The #1 Thing Your Clients Need From You
Last week I introduced you to SomaField’s 9th Core Principle: Integrity. This week I want to introduce you to the 10th and final Core Principle: Heart.
Of course we have heart! Most of us are therapists or coaches because we care about humans and we want to help. What I mean here by Heart is a little more detailed than just simply care for our clients. I define it this way:
Heart is the practitioner’s unwavering commitment to unconditional positive regard. It is the lived stance that the client is not a problem to fix, but a human being to love, respect, and understand. Heart requires warmth that feels genuine, care that is consistent, and a deep trust in the client’s inherent dignity and adaptive intelligence. It asks the practitioner to listen without pathologizing, to interpret symptoms as meaningful and coherent strategies rather than defects, and to approach policies, boundaries, and structures in ways that are fair, transparent, and genuinely workable for the client. Heart is expressed through tone, pacing, flexibility, and relational generosity. Just as in any meaningful relationship, transformation depends on the client experiencing that they matter—that they are welcomed, supported, and held in sincere regard. Without Heart, technique becomes mechanical but with Heart, the relational field becomes safe enough for depth, repair, and change.
It’s true that practitioners need good boundaries. So is the client coming to see you and existing in your world? Or are you existing in theirs?
When Heart is in balance, the answer is that of course both people have boundaries, but the shared process together is more collaborative than it is one or the other person being “in charge” as such.
It’s this process of collaboration that helps a client feel that they matter and that what they need will matter to the person they’re working with. Within reason. Always within reason.
Most importantly, Heart is about the emotional tone of the work you’re doing with clients. I would even assert that if you can’t find respect and genuine care for your clients (which I think is necessary to the process), the best thing you can do for them is to refer them out to someone else. But maybe not before you do a little of your own therapy or mentorship around what’s in the way.
Of course abusive clients do exist and I’m never suggesting that any practitioner should put up with poor treatment. Part of what I’m pointing to here with Heart is the collaboration of it all, the respect of it all. SomaField’s first Core Principle is called Client Centered and that’s about not letting our agenda for the client take over and instead staying responsive to where they want to go and respecting them in that.
Heart is more about the emotional felt sense. It’s the idea that we’re not just being productive with our clients but we’re also centering care in the relationship. Because so often, that missing element of care in past relationships is what brought the client to us in the first place. Helping clients feel both a sense of productivity right alongside care, support, and respect during a process is healing. For both parties, honestly.
This bit about not pathologizing the client can’t be stressed enough. In order to help them, we have to see their behaviors as understandable and coherent with their life experiences whether those be diagnoses, past experiences, or other factors.
I’ll be honest about something I think isn’t very pretty. I have known many, many therapists and coaches through the years of being one and I’ve been in community with so many. So I’ve heard way too many of them bitch about their clients. Not with identifying details, but with general exasperation.
I’m reluctant to talk about this because I never want to scare anyone away from therapy or growth work and I understand how vulnerable it is to open yourself up to a new practitioner, but I’m talking about it because by naming it, I’m hoping it can be a little drop in the bucket that says, “Stop it. We can do better.”
One way to think of Heart is that it’s about love. If you really boil it all the way down. And if we’re honest about that, we humans can get pretty confused about love and how to do it when our own material is in the way. And therapists and coaches are just people. So to that I say may we all stay committed to doing our own work and finding the barriers, as Rumi says:
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. -Rumi
Of course, Heart can also be overdone but I’ll have to write about that in another post.
Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)
