The superiority that keeps us employed

I hear this phrase every year at the national conferences. Some speaker stands on a stage and talks about the democratic nature of the therapeutic alliance. This speaker tells a room full of people that the relationship is a partnership between equals. I sit in the back of the room and I watch the heads nod. I see the people around me wanting to believe that they are just fellow travelers. This is a comfortable lie. I understand why people tell it. Equality feels kinder than the truth. But I am not interested in feeling kind when I am at work. I am interested in being effective.

The reality of the work is that I am not the client’s equal. If I were their equal, I would be useless to them. They do not pay me to be a peer. They do not pay me to share in their confusion or to mirror their instability. They pay me because I possess a functional advantage that they currently lack. I am more regulated than the client. I am more integrated than the client. I am more capable of remaining steady in the presence of their chaos than they are. This is a structural superiority. I do not mean that I am a superior human being in a moral sense. I mean that, within the context of the clinical hour, I am the superior psychological instrument.

This superiority is the primary mechanism of the work. I am the anchor. If the anchor floats as much as the boat, the boat hits the rocks. I have to be the one who is not drowning. I have to be the one who can see the shore while the client is focused on the waves. This requires me to maintain a distance. I must occupy a position of relative psychological advantage at all times. If I lose that advantage, I am no longer a therapist. I am just another person in a difficult conversation.

I see therapists fight against this idea. I see them try to flatten the hierarchy because they feel guilty about the power they hold. They use words like collaboration to hide the fact that they are the ones directing the change. They pretend they are learning as much from the client as the client is learning from them. This is a professional courtesy. It is a fiction. I do not need my clients to teach me how to live. I need to provide the structure that allows them to function. When I pretend we are on the same level, I abandon my responsibility. I leave the client alone with their problem because I am too insecure to admit that I am the one in charge of the process.

I recall a specific client who challenged this dynamic. This person was an executive at a large firm. They were used to being the smartest person in any room. They came to me because their life was falling apart, but they spent the first six weeks trying to dominate the sessions. They questioned my methods. They scrutinized my logic. They tried to turn every session into a debate about the validity of psychological theory. This client wanted to prove that we were equals. More than that, they wanted to prove they were superior to me.

I did not argue with them. I did not try to prove my intelligence. I did not offer a collaborative explanation of why they were doing this. I simply remained unmoved. I stayed in my position of advantage. I watched their performance with a neutral curiosity that they could not disrupt. I was more regulated than their need to win. I was more stable than their need to intimidate. Eventually, the client stopped talking. They sat in silence for a long time. When they finally spoke, they did not ask a question about theory. They asked me if I was tired of them.

I told them I was not tired. I told them I was waiting for them to finish so we could start the work. In that moment, the hierarchy was clear. I was the one who could withstand their aggression without becoming aggressive myself. I was the one who could hold the silence without feeling the need to fill it. My advantage was my ability to remain outside of their habitual patterns. If I had tried to be their friend or their equal, I would have been pulled into their game. I would have lost my use. By maintaining my structural superiority, I forced them to face the reality of their situation.

This is the part of the job that people do not like to talk about at lunch. I have to be better than the client in the moment. I have to be more disciplined. I have to be more aware of my own impulses than they are of theirs. This is not an accident of personality. It is a requirement of the role. I spend my career refining this advantage. I go to supervision. I attend continuing education units. I do my own work so that my own issues do not interfere with my ability to stay above the fray. I do not do this to be a better person. I do this to keep my edge.

If I am not honest about this power, I cannot look at how I use it. I see therapists who claim to be egalitarian while they subtly manipulate their clients into agreeing with them. These therapists are more dangerous because they are blind to their own influence. They think they are being supportive when they are actually being dominant. Because they refuse to name the superiority, they cannot see when they are abusing it. I prefer to be honest. I know I have the power. I know I am the one with the psychological high ground. Because I acknowledge it, I can use it with precision. I can monitor my own ego. I can ensure that my advantage serves the client rather than my own need to be right.

I find the common rhetoric about the “wounded healer” to be particularly unhelpful. People use that phrase to suggest that our own pain makes us better at helping others. They suggest that our flaws are what connect us to our clients. I think that is nonsense. My wounds do not help my clients. My mastery over my wounds is what helps them. The fact that I have integrated my experiences and moved beyond them is what gives me the advantage. If I am still bleeding, I am a liability. I need to be the person who has already found the exit. I cannot lead someone out of a place where I am still lost.

The profession is allergic to the word superiority because it sounds like arrogance. But there is a difference between arrogance and functional competence. Arrogance is a defense. Functional competence is a fact. I am functionally competent in ways my clients are not. That is why they are in my office. They are paying for my superior perspective. They are paying for my superior emotional regulation. If I deny this, I am committing a form of consumer fraud. I am selling a service while pretending that the service does not require me to be more capable than the buyer.

I notice that the therapists who struggle the most are the ones who try to be “real” with their clients. They want to show their vulnerability. They want to be seen as human. There is a place for humanity, but there is no place for fragility. The client does not need to know that I had a bad morning. They do not need to know that I am feeling tired or frustrated. When I share those things, I am asking the client to care for me. I am abdicating my position. I am surrendering my advantage. The moment I become “just a person” to the client, the therapy ends and a friendship begins. And a friendship is not what will save them.

The therapeutic relationship is a controlled inequality. I set the boundaries. I manage the time. I determine the focus of the conversation. I am the one who decides when to push and when to hold back. Every part of the structure reinforces my position of advantage. We should stop apologizing for this. We should stop trying to dress it up in the language of social justice or radical empathy. Empathy is a tool, but it is a tool used by the person in the superior position to understand the person in the inferior position. It is not an equalizer. It is a method of data collection.

I stay employed because I can do something the client cannot do for themselves. I can look at their life without the distortion of their defenses. I can feel their pain without being overwhelmed by it. I can see the solution while they are still describing the problem. This is only possible because I am standing on higher ground. I have a better view. I have more oxygen. If I come down into the valley to stand next to them, I might make them feel less alone for a moment, but we will both be stuck in the dark. I choose to stay on the ridge and call out directions. That is the only way anyone gets home.

I do not expect the schools or the associations to change their tune. They will continue to promote the idea of the collaborative alliance. they will continue to tell new therapists that the relationship is everything. They are half right. The relationship is everything, but the relationship is built on a foundation of unequal power. The therapist who understands this will be effective. The therapist who hides from it will be popular but useless. I know which one I prefer to be. I am finished with the day. I am going to have a drink and I am going to enjoy the fact that I do not have to be more regulated than anyone else until tomorrow morning at nine.