When Your Past Meets Your Practice: Working with Childhood Wounds as a Clinician

Therapists don’t walk into the room as blank slates. Our own childhood wounds, nervous system adaptations, and survival strategies come with us, quietly shaping how we see our clients, hold boundaries, tolerate distress, and conceptualize “the problem.” Sometimes that history deepens our attunement. Sometimes it pulls us off center.
Join us for a free, clinically honest, shame-free Clinical Conversation with trauma therapist, EMDR Consultant and Trainer, and international speaker Yunetta Spring Smith. We’ll explore how your past and your practice intersect, and how to work with that reality in a way that supports both you and your clients.

In this conversation, we'll explore:

• How childhood wounds live in the nervous system and quietly show up in clinical relationships, even when you “know better.”
• Common ways unexamined history shapes our work: case conceptualization, boundaries, countertransference, people-pleasing, rescuing, rigidity, and burnout
• Shifting from shame to curiosity so you can notice your own patterns without collapsing into “I’m a bad therapist.”
• Anti-oppressive, trauma-informed lenses for understanding your survival strategies in context, not in isolation
• Practical, in-the-moment practices to ground yourself when your stuff gets stirred up in session
• Sustainable ways to keep doing this work without abandoning yourself or reenacting old roles in the therapy room

This is not about “fixing” yourself before you can be useful. It’s about telling the truth about how human you already are, and learning to work with that, instead of against it.