#and i have no visible mental scars because i genuinely never have nightmares or flashbacks or triggers that upset me

[kirexa]

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[missmentelle]

In short term 12, Grace shows Jaden her self-harm scars and discloses her past with abuse and self-harm. Is that something that happens and is okay (to share that kind of history with these kids) or is it another example of a lack of personal boundaries?

It’s… complicated, but I would say that the scene in the movie crosses the line into “poor boundaries” territory. That doesn’t mean that conversations like that don’t happen in these settings, it’s that that specific scene was not necessarily the preferred way to deal with that situation.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie [spoiler and content warnings in effect] there is a scene where a deeply troubled girl has been placed in a sort of “cool down” room after a meltdown, and she begins attempting to self-harm by digging her thumbnails into the flesh of her hand. Her counselor, Grace - who has been struggling to connect with the hostile girl since she arrived - sees this as an opportunity to finally find some common ground with the girl, pulls up the leg of her pants to show her own self-harm scars, and discloses her own history of abuse. 

Whenever a mental health worker tells a client personal information about themselves, we call it “self-disclosure”, and it’s not inherently a bad thing. Used properly, it can help you to establish trust and rapport with a client. When you work in mental health, clients will often assume that you can’t possibly understand where they are coming from, and that don’t have anything in common with them. This is especially true if you work with highly marginalized clients like the ones in the movie - they will often assume that your life is perfect and that you’ve never faced anything like the obstacles they have. Self-disclosing that you have had similar experiences can help you establish rapport and make the clients feel that you are talking to them as a peer who has been there, rather than a counselor talking down to them about things they’ve never experienced. 

When it comes to self-harm, sometimes it can be better for a counselor who has visible scars to address that head-on, rather than trying to dodge the issue; many people who work in mental health have visible scars, and it can be an important opportunity to normalize having these scars and show that recovery is possible for people who have them. One of the best counselors I have ever known has a very obvious row of scars on his arm, and when kids asked him about it, he was honest about how he got them and what that recovery process was like for him, rather than trying to brush off the question. I certainly don’t think it’s inappropriate for mental health workers to have visible scars, or to answer honestly when asked how they got them. 

When it comes to self-disclosure in general, though, there are a couple of big possible pitfalls, some of which Grace stumbles into in the movie. Self-disclosing to a client is always a risk, because:

It could make you look like an asshole. If you tell your counselor that you’re suicidal because your long-term partner just left you for the person they were cheating with and you think you lost the love of your life, and they respond with “yeah, I know how you feel, sometimes I feel like my husband doesn’t care about me because he never remembers to buy my favourite type of ice cream”, that’s not going to make you feel more connected to the counselor. It’s going to make you feel like the counselor is a self-centered asshole who isn’t taking you seriously and doesn’t understand what you’re going through at all. Self-disclosing when you don’t actually have any experiences that are similar to a client’s just makes you seem clueless and out-of-touch, especially if you have had a much more privileged upbringing than the client. New counselors make this mistake a lot. As someone from a relatively privileged upbringing, your parents’ divorce might genuinely be the worst thing that ever happened to you; trying to use it to connect with a kid who has been in neglectful and abusive foster care homes since age 2, however, just makes you sound like a rich jerk whining about having to have two Christmases. 

It could be used against you. Counselors don’t always know their clients as well as they think they do. Sometimes, disclosing immensely personal information can be a mistake, because the client may share that information with other people, or try to use it as leverage against you. If you disclosed to a client that you were also a victim of sexual assault, they may cruelly throw that information in your face the next time they are upset with you, or they may share that information with your other clients without your consent. I currently work in a residential facility; anything that is told to one client usually spreads throughout the entire building, and staff are well aware that it’s only safe to disclose information that they are comfortable with every single client knowing. Even very casual information like “Oh, sorry I’m late, the 6 train was delayed today” can be dangerous - if you have a client who hates you (or likes you way, way too much), that’s information that they can use to track you down outside of work. 

It can create an inappropriately personal relationship with the client. A counselor can have an amazing and close relationship with a client, but it’s important to remember that it’s still a client-counselor relationship. You are not friends, and in the case of teenage clients, you are not parent and child. If you’re going to be able to confide your darkest and most embarrassing secrets to a counselor and trust the advice they give you, there has to be a little bit of professional distance there. Otherwise, it’s impossible for the counselor to be impartial. A therapy session is a safe space for you to work through serious trauma and dysfunction, and learn healthier coping skills; it should not feel like a casual gossip session with your bestie. Therapists can definitely have a relaxed, fun, casual persona, but if the two of you are spending half your time together analyzing each other’s Tinder matches and swapping stories about drunk things you did in college, that’s a sign that professional boundaries are starting to break down. Counselors who over-disclose can cause their clients to start believing that the relationship is a genuine friendship, which sets the client up for shock and pain the first time the counselor tries to enforce boundaries. This is especially true of abused teens like the girl in the movie; they are often desperate for intimacy, and very quick to try to form inappropriately close or dependent relationships with their counselors.

It can make the counseling session all about you. Think about the last time you were having a mental health crisis - a panic attack, anxiety attack, depression wave, PTSD flashback, etc. In that moment, were you in a good place to listen to someone else’s darkest, most horrible experiences? Probably not. Self-disclosing your trauma or mental health issues - especially ones that are still ongoing - puts the client in a position where they suddenly have to comfort YOU, instead of the other way around. That’s not something that most people are prepared to take on when they are in the middle of a breakdown, and it can both damage the relationship between client and counselor, and leave the client feeling even more stressed-out than they were before. Many people who have experienced trauma need to be in a good headspace with advance notice to prepare themselves before they engage with potentially traumatic content - that’s why many people appreciate the inclusion of content warnings on media. For those people, having your mental health worker throw their own trauma in your lap when they are struggling to cope with their own is the stuff of nightmares. 

That last one is the main error that Grace made in the movie, and it’s the biggest reason why I think this particular scene crossed boundaries. For one thing, she chose a pretty risky moment to have that kind of disclosure - not only was the girl in a bad place, she was actively self-harming. That girl was not in a place where she could even process her own emotions, and asking her to suddenly process someone else’s severe trauma - trauma that closely resembled her own - is too much. Perhaps when the girl was a little calmer, finding out that her counselor had been through similar experiences might have been helpful, but in the moment, it’s hard to see how that kind of disclosure would do anything but make the girl panic about the fact that she lives in a world rife with child abuse and self-harm. The description that Grace gives of the abuse she endured is quite explicit and quite graphic, and that girl already had enough horribly damaging images in her head at the time - it probably was not a good thing for Grace to add more. If anything, since Grace’s self-harm scars are much more prominent and numerous than the girl’s, the message that comes across is “I went through much worse than you did, why are you whining?”, even if that is not her intent. 

Secondly, I think that Grace crossed the line because she was sharing abuse that she herself had neither worked through or resolved. The reason my counselor friend with the scars was helpful when he self-disclosed was because he was able to share a story of recovery - he would gloss over the bad things in his life that happened to cause the self-harm, and focused the narrative on the fact that he had successfully gotten help and that this kind of pain was no longer a part of his life. The message he was sending was “you can get better, and it’s possible to get to a place where you don’t feel the urge to do this anymore”. The trauma Grace is sharing, on the other hand, is unresolved. It is still very much affecting her life, and that is clear when she discusses it with the girl. Instead of presenting a message of hope or understanding, the narrative she inadvertently creates is “yeah, all this stuff is probably going to suck forever and you’re still going to be in pain as an adult”. It also really puts the teen in that counselling role - it’s clear that Grace is still very much in pain from her childhood experiences, and most people’s instinct would be to try to comfort her, which is the opposite of what should be happening here. 

I do think that there are strong benefits to self-disclosure in mental health, but I don’t necessarily love how it was done here. This is reinforced by the fact that Grace later goes way too far in trying to personally take revenge on the girl’s father, something that points to some seriously blurry boundaries between the two women. In real life, that kind of breach of boundaries could get you fired and permanently barred from the profession, if not actually criminally charged if someone found out about it. A counselor who crosses boundaries like this is ultimately doing a disservice to their clients, and there are better ways to handle these kinds of situations.