Silencing Myself: When Clinical Bracketing Erases Me by Kelly Field
This article was generously submitted to our Counsellor Voices series in May 2026 by Kelly Field.
Kelly Field is a UKCP-accredited Gestalt psychotherapist, EMDR practitioner, and relational supervisor-in-training based in London. Her work is grounded in Gestalt theory, relational practice, and trauma-informed approaches, with a particular interest in identity, authenticity, embodiment, and the wider social field in which therapy takes place. Alongside her private practice, she writes reflective pieces exploring contemporary culture, relationships, difference, and the emotional complexities of therapeutic work.
The Counsellor Voices Series is an initiative by Counsellors Therapy Pot to invite guest voices to address some of the issues and experiences facing counsellors and therapists in the UK in 2026.
I was trained to “bracket” my own experience so I could better meet my clients in
theirs. But as a therapist who also happens to be Jewish, working within the current
sociopolitical climate, that bracketing has begun to feel less like clinical discipline
and more like silence—and at times, erasure. This piece explores the limits of clinical
bracketing, the emotional and ethical cost of withholding parts of myself in the
therapy room, and the tension between remaining present for my clients while
staying connected to who I am.
The Discipline of Bracketing
I was trained to bracket my experience in service of the client. To set aside my assumptions,
my reactions, even aspects of my identity, so that I could meet the person in front of me
more fully.
In Gestalt therapy, bracketing is part of what we call the phenomenological attitude. It
means noticing what I bring—my opinions, my history, my emotional responses—and
choosing, at least for a time, not to let those lead. Instead, I stay with what is emerging for
the client. I prioritise their experience over my interpretation of it.
This is not about becoming neutral or empty. It is about creating enough space so that the
client can encounter themselves more clearly, without me shaping that process too quickly.
Done well, it allows for deeper contact. It supports trust. It keeps the work grounded in the
client’s reality rather than the therapist’s assumptions.
It is a discipline I respect and one I rely on.
But there are moments now where what I am bracketing no longer feels like discipline. It
feels like disappearance.
Somewhere in the current climate, the line between clinical restraint and self-erasure has
begun to blur, and I find myself sitting in the therapy room aware that I am not only holding
my experience in awareness but actively keeping parts of myself out of sight.
Presence, Not Neutrality
Gestalt therapy places strong emphasis on presence. The therapist is not a neutral observer,
but an engaged participant in the relational field. We speak of inclusion, of bringing oneself
into the encounter while remaining grounded in the client’s experience. We recognise that
the therapist’s subjectivity is not an interference to be eliminated, but part of the field to be
worked with.
Bracketing, within this, is not about removing the self, but about relating to it with
awareness. And yet, I find myself wondering what happens when that awareness becomes a
form of containment so tight that it begins to silence rather than support presence.
Bracketing My Identity
I am Jewish. This is not a political or religious identity for me, but a lived one—shaped by
family, history, culture, and a lineage marked by both resilience and persecution. It is part of
my ground, part of what I stand on as I meet the world. It informs how I organise
experience, how I understand safety and threat, belonging and exclusion, voice and silence.
And increasingly, it is something I find myself bracketing in a way that feels less like
thoughtful clinical practice and more like personal concealment.
I work with clients who are deeply affected by the conflict in the Middle East. The therapy
room often fills with grief, anger, fear, and moral conviction. These are not abstract
positions; they are embodied, charged, and often urgent. My role is to meet that, to stay
present to the figure that is emerging for the client, to support contact with their
experience, and to allow meaning to unfold.
At the same time, I am part of that field.
The Field We Share
Field theory reminds us that there is no such thing as an isolated individual; we are always in
dynamic relationship with our environment. The therapy room is not separate from the
social, cultural, and political context in which it exists. What enters the room is shaped by
that wider field, and so too am I.
And yet, in practice, I notice myself attempting to hold that part of the field—my Jewish
identity—just outside of contact.
I am tracking what I say, what I do not say, what might be inferred, and what might shift if
this part of me were known. I am aware of the potential for projection, for rupture, for a
shift in how I am perceived. I do not know whether I would remain a therapist in the eyes of
every client, or whether I might become something more symbolic, more easily located
within their existing narratives.
So I bracket it. But the more I do this, the more I feel the strain.
When Bracketing Becomes Strain
Because there is a difference between bracketing something that is momentarily irrelevant
to the contact and bracketing something that is central to one’s sense of self. There is a
difference between holding something in awareness and holding it at a distance. Over time,
this begins to affect the quality of my presence. I can feel a subtle contraction, a narrowing
of the field, as though something vital is being held back.
In Gestalt terms, contact requires the capacity to meet at the boundary—where self and
other come into relationship. If part of the self is persistently withheld, then the contact
boundary itself becomes altered. What is available to the relationship is reduced. The
encounter becomes, in some small but significant way, less than it could be.
This is where bracketing begins to feel less like a clinical tool and more like an internal
negotiation.
Language, History, and Disorientation
There is also a further layer that I have found difficult to articulate, and one I have perhaps
been most inclined to bracket. I do not align myself with the actions of the Israeli
government. Like many, I feel grief and horror at the scale of suffering that is unfolding. I do
not approach this from a place of certainty or allegiance.
And yet, I find myself struggling with some of the language that has become increasingly
common in describing what is happening.
Terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “coloniser” carry immense historical and moral
weight. I understand why they are being used. I can follow the arguments. I can feel the
urgency behind them.
But when I hear them in the room, something shifts in me.
I notice a tightening in my chest. A flicker of alertness. A moment where I am no longer just
listening to my client, but also registering myself—my identity, my history—suddenly
present in a way I cannot ignore.
I remember one moment in particular, sitting with a client as they spoke with raw emotion
about what they saw unfolding, describing Israelis as “colonisers” and the actions of the
state as “genocidal.”
I could feel two things happening at once. On the surface, I remained present, attuned,
engaged with their experience. But underneath, something in me pulled back slightly—not
in disagreement, but in recognition that I had become more than just a therapist in that
moment.
I had become, at least potentially, something that could be located within what they were
describing.
Not as myself, but as a symbol.
That is where the struggle sits for me. It is not simply about whether I agree or disagree with
the language. It is about what happens to me in relation to it.
There is a part of me that can stay with the complexity, that can hold multiple perspectives,
that can understand the need to name harm in strong terms. And there is another part of
me that feels unsettled by how quickly those terms can collapse identity into
category—how they can position Jewishness within a narrative that feels both familiar and
disorienting.
Because these words do not arrive in a vacuum.
They echo with histories in which Jewish identity has been defined by others, often in ways
that have made Jews into something dangerous, powerful, or deserving of suspicion. I am
not suggesting that the same thing is happening now. But I cannot ignore the resonance.
And this is not only historical. We are living through a period in which antisemitic incidents
have risen globally, and in the UK have become more visible in both subtle and overt ways. I
find myself aware of this context—not abstractly, but as something I am registering in real
time, both inside and outside of the therapy room.
At the same time, I am aware that feeling unsafe does not necessarily equate to being
unsafe. Felt experience and objective threat are not always the same thing. As a secular Jew
with relatively limited involvement in Jewish community or religious life, I recognise that I
move through the world with forms of protection and social acceptance that many other
minority groups do not. In many ways, I am far safer than others whose difference is more
immediately visible, embodied, or socially marginalised. And yet, acknowledging that does
not dissolve the feeling itself, nor the history that informs it.
That awareness sits quietly in the background when I hear these terms. It doesn’t determine
my response, but it shapes the way they land. It adds a layer of vigilance, of sensitivity, of
questioning—not only about what is being said, but about where it places me in the field.
There is something profoundly uncomfortable about sitting in a space where I am holding a
client’s experience of oppression, while also feeling the possibility that my own identity
might be unconsciously associated with that oppression—and, at the same time, impacted
by the reactions to it.
The Limits of Bracketing
In the therapy room, this becomes part of what I am managing internally. I listen to the
language my clients use, noticing my own responses, tracking the shifts in my body, my
sense of grounding. I am making ongoing decisions about how to remain present without
withdrawing or reacting.
This is where the limits of bracketing begin to show themselves.
Because bracketing, as a phenomenological stance, assumes that it is possible to hold
aspects of oneself in awareness without them overwhelming the encounter. But what
happens when what is being bracketed is not simply an opinion or a reaction, but something
that is deeply tied to identity, history, and current lived experience? At what point does the
act of bracketing become too great a demand on the self?
The Weight of Silence
And then there is the question of silence.
Jewish history carries with it repeated experiences of silence—of not being spoken for, not
being defended, not being seen. There have been moments where that silence, both
imposed and internalised, has had devastating consequences. Entire communities were left
unheard, unprotected, and ultimately annihilated in part because voices were absent where
they were needed.
I am not equating my current experience with those histories. But I cannot ignore how they
live in me.
They shape what silence feels like.
When I bracket my Jewish identity, it does not feel neutral. At times it feels like a necessary
boundary, a way of maintaining the therapeutic relationship and protecting the work. But at
other times, it carries an echo of something older—a sense that staying silent, even for good
clinical reasons, edges uncomfortably close to a form of disappearance.
There are moments when I find myself wondering whether, in holding this part of myself
back, I am also participating, however subtly, in the conditions that make it difficult to be
openly Jewish in the first place.
Guilt, Shame, and the Paradox of Change
This brings me into contact with something deeply uncomfortable.
There is guilt—about centring my own experience when others are suffering. There is
shame—about the hesitation, about the awareness that I am not always able to embody the
authenticity I value in my work. And there is something more complex that sits between
self-protection and complicity.
Gestalt therapy speaks of the paradoxical theory of change: that change occurs when one
becomes what one is, not when one tries to become what one is not. It invites a movement
towards integration, towards owning one’s experience rather than disowning it.
And yet here I am, in a position where owning my experience feels risky, and disowning it
feels costly.
Staying With the Limits
At what point does a clinical stance designed to facilitate contact begin to inhibit it? At what
point does setting oneself aside become a form of self-erasure? And what are the ethical
implications of that, both for the therapist and for the work?
I do not have clear answers.
What I have instead is an ongoing inquiry—one that asks me to stay in awareness of what I
am holding, what I am bracketing, and what it costs to do so. One that asks me to remain in
contact with myself, even in the places where that contact is uncomfortable or uncertain.
Perhaps the task is not to abandon bracketing, but to remain in relationship with its limits.
To notice when it begins to ask too much. To recognise when silence shifts from being a
supportive condition for the client into something that diminishes the therapist’s presence
in the room.
Because if the therapist disappears, something essential to the work is lost.
What Cannot Be Silenced
These are not neutral times, and they do not allow for entirely neutral positions. As
therapists, we are asked to hold complexity, to remain open, and to meet our clients where
they are. But we are also part of the field we are working within, shaped by it, impacted by
it, and at times constrained by it.
I am not writing from a place of resolution.
I do not silence this part of myself everywhere. There are moments, and certain
relationships, where I do disclose my Jewish identity—where it feels safe enough to do so,
where I trust that I will be met, and where I believe that naming it serves the work rather
than disrupts it. In those moments, the contact feels fuller, more honest, less divided.
But that is not always the case.
With some clients—particularly those whose lives are directly shaped by the realities of the
Middle East conflict—I find myself hesitating. Not because I doubt their capacity, but
because I am acutely aware of the field we are sitting in. I am aware of the possibility that
my identity might shift how I am seen; that I might come to represent something larger than
myself, something that feels unsafe or even oppressive to them.
And so I make a different choice. I bracket it.
Not as an abstract clinical exercise, but as a live, moment-to-moment decision shaped by
risk, responsibility, and uncertainty. I hold something back in order to preserve the work,
even as I feel the cost of doing so.
Because this, too, is not neutral.
It means that my presence shifts depending on who I am with. It means that parts of me are
available in some rooms and absent in others. It means that I am constantly negotiating how
much of myself can be brought into contact, and how much must remain out of sight.
And beyond the therapy room, I find myself watching, often in silence, as antisemitism
gathers momentum—online, in public discourse, and on the streets. I feel it, I register it, and
yet I do not always name it.
Partly out of care for the work. Partly out of concern for how it will be received.
And partly because I am still working out what it means to speak from this position without
losing something essential in the process.
There is a part of me that understands these choices. And there is another part that cannot
ignore what they cost. I do not have a resolution to offer. Only the recognition that I am
living at the edge of what I can bracket, and that the question is no longer simply what
serves the client, but how much of myself I can continue to silence before something vital in
me—and perhaps in the work itself—begins to disappear.