There are moments in therapy when what enters the room is not simply a client’s story, but an atmosphere.
Over the last few years as war, repression, internet shutdowns, and collective instability intensified across Iran, I began noticing something different in many of my sessions. Fear moved differently. Silence carried more weight. Even grief felt less containable. It no longer belonged neatly to one person’s history or a single traumatic event. It lingered in the room itself.
At times, there was an almost an uncanny parallel process between what the I was carrying emotionally and what was unfolding inside the client, even when the actual circumstances were different. My own experiences of grief, uncertainty, fear, helplessness, or vigilance have oftentimes deepened attunement and helped me to recognize emotional states that have not yet fully found language. Much of therapy happens nonverbally through shifts in tone, pacing, silence, facial expression, and the subtle ways one nervous system responds to another (1, 2). When I remain engaged in ongoing self-reflection, my emotional reactions can become a source of awareness and connection rather than something that unconsciously pulls the work off course.
But there are also times when my emotional experience and the client’s process fall out of sync in ways that disrupt attunement. Under prolonged conditions of collective stress, I have, at times, begun overidentifying with clients, emotionally pulling away from difficult material; becoming emotionally flooded or losing the reflective space needed to stay grounded and present.
Over time, repeated exposure to trauma, suffering, and chronic instability can contribute to burnout, emotional exhaustion, compassion fatigue, and vicarious traumatization (3,4). Sometimes it appears as numbness, hypervigilance, irritability, hopelessness, or overfunctioning that becomes difficult to recognize while it is happening.
Working with Transnational Trauma
As an Iranian therapist working in the diaspora, I also had to confront something uncomfortable personally: I was not standing outside the collective trauma observing it from a protected clinical distance. I was inside it too.
One afternoon, I finished a session with an Iranian client whose family was still in Tehran during a period of internet disruption and escalating violence. Her phone sat face up beside her for the entire session. Every few minutes, her eyes drifted toward it automatically.
“I haven’t heard from my mother since yesterday,” she finally said quietly. Then silence. Not dramatic silence. Familiar silence. The kind filled with suspended fear. The kind where both people in the room already understand what has not been said out loud.
I noticed my own body tighten immediately because I had spent the entire morning checking my own phone for the exact same reason. I too was waiting for messages from family members. I too had been compulsively refreshing news feeds before sessions began. For a brief moment, the emotional distance between me and the client collapsed in a way I had never fully experienced. It felt less like one person helping another process fear and more like two nervous systems sitting beneath the same emotional weather.
She apologized several times for “bringing politics into therapy.”
I remember thinking how often Iranian clients speak about collective trauma as though it exists outside the realm of legitimate psychological suffering, rather than something actively shaping attachment, emotional regulation, sleep, relationships, and the body itself.
These experiences are not background context. They become atmosphere. They enter the room quietly and settle into the space between people. You can feel them in the pauses, in the vigilance, in the way the body never fully unclenches. They are in the air you breathe in the therapy room.
What struck me most in that, and the following moments, was not simply her fear, but the impossibility of resolution. There was no completed traumatic event to process. No stable ending. No clear return to safety. The threat remained ongoing, present, unresolved. We were not speaking about trauma as something confined to the past, but as something unfolding continuously in real time.
Much of the trauma literature has historically focused on events that have already occurred and are later remembered, revisited, and metabolized (5). But this felt different. The nervous system was responding to danger that was not over yet.
Transitioning from Trauma?
After the session ended, I sat alone checking the news for a couple minutes again before my next client arrived. Then, almost immediately, I transitioned into a session with a non-Iranian client in his forties struggling with burnout, loneliness, and conflict in his marriage. His suffering was real and deserving of care. But I remember feeling emotionally disoriented by how quickly I was expected to reorganize myself internally between emotional worlds that felt psychologically galaxies apart.
One moment I was sitting with fears of imprisonment, disappearing communication, execution, and uncertainty about the future. The next, I needed to fully attune to workplace frustrations and relational disappointment while carrying an invisible emotional reality inside myself that nobody else in the room could see.
And perhaps the hardest part was that he did not know. Not because he was uncaring, but because why would he? I still had to show up. I still had to remain present. I still had to ethically care for another person’s emotional world while part of my own nervous system remained somewhere else entirely.
Some days I could not fully hold it back, and I would briefly disclose the difficulty of living in two emotional realities at once. At times, what made the experience even more isolating was realizing how invisible these events remained within many people’s emotional worlds unless they touched them directly.
There were moments when I have caught myself drifting for a split second in sessions that had nothing to do with Iran. A client would be talking while another part of my mind was still wondering whether the internet was working again, whether another video had surfaced overnight, whether my family was safe, or which political prisoner whose story I had come to know I might wake up to find executed the next morning. Usually, I could pull myself back quickly. But the fact that I needed to at all unsettled me.
Ethically, therapists are often encouraged to step away from clinical work during periods of significant distress. But I found myself questioning what that means when the trauma is ongoing rather than time limited. Living within the typical 3-day bereavement culture of the United States felt psychologically disorienting while carrying forms of grief that were collective, chronic, and constantly renewing in real time.
The Double Edge of Compartmentalization
For a long time, I believed I was exceptionally good at compartmentalizing. Many people shaped by migration, political repression, collective trauma, and prolonged instability learn early how to continue functioning while carrying enormous emotional strain internally (6,7,8). I often think that what many people interpret as extraordinary immigrant work ethic is also, in part, the channelling of pain into functioning. Productivity becomes a way of maintaining psychological coherence when emotional collapse does not feel possible.
But therapy has a way of exposing what can no longer be compartmentalized. In many ways, that is part of the profound privilege of being a therapist. If the ongoing work of self-of-the-therapist is taken seriously, the clinical encounter can become not only a space of healing for clients, but also a place where therapists are repeatedly confronted with parts of themselves that still remain unresolved, defended against, grieving, fearful, or unfinished.
Irvin Yalom (9) wrote about the importance of therapists paying close attention to their own emotional reactions through reflection, personal notes, and ongoing self-examination, emphasizing that the therapist’s internal experience is itself an important clinical instrument. Relational and intersubjective approaches to psychotherapy similarly recognize that therapy inevitably affects both people in the room, and that the therapist’s capacity for self-awareness, emotional honesty, and reflection is essential to ethical clinical work (10).
This period of history forced me to confront not only the pain carried by others, but also the parts of myself still organized around fear, grief, vigilance, longing, and uncertainty. I began to understand that I was not standing outside the therapeutic process observing it from a safe distance. I was emotionally inside it too.
I realized that compartmentalization functions very differently when trauma is not historical but ongoing. The nervous system does not fully set aside realities that remain unresolved in real time. There is no true emotional closure when loved ones remain under threat and uncertainty itself becomes chronic.
There have been moments when I reached for consultation or support from colleagues and left feeling even more alone afterward. Not because colleagues lacked compassion, but because the existential depth of what I was carrying often felt difficult to fully translate. Suggestions about “better boundaries” or “watching less news” failed to capture that these were not distant headlines. These were my loved ones, my language, and my attachment to home.
Turning away from it did not feel like self-care in any simple sense. At times, trying to distract myself from it felt closer to abandoning a part of myself.
The experience also changed the way I understood the unconscious dimensions of therapy itself. There were moments when very little was spoken directly about fear or grief, yet the emotional atmosphere in the room carried those experiences fully. Silence often felt heavy rather than empty. Small shifts in tone, pacing, facial expression, or bodily tension communicated far more than words themselves. At times, I could feel anxiety moving through the space before it had been consciously named by either the client or myself. Therapy increasingly felt less like a conversation and more like a living emotional system where fear, vigilance, grief, regulation, and safety moved quietly between people beneath language itself through attunement, co-regulation, and the subtle ways nervous systems respond to one another (1,2).
Over time, I became increasingly interested in the ways chronic exposure to authoritarian systems, political instability, collective fear, and prolonged uncertainty remain emotionally influential long after people physically leave those environments. Many clients do not simply remember instability as something that happened in the past. Their nervous systems continue expecting it. Even in objectively safer environments, there can still be a persistent anticipation that safety is temporary or that something catastrophic could happen at any moment. I also began recognizing how these same dynamics were quietly shaping me inside the therapy room.
One of the most important lessons I’ve come to understand is that therapists are not untouched by collective trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic made this impossible to ignore, as clinicians simultaneously lived through the same crisis affecting their clients while continuing to provide care (11,12.) The illusion that therapists can somehow stand outside the emotional conditions shaping the larger system no longer felt psychologically honest (13, 14).
But what happens when collective trauma is geographically distant from the dominant culture surrounding us, yet emotionally immediate within the therapist’s own nervous system, family system, and daily life?
I no longer believe neutrality or unaffectedness is possible under such conditions. The task is not emotional detachment, but developing enough awareness of our own emotional responses that we can continue showing up ethically and relationally without unconsciously organizing the therapeutic space around our own fear, vigilance, helplessness, or exhaustion.
At times, I noticed myself overfunctioning, intellectualizing, or moving too quickly toward clinical organization rather than fully acknowledging the emotional reality I was carrying alongside my clients. The work became less about trying to eliminate my emotional responses and more about learning how to stay aware of them without allowing them to unconsciously organize the therapeutic space.
Writing became one of the ways I metabolized these experiences personally. It created enough emotional space for me to continue showing up more fully for the people sitting across from me while helping me move closer to these experiences rather than continually trying to distance myself from them.
Some days, the hardest part of the work was not hearing collective trauma spoken aloud in the room. It was moving quietly between emotional worlds while carrying realities that remained invisible to almost everyone around me.
And yet, perhaps that is also where some of the deepest humanity in therapy lives. Not in pretending we are unaffected. Not in convincing ourselves we stand outside suffering. But in learning how to remain emotionally present with one another anyway, even while carrying our own fear, grief, uncertainty, and unfinishedness alongside the people who entrust us with theirs.
References
(1) Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
(2) Siegel, D. J. (2010). The mindful therapist: A clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration. W. W. Norton.
(3) Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.
(4) Newell, J. M., & MacNeil, G. A. (2010). Professional burnout, vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. Best Practices in Mental Health, 6(2), 57–68.
(5,6) Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.
(7) Jalali, B. (2005). Iranian families. In M. McGoldrick, J. Giordano, & N. Garcia-Preto (Eds.), Ethnicity and family therapy (3rd ed., pp. 451–465). Guilford Press.
(8) McGoldrick, M., Giordano, J., & Garcia-Preto, N. (2005). Overview: Ethnicity and family therapy. In M. McGoldrick, J. Giordano, & N. Garcia-Preto (Eds.), Ethnicity and family therapy (3rd ed., pp. 1–40). Guilford Press.
(9) Yalom, I. D. (2002). The gift of therapy: An open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients. HarperCollins.
(10) Aponte, H. J., & Kissil, K. (2014). “If I can grapple with this I can truly be of use in the therapy room”: Using the therapist’s own emotional struggles to facilitate effective therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 40(2), 152–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12011
(11) Aafjes-van Doorn, K., Békés, V., Prout, T. A., & Hoffman, L. (2020). Psychotherapists’ vicarious traumatization during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 12(S1), S148–S150. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000868
(12) Sahebi, B. (2020). Clinical supervision of couple and family therapy during COVID-19. Family Process, 59(3), 989–996. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12591
(13) Aron, L. (1996). A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis. Analytic Press.
(14) Renik, O. (1993). Analytic interaction: Conceptualizing technique in light of the analyst’s irreducible subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 62(4), 553–571.
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