Self of the Therapist: Core Dimensions

This piece offers a way to think about the different layers that shape the self of the therapist. It’s not a checklist or a set of answers. It’s a reflection on how our personal histories, habits, and ways of seeing the world show up in the work. Therapy is never just about what we know—it’s also about how we relate, notice, and stay connected to ourselves and others. Becoming a therapist and becoming a person are part of the same process.

Table of Contents

• Personal Relationships
  • Attachment Style
  • Introversion and Extroversion
  • Communication
  • Family of Origin
• Neurology
  • Processing Speed and Cognitive Style
  • Brain Hemisphere Dominance
  • Trauma, Triggers, Fight or Flight, and Regulation
  • Unconscious Automatic Defense Mechanisms
  • Executive Function
• Intelligence
  • Emotional and Social Intelligence
  • Academic, Intellectual, Knowledge, Recall, Strategic, and Deductive Intelligence
  • Motor or Kinesthetic Intelligence
• Thought Structures and Operating Systems
  • Cultural Values, Ethics, Rules, Codes of Conduct, Schemas, Dogma, Spirituality, and Beliefs
  • Individual Values, Schemas, Existential Operating Systems, Spirituality, and Beliefs
• Creativity
• Consciousness, Awareness, and Presence
  • Differentiation
  • Wisdom
  • Congruence
• Physical Reality

Personal Relationships

The nature and quality of a therapist’s close relationships—both past and present—shape the emotional and relational stance we carry into the room. Whether we approach others with openness or caution, connection or withdrawal, is often less a matter of theoretical alignment and more a reflection of our lived experience.

• Attunement emerges through real-time relational instincts – reinforced when ritualized into habit
• Boundaries are negotiated through internalized models of safety and trust
• Our capacity for rupture and repair grows out of what we’ve seen, practiced, and internalized

Therapy is not separate from the relational systems we’ve moved through. It reflects them, revises them, and often deepens them.

Attachment Style

Relational patterns formed in early caregiving contexts continue to influence how we engage, protect, or withhold in connection. Whether secure, avoidant, anxious, or disorganized, these internal templates often reveal themselves in subtle, patterned ways.

• Island – Withdraws under stress, tends to self-regulate in isolation, and may overvalue independence. Shaped by caregivers who were emotionally unavailable or distant. While they may present as calm or competent, They are not always as regulated as they believe themselves to be. Intimacy often feels intrusive or destabilizing, leading them to sometimes sabotage everything they need for growing towards grounding.
• Wave – Intensely seeks connection, may fear abandonment, and often experiences emotional flooding. Typically shaped by inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving. These types may pursue closeness in ways that can feel overwhelming to others. They often oscillate between extremes and tend to have more overt relationships with jealousy and fears of abandonment.
• Anchor – Grounded, emotionally responsive, and comfortable with both autonomy and interdependence. This style tends to support co-regulation and emotional availability, having emerged from reliably attuned caregiving. They are able to ask for help effectively when they need support… and offer support from a place free of over-personalization or enmeshment.

Introversion and Extroversion

This distinction is less about social preference and more about the way energy is regulated and expression unfolds:

• Introverts tend to process internally, often requiring time to integrate thoughts and emotions before speaking. They tend to recharge their batteries in small groups or alone. They tend to prefer higher levels of intimacy to higher quantities of people. They can bond without engaging in overt interaction (reading next to their partner)
• Extroverts are more likely to think aloud, drawing clarity and momentum from interaction. They gain energy in dynamic and stimulating environments with many people. They tend to seek connection in overt interaction (having a meaningful conversation during an activity).

What matters in therapy is not which we are, but how consciously we navigate these tendencies in our presence and pacing.

Communication

How we speak, listen, pause, and respond all carry relational weight. Communication is not just the transmission of information.

• Our tone is a signal of safety
• Our cadence is a form of regulation
• Our clarity can inspire confidence to reduce defenses

The quality of our communication reveals our level of clarity, congruence, and availability.

Family of Origin

Our earliest relational field often shapes the unconscious scripts we bring into the room:

• Roles such as caretaker, rebel, or peacemaker can become default stances in therapeutic work
• Reenactments may arise when we feel over-responsible, dismissed, or unseen
• Awareness allows us to interrupt automatic cycles and stay anchored in choice

The goal is not to sever from origin but to see it clearly enough that we can respond rather than repeat.

Neurology

The nervous system sets the tone for all that follows. Beneath every insight or intervention is a biological rhythm—how we track safety, interpret cues, and regulate intensity. This terrain is less about cognition and more about presence. 

Processing Speed and Cognitive Style

• Some therapists are quick to respond, guided by intuition or familiarity
• Others take more time, relying on careful reflection and internal dialogue

Both styles are valid. What matters is that we know how our pace interacts with the client’s experience.

Brain Hemisphere Dominance

• Left brain: language, logic, linear thinking, objective
• Right brain: imagery, emotion, narrative flow, systems, creative

Effective therapy integrates both, offering clear structure and emotional resonance. Awareness of our innate tendencies helps us round out our presence.

Trauma, Triggers, Fight or Flight, and Regulation

Our bodies often respond before our minds can interpret. As therapists, our regulation matters—not just for ourselves, but because:

• Dysregulation can reverberate in the client’s system, and our regulation can entrain the dysregulated frequency before us to ours. It is nice to think of regulation like a frequency wave – waves interact and influence each other.
• Presence requires awareness of what activates us and how we can return to balance. Somatic check-ins help us to engage in breathwork to encourage grounding.
• Co-regulation and external regulation often begin with the therapist’s self-regulation. It is generally more effective for the therapist to start breathing than to tell the client to breathe.

Unconscious Automatic Defense Mechanisms

Defenses are often unconscious strategies formed to manage distress or threat. Common ones include:

• Projection – attributing unwanted parts of ourselves onto others
• Intellectualization – avoiding emotion through over-analysis
• Dissociation – disconnecting from experience to maintain function

Rather than eliminating defenses, we become curious about them—and more discerning about when they are useful and when they obstruct contact. When we know our most common defenses, it is easier to become aware of them when they arise. It is also helpful to not take a blaming stance with ourselves and others… ‘defense mechanisms’ are generally adaptations that we developed to assist us at a particular stage of development – the question for the present moment is simply whether that adaptation is still serving us.

Executive Function

This is the internal coordination system that supports structure and flexibility. It allows us to be the leader, the orchestrator of the session. It helps us to speak and redirect at times … and to be silent and hold space at other times.

Good executive function allows us to hold the arc of the work without becoming rigid or chaotic. It allows us to be intentional when our emotional systems encourage us to be reactive or automatic. 

Intelligence

Intelligence, as it shows up in clinical work, is not limited to knowledge, memory, or analytic capacity. It includes how we notice, how we move, how we adapt, and how we understand what’s happening beneath the surface. It’s a multi-dimensional resource, offering both structure and insight.

Emotional and Social Intelligence (including but not limited to)

• Empathy – The ability to feel with, not just for, someone
• Self-awareness – Tracking our thoughts, feelings, and bodily states in real time
• Attunement – Sensing another’s emotional tone beyond what’s said
• Emotional tolerance – Staying present with discomfort without needing to fix or flee

These skills support relational depth and allow us to hold space without collapsing into defense, distress, or automaticity.

Academic, Intellectual, Knowledge, Recall, Strategic, and Deductive Intelligence

• Conceptual thinking – Making links between internal experience, behavior, and theory
• Memory and recall – Tracking themes, noticing repetition, remembering key details
• Strategic reasoning – Knowing when to intervene, when to pause, and how to sequence effectively
• Pattern recognition – Seeing the relational or systemic dynamics behind behavior

Motor or Kinesthetic Intelligence

• Embodied awareness – Knowing where we are in our body and how we hold ourselves
• Somatic intuition – Using body cues to notice resonance, misalignment, or emergence
• Movement fluency – Helpful in somatic modalities or creative interventions involving gesture or play

Therapists with strong kinesthetic intelligence often hold space with physical steadiness and relational immediacy.

Thought Structures and Operating Systems

We operate from a constellation of internalized frameworks—ideas, values, beliefs, and meaning-making systems that help us interpret the world. Some are consciously chosen; others are inherited and largely implicit. These frameworks influence what we notice, how we make sense of suffering, and what we believe healing requires.

They are not just intellectual—they are lived.

Cultural Values, Ethics, Rules, Codes of Conduct, Schemas, Dogma, Spirituality, and Beliefs

We each emerge from cultural narratives—spoken and unspoken—that shape our instincts around power, morality, emotion, and identity.

• Cultural values may include assumptions about family, gender roles, success, suffering, or community.
  • Individualistic vs. collectivist orientation 
  • Conservative (maintain through rules) vs progressive (change through growth)
  • Rigid or Fundamental vs. flexibly structured vs. Chaotic or Anarchistic 
• Ethical codes and implicit rules often guide our sense of responsibility and boundaries
• Schemas and dogma—especially when unexamined—can limit curiosity and narrow our clinical stance
• Spiritual and religious traditions may offer grounding, purpose, or moral direction—but can also carry shame or rigidity

Therapists benefit from regularly reflecting on what we’ve inherited, where we resist, and how those structures show up in the room. Cultural humility is not just awareness of others—it includes an honest reckoning with ourselves. It is important for us to honor one of the many dialectics of multiculturalism = it is often our culture which makes us intolerant of other cultures… or… it is often our culture which is at the source of our current mental health difficulties (such as in not being congruent or honest in one’s presentation, as our culture can make us prejudice and ashamed of our authentic self).

Individual Values, Schemas, Existential Operating Systems, Spirituality, and Beliefs

Alongside our cultural inheritance, we also develop more personal frameworks. These shape our sense of meaning and identity:

• Values include what we care about most, what we prioritize, and how we define topics like justice and ethics.
• Schemas are cognitive-emotional maps that guide perception and prediction
• Existential frameworks address questions of purpose, mortality, freedom, and connection
• Belief systems may be explicitly spiritual or rooted in personal philosophy

What matters most is not what we believe, but how consciously we relate to those beliefs. A therapist’s operating system affects everything—from understanding resilience to tolerating the unknown.

Creativity

Creativity is not a bonus feature in therapy—it’s essential. It allows us to move with the moment, respond when the textbook falls short, and discover meaning where language has yet to form.

Creative therapists are often:

• Willing to improvise when traditional methods stall
• Comfortable with silence, play, image, or metaphor
• Curious about alternative forms of knowing—like art, story, gesture, or symbol

Creativity keeps the work alive. It allows us to co-create rather than impose. It supports resilience when the way forward isn’t clear. And it reminds us that healing doesn’t always follow a script.

Consciousness, Awareness, and Presence

Therapeutic presence is not simply a calm demeanor or reflective tone—it’s a layered state of being that includes clarity, flexibility, and emotional courage. To be conscious in the work means we are tracking not only the client’s experience but our own. It means we are aware of what is being said, what is being felt, and what is being avoided.

Differentiation

Relational Differentiation is the capacity to remain grounded in one’s own emotional truth while staying in contact with another’s emotional truth. The differentiation we learn from Buddhism allows us the capacity to become the observer – to watch our emotions, thoughts, sensations, and impulses without being governed or overly attached to them.

• It involves holding self and other without needing to merge or withdraw
• It allows for disagreement without rupture, closeness without control
• It supports our ability to be with intense emotions without losing perspective. It allows us to see our thoughts and beliefs with curiosity and flexibility.

Wisdom

Wisdom, in the therapeutic sense, is not a set of facts but a relational capacity. It’s the ability to:

• Hold multiple truths at once
• Tolerate complexity and uncertainty
• Make meaning from paradox rather than resolving it prematurely

This capacity often emerges over time, through lived experience and reflective practice.

Congruence

Congruence is the alignment between what we feel internally and what we express externally. It is sensed more than seen.

• Clients often experience it as integrity, trustworthiness, or safety
• Incongruence can create confusion or mistrust, even if our words sound kind or insightful

Practicing congruence means staying honest, even when honesty feels vulnerable.

Physical Reality

Therapists live in bodies, and those bodies are seen, interpreted, and responded to in complex ways. Our physical form is part of the therapeutic encounter, whether we name it or not.

• Sleep, nutrition, movement, and hormonal rhythms affect our attention, patience, and presence
• Chronic pain, illness, or neurodivergence can shape energy, regulation, and empathy

Beyond physiology, other embodied realities play a central role:

• Gender and gender expression influence how we are perceived and how we navigate proximity, power, and disclosure
• Physical stature and ability level impact accessibility, perceived authority, and felt safety in the room
• Sexual orientation may shape resonance, attunement, or dissonance across cultural or generational differences.
• Race and ethnicity carry visibility, history, and complexity. They impact how we are seen, what is projected, and what must be explicitly addressed or gently held.

We cannot offer an embodied presence without first understanding how our body moves through the world—and how the world responds.

Closing Reflection

This framework is not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. It is an evolving map—a way to reflect on the many dimensions of therapeutic presence. Each of these areas offers a lens, a question, an invitation.

None of us arrives fully formed. We grow into the work by becoming more human within it.