Can Therapists Leave Politics Outside the Therapy Room? Jordan Conrad on Conversations With a Wounded Healer Podcast
Politics has, in the past few decades, become a larger and larger part of most American's lives. In big and small ways, areas that once seemed outside the scope of political involvement have become mediated by political values. At its best, this has encouraged us to be more mindful of the world outside of our own lives - of how our choices can affect the lives of others, even unintentionally - but at its worst, politics has been used to separate us from those we care about. In a time of heightened political anxiety and fear, it seems as though everything, including therapy, must be political.
Though much has been made of this in popular media, there is a specific role that politics plays in the therapy room. In 2025, the founder and clinical director of Lexington Park Psychotherapy, Dr. Jordan Conrad, published an article entitled Psychotherapy, Politics, and the Limits of Professionalism, in the American Journal of Psychotherapy discussing the way that when a therapist's politics become an active component of psychotherapy, something has gone wrong in the therapy. In the article, Dr. Conrad encouraged therapists to appreciate that in their roles as professionals, their job is to assist patients work through problems and not to enforce a particular political program.
Surprisingly, the article was controversial and the view Dr. Conrad expressed incited a hot debate in the field. To discuss the controvery, Dr. Conrad, recently joined psychotherapist Sarah Buino on her podcast, Conversations With a Wounded Healer, to discuss “The Ethics of Taking Politics into the Therapy Room.” Their conversation examines whether therapists can work responsibly with clients whose political beliefs differ sharply from their own—and what professionalism requires when political disagreement becomes emotionally or morally charged.
Therapy May Be Politically Informed—But It Is Not Political Advocacy
Psychotherapy is sometimes described as though it occurs in a neutral space, insulated from the conflicts of ordinary social life, but therapists live in the same world their patients do. Ignoring the political realities of the profession (e.g., how insurance is reimbursed for mental health treatment, access to psychotherapy, etc.) or the effects that politics may have on patients (e.g., in terms of immigration, finances, etc.) does not make therapy politically neutral, it simply makes the therapist less attentive to important parts of the world.
But acknowledging that therapy takes place within a social and political world does not mean that the therapist’s role is to produce agreement, or to bring their own feelings or struggles into the session. Therapy is a medical discipline in that it attends to the health of a patient, and so any deviation therefrom - any discussion that is not a part of the treatment - is not psychotherapy. There is a debate in the field as to how much a therapist should be "in the room" - that is, how much the therapist should be able to self-disclose - but as a rule, your therapist should say and do only what serves you, the patient, and not what makes them feel good. That means that a therapist may have strong political convictions while also recognizing that the clinical relationships creates responsibilities that do not arise in ordinary political conversations. Can therapists explain that they struggle with depression or anxiety if they are trying to connect with patients? Can they tell them that they struggled with their coop-board or advise them on what to say? The relevant question is therefore not merely, “What do I believe?” It is also, “Why am I saying this, and whose interests would this disclosure serve?”
That distinction becomes especially important when therapists describe therapy itself as political. The phrase can identify something real: ideas about mental health, family life, normality, responsibility, and human flourishing are never entirely detached from culture. Yet the same phrase can become an excuse for collapsing psychotherapy into activism. If every clinical intervention is treated as political advocacy, the part of therapy that is actually "therapy" can disappear remarkably quickly, as we see with TikTok therapy. Therapy for depression and anxiety has to be more than an opportunity to talk to someone who has had similar experiences.
What Happens When a Therapist Disagrees With a Client?
Patients may express a belief that a therapist finds misguided, offensive, or even morally disturbing, and that is OK. Therapists are not empty vessels, and professional training does not eliminate their emotions. However, therapists must do extensive training to manage their own resistances and countertransferential reactions precisely in order to keep the session about the patient and fulfilling its therapeutic purpose.
“If therapists are going to be as resistive to their patients as the patients are to their therapists, what are the patients paying for?” - William Herron
Disagreement may be clinically relevant, but it does not automatically authorize confrontation, self-disclosure, correction, or termination. Before acting, the therapist has to understand the belief’s place in the client’s psychological life. The same political statement can perform very different functions for different people: it may express fear, loyalty, resentment, grief, identification with a family or community, a need for certainty, a defense against helplessness, and many other things besides. Good therapists don't just listen and react - they pay attention in a deep way not just to what is being said, but what is being communicated in order to understand how they understand themselves and how they want others to see them. This kind of attention has the power to reveal something important about the person - about the types of relationships they get into and the problems that arise, about the way they value themselves and others, about how they want their life to look.
The Ethical Problem of Therapist Self-Disclosure
Political self-disclosure can sometimes clarify the therapeutic relationship and frame a problem in helpful ways, but it also subtly changes the reality that the therapy exists within. Patients can't help but know something about even the most buttoned up therapists - their race, their sex, sometimes whether they are married or where they went to school, their style of furniture or artwork - but everything one knows about their therapist changes the way they think about the person their talking to, and with that what can be expressed changes as well.
To take a hyperbolic example, consider what it is like speaking to an adult when you are a child, or to a child when you are an adult. It isn't just that the knowledge of your differences makes you speak to them in a different way consciously, but that different thoughts, different words, different kinds of things come to your mind. It isn't that you are choosing to communicate differently with that knowledge (that is a part of it), but that what is coming to mind prior to any choices you make changes.
place a client in a difficult position. Because therapists possess authority within the room, disclosure is never simply an exchange between equals. Clients may worry that disagreement will change how the therapist sees them, jeopardize the relationship, or make honest discussion unsafe. Even clients who share the therapist’s politics may begin monitoring themselves for the “right” answer. This happens in subtle and unconscious ways. What initially feels like solidarity can narrow the range of thoughts and change the trajectory of an otherwise helpful relationship.
This does not mean that therapists must conceal every value or decline to answer every direct question. But it does mean that disclosure should be governed by rules that would be odd or unusual outside of the therapy room. If a friend or even a stranger asks where you went on holiday, it would be rude to not answer openly and so you people do so without thinking; but a therapist must work for the patient and that means interrogating the often hidden meanings beneath what is explicitly being asked. A useful question is whether the disclosure increases the client’s freedom to think, speak, and examine experience—or subtly asks the client to take care of the therapist, demonstrate allegiance, or accept the therapist’s interpretation of events. The ethical value of a disclosure depends less on whether it is sincere than on what it does within the relationship.
Professionalism Requires More Than Neutrality
The deepest issue raised by political disagreement in therapy may be the meaning of professional restraint. Restraint is sometimes mistaken for emotional distance or a lack of moral conviction, but the opposite is true. Professionalism requires the capacity to remain responsible for how one uses authority even when personally activated and restraint allows therapists to take their own reactions seriously without making those reactions the center of the client’s treatment.
This is not passive neutrality and it certainly is not a tacit political acceptance of any particular view. Recognizing one's own beliefs and values without responding to them is an active clinical discipline: noticing one’s response, examining its sources, determining whether it contains useful information, and deciding what—if anything—belongs in the room. Therapists who cannot recognize their own values are not behaving political therapy, they are simply less able to understand how their values may be affecting their work.
At Lexington Park Psychotherapy, we believe rigorous psychotherapy depends on the ability to think carefully about complexity rather than relying on slogans. Political beliefs can matter deeply, but so do the differences between understanding a person, agreeing with a person, and using one's professional role to influence a person, even unintentionally.
In a polarized culture, preserving those distinctions is difficult. It is also part of the work.
Listen to Dr. Jordan Conrad’s full conversation with Sarah Buino, “The Ethics of Taking Politics into the Therapy Room,” on Conversations With a Wounded Healer.
