A Therapist Can't Say That EP 2.3: Normalizing Vulnerability: The Power of Authenticity in Client Relationships with Onyx Fujii and Asher Pandjiris
If you’ve been in this field for even a couple of hours or so, you have almost certainly had someone try to impress upon you the importance of self-care.
Not usually in the context of your self being valued for its own sake, but self-care that enables you to show up effectively for your clients.
On the face of it, there’s not much to disagree with there. Yes, when we are adequately cared for, we are better equipped to show up and care for our clients.
And yet, we’ve been taught that our self-care, and by extension our need for care, should be invisible to our clients.
The tenet that if we are doing self-care right, it will be invisible, can contribute to the sense we often have that critical elements that comprise our humanity are a secret that we must keep away from our clients.
The belief that exposure to our fallibility will harm our clients is so interwoven into the substrate of this field that we rarely think to ask the question, what are the harms we are doing by hiding our fallibility? What opportunities for connection with our clients are being lost when we perform what today’s guests describe as a “constructed state of perpetual well-being?”
Onyx Fujii (they/them) is queer, non-binary, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, mixed-race clinical social worker in private practice in Philadephia (on unceded Lenni-Lenape land). Healing justice is at the core of their multidisciplinary practice where they offer trauma-informed, anti-oppressive psychotherapy, clinical supervision, and cultural humility facilitation and consultation; focusing on the intersections of gender, sexual orientation, race, chronic illness, and disability. In 2021, they became a co-founder and co-director of the Kintsugi Therapist Collective, a virtual community of care workers dedicated to embodied and liberatory visions of care. Their professional practices and writing center on the significance of identity, trauma, (in)visibility, and connection. They are committed to sustaining a social justice-orientated business that aims to empower and liberate through compassion and understanding.
Asher Pandjiris (they/they) believes that everyone deserves to be supported in dealing with their own legacies of trauma and psychic suffering so that we can more easefully navigate this neoliberal/capitalist/deeply racist, transphobic and ableist heteropatriarchy that is traumatic for everyone, especially folks who are highly sensitive and/or navigate multisystemic oppression. The programs and workshops they offer are aimed at supporting folks in these challenges. They love hosting the Living in this Queer Body podcast and facilitating programs on topics that they feel deeply passionate about.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- How performing professionalism and well-being contributes to burnout, especially for marginalized and chronically ill therapists
- How acknowledging their physical and mental needs has actually created points of connection for Onyx and their clients
- Why Asher allows themself to “fail” their clients by showing up imperfectly
- How honesty and transparency can actually improve the reparative client-therapist relationship
- Why therapists may be uniquely expected not to need the same kinds of care as their clients
Learn more about Onyx Fujii and Asher Pandjiris and Kintsugi Therapist Collective:
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Resources: