When politics enters the therapy room
A client is talking about work stress and family life. Then they mention doomscrolling and how it leaves them feeling helpless and anxious. Something they saw on TikTok. Photos of a war, sometimes footage of a genocide. They stop and look at me and say, “Can I ask what you think about all this? How do you cope with it?”
I hear some version of this more often now.
I’m a British Iranian therapist, born in the UK. Politics is not abstract for me. It sits in my family, in my name, “Roya”, in my skin colour and my very dark eyes. When clients bring politics into the room, I notice it straight away.
When I was a trainee counsellor in 2023, I brought politics into the room myself. A client was speaking about Ukraine and refugees, and I mentioned that before counsellor training I had worked as a migrant and refugee legal advocate. She seemed to recoil and told me she was worried about immigration. I changed the subject, but I felt myself become anxious for the rest of that session. My emotions stayed closer to the surface in our work together after that. It was a lesson in what a small piece of disclosure can trigger, including in me.
Over time, I’ve become better at holding my feelings to one side in sessions. The last few years have felt different in the UK. Politics has become more charged. Clients describe losing friendships, falling out with siblings, and feeling they cannot speak freely at work. Some come to therapy carrying the stress of those ruptures alongside everything else.
Many clients arrive already saturated in news and social media. The therapy relationship can become a place where they reflect on what they are taking in, and what it does to them. They speak about fear, disgust, numbness, anger. Often the sharpest emotions are about other people, partners, parents, close friends, where views have hardened and conversations have become brittle.
Clients sometimes want to know where I stand. Earlier in my career I treated this mainly as a boundary issue. Now I treat it as relational material. A client can be trying to work out what kind of person I am, whether I can tolerate difference, whether I will hide behind professional distance, whether I will meet them as a human being.
At times I answer briefly, and then bring it back to what it is like for them to ask me. Some clients say they find this grounding. Sometimes, after a painful session focused on trauma or grief, the session ends with a few minutes talking about the state of the world. Clients will say, “Well, we’ve put the world to rights.” I hear this as a shift in agency. They are not only a story of what happened to them, they are also someone with a view, a stance, a relationship to the wider world.
It carries risk. Self-disclosure brings influence. It can pull the work into my world rather than theirs. It can invite agreement seeking. It can create distance if a client senses difference and does not feel safe to name it. It can slide into conversation that stays with opinion rather than feeling. I keep these tensions active in supervision.
In supervision I’ve spoken about reading on radicalisation, and noticing patterns across the political spectrum. I am generally politically left, and I notice my own reactions too. As an Iranian, I have found some of the left’s silence about the recent uprising and the killings of protesters hard to ignore. I read this as part of a wider pull towards rigid political positions. That awareness affects how I listen, and how careful I need to be.
I’ve also been influenced by Prevent training, and by guidance on the Prevent website about how radicalisation develops and how people can be responded to. What stayed with me was the emphasis on staying in relationship while holding boundaries. Listening properly. Letting someone speak without jumping to labels. Offering a different perspective without humiliating the other person. Using phrases like, “I read something that gave me a different perspective, would you like to hear it?” and “I’d like to understand how you came to that view.” I find these ways of speaking useful in therapy, and outside it.
The BACP Ethical Framework helps me keep this grounded. I return to questions of trust, power, boundaries, and social context. I think about what neutrality communicates, and how silence can be experienced differently by different clients.
Political life is already woven into what clients bring, through war, climate crisis, poverty, racism, and the constant feed of images and opinion. My task is to meet the client in front of me, stay clear about what the therapy is for, and stay honest about the impact of my own position.