My Most Shared Resource In Supervision This Week (for you AND your client)

It is not a new modality or a research paper. It is a three minute YouTube video, and I have shared it with almost every therapist I supervised this week.

It is Russ Harris explaining the struggle switch. Even if you know nothing about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, you will find the video helpful.

The idea is simple. We have a kind of switch at the back of our minds, and when an uncomfortable feeling shows up, the switch flips on. Anxiety shows up, and suddenly we are not just anxious, we are anxious about being anxious. We do not like the feeling, so we fight it, resist it, try to push it away. And the fighting makes it bigger, not smaller. Everything is amplified.

It is a tool worth having in your back pocket for clients. Anxiety, grief, anger, shame, most of what shows up in session gets harder to sit with the moment a client starts fighting it instead of feeling it. The struggle switch gives clients a concrete way to understand why trying harder to get rid of a feeling often backfires, and it opens the door to a different approach, one based on allowing rather than resisting.

But here is the part that came up again and again in supervision this week. This is not just a client tool. It is describing something therapists do constantly, often without noticing.

You feel uncertain after a session, and instead of letting that uncertainty be there, you spiral into needing to know you did it right. You feel anxious before a hard conversation with a client, and the anxiety about the anxiety builds until you are dreading something that was already going to be hard enough. The struggle switch does not turn off just because you have a registration number.

New therapists in particular tend to treat their own discomfort as a problem to solve immediately, rather than a normal part of doing meaningful work. That instinct to fight the feeling, to get rid of it fast, often makes the anxiety louder, not quieter.

Watch the video this week, not just as something to use with clients, but as something to notice in yourself. Where is your own struggle switch flipping on. What would it look like to let the feeling be there instead.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/rCp1l16GCXI?si=QhI3GYwT9oqdkjAB 

Want to read more about new therapist anxiety, read the blog here