Given a choice, you might think it better to undertake psychotherapy with a confident therapist than a self-doubting one. After all, you want a firm hand to guide you through a storm. But in fact, there’s evidence that therapy clients do better when their therapist has professional self-doubts. In a new paper published in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Helene Nissen-Lie and her colleagues tested their idea that therapist self-doubt might not always be helpful, and specifically that the ideal mix is professional doubt combined with personal self-compassion.

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Consistent with past research, therapists who were self-doubting appeared to be more effective at their job – their clients showed greater reductions in interpersonal distress. But furthermore, and as the researchers predicted, there was an interaction between therapists’ self-doubt and self-compassion. That is, the most successful client outcomes were seen for therapists who expressed a combination of professional self-doubt and greater personal self-compassion. This combination “seems to pave the way for an open, self-reflective stance that allows psychotherapists to respect the complexity of their work, and, when needed, to correct the therapeutic course in order to help clients more effectively with their challenges,” the researchers said.

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