Meeting Clients Where They Are At: A Clinician’s Perspective

The following is an excerpt of a piece written by CJCJ’s Elayne (Laynee) Jeanne Daniels on her first year as an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT) and Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC). Laynee is a clinician with our Community Options for Youth (COY) program. CJCJ’s COY program provides mental health support for youth ages 12 – 21 who are impacted by San Francisco’s juvenile justice system — both pre- and post-adjudication.

Elayne (Laynee) Jeanne Daniels, AMFT, APCC is supervised by Erica Spartos, LMFT #81057, who owns and operates a private practice in San Francisco serving young people and individuals, and is the Clinical Supervisor for the COY program at CJCJ since 2017. Original piece was published by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists®, and shared with their permission. The original piece was published by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists®, and shared with their permission. You can learn a bit more about Laynee and her work in this CJCJ newsletter piece from earlier this year. We are lucky to work with Laynee and proud to celebrate her accomplishments.

Sometimes a question I’ve spent entirely too long thinking about is met with an ​“I don’t know.” Sometimes I can see a connection that a client has no interest in making, at least not right now. Sometimes the thing I think would be most valuable to explore is nowhere near what feels most important to the person sitting across from me. I have had to pay attention to the moments when my excitement about the work starts moving faster than the work itself. Wanting something for a client can very easily become wanting something from them, and there is an important difference between offering an opportunity for insight and needing a client to take it.

That distinction feels especially important in community mental health. Many of the clients I work with have experienced significant trauma, some of which cannot be neatly placed in the past tense. Their lives may involve instability, immediate needs, and systems that demand their attention long before whatever I hoped we might get to in session. I’ve had the privilege of entering my own therapy with enough safety, stability, and psychological space to make reflection a priority. I can leave a session thinking about what came up, return the following week ready to go further, and trust that much of what I am processing will remain exclusively in the realm of processing. That is not a neutral starting point, and it’s not one I can assume my clients share. I can’t take the circumstances that have allowed me to engage in therapy this way and turn them into the standard by which I measure someone else’s engagement.

Sometimes guardedness makes sense. Sometimes, simply saying ​“I don’t want to talk about that” is meaningful progress. Sometimes the work is answering the phone, trusting me with one more detail of the story, or simply returning for another session. A year into associateship, I’m learning that meeting clients where they are requires more than knowing the phrase. It requires giving up some of my expectations about where I thought we were supposed to go.

You can learn more about the COY program on our website under Our Programs.