Danielle Wayne

LCSW, LISW

I'm a firm believer that the most important component in therapy is your relationship with your therapist. I mean, if we don't like someone, we're not going to share our thoughts, yet alone our feelings. It's incredibly hard to be vulnerable, and it's basically impossible if we don't like who we're talking to.

Some of the most important professional lessons I've learned have come from clients I've worked with. When I first started doing this work, I would hear clients tell me that it was so hard that other therapists didn't listen. Or would invalidate or minimize them. They would share how hard that was for them, and it was really heartbreaking to hear that people wanted help, that they were trying to get help, but the people who were supposed to help them weren't helping. I really tried to keep this lesson in the back of my mind, because I essentially didn't want clients to ever talk about me like that. In my work now, I try to have conversations with my clients about how I can improve. If there have been times that I've accidentally invalidated them, and what I did to cause that. I'd rather have these conversations so I can learn and grow, so I don't become ignorant and cause any harm that I'm unaware of.

When I'm working with someone, I'm trying to work myself out of a job. When people come to therapy, there's often an element of pain involved. We usually don't seek help unless we're in some kind of emotional pain, and I don't want people to feel that pain for so long that they feel like they need to be in therapy forever. I see it as my job to help people help themselves, so they feel confident that they don't need therapy. When we're looking at goals for our work together, I often approach it from the perspective of what people want to get out of therapy in order to feel like they don't need it anymore. This is a conversation we have together, because it's their therapy, not mine. When these goals are met, I like to review this progress, because it's something to be celebrated. But I also want to have a conversation about what next steps they want to take. We can stop therapy, or we can create new goals to work towards. Again, it's a conversation we have together.