You Don’t Have to Have Been There — But You Can’t Be Afraid of It
On Empathy, Experience, and the Therapist’s Capacity to Stay Present
There’s a belief, often spoken quietly or passed between therapists, that you can’t sit with a client’s pain if you haven’t known that kind of pain yourself. That empathy is earned through suffering. There’s some truth in that. But it’s also more complicated than it sounds.
It’s true that lived experience changes something. There’s a kind of contact, an embodied knowing, that comes from having walked through something yourself. Clients feel it — not because you tell them, but because your nervous system doesn’t panic when theirs does. You don’t rush to fix it. You don’t fill the silence. You just stay. That kind of presence can’t be learned from books. It comes from having lived it.
But the idea that you need to have experienced the same thing as the client misses the point. The context doesn’t have to match. The stories don’t need to align. What matters is that you’ve known the essence of it — the territory. Shame, loss, grief, failure, betrayal. These are universal human experiences. The circumstances may differ wildly, but the emotional terrain is recognisable. If you’ve never let yourself feel loss or shame, it will be hard to stay with someone else in theirs.
Therapists who haven’t done that inner work — who haven’t come to terms with their own vulnerability — will often react, even subtly, when clients touch something raw. They’ll offer solutions too soon. These are not failures of technique; they’re human attempts to escape discomfort. But in therapy, they often send the message: “This is too much.”
Good training helps, of course. Supervision helps. But nothing replaces the internal work of becoming someone who doesn’t turn away — not from grief, or shame, or fear, or rage. Someone who can sit with what’s hard not because they’ve suffered the same, but because they’ve suffered honestly.
So no — you don’t have to have been there in the client’s exact way. But you do need to have walked through pain of your own. Enough to know its flavour. Enough to not be afraid of it. The client will know the difference.
This is the heart of the work of therapy — creating a space where pain doesn’t have to be avoided or managed, but can simply be met. Not analysed. Not rushed. Just met, and maybe understood.