Why Therapist Identity Matters (Not the Blank Slate)

Jude Carn
Aug 25
7 min read

Therapists are often taught to be ‘blank slates.’ But neutrality isn’t neutral; it’s privilege. Rooted in whiteness and colonial frameworks, the blank slate erases identity and reinforces harm. For me, as a white, AuDHD, queer therapist, self-disclosure is not indulgence but safety. This post explores why identity matters in therapy, why neutrality so often means whiteness, and how decolonising, neurodivergent-affirming practice can create spaces of recognition, safety, and liberation.

Introduction - The Blank Slate Myth

In many modalities of therapy training, we are told to be “blank slates.” Keep yourself hidden. If a client asks whether you’re married, don’t answer. Say instead: What makes you want to know? That was the gold standard, the purest expression of therapeutic neutrality.  

I remember sitting in those training rooms, surrounded by white walls and clinical language, trying to swallow this idea whole. Neutrality was supposed to be safe. But even then, before I had language for it, I knew it wasn’t. It felt like another mask, another performance.  

This was years before I knew about my neurodivergence; I have never been able to believe in the blank slate, and I have never been able to be a "blank slate". This lauded position of therapeutic neutrality always escaped me. My body doesn’t sit still in the way I was supposed to, in fact, sitting still feels painful and takes me away from concentration, not towards it. My mind doesn’t flatten into “neutral” stillness, it moves around, holding onto mulptiple tangents.

Happily, now, my clients, so many of them autistic, ADHD, queer, trans, do not come to me looking for a blank screen. They come because they want to be seen and not pathologised themselves, they want to feel safe, and they want to know they won't be misgendered, judged, or criticised for who they are.

This is the problem with the blank slate approach to therapy.   Neutrality has never been neutral. It has always been a privilege.  

Who Gets to Be ‘Neutral’?

When we look at who gets to be read as “blank,” it is clear: whiteness more than blackness or brownness. Cisgenderness more than transness. Straightness more than queerness. Neurotypicality more than neurodivergence. Middle-classness more than working-classness. The blank reinforces othering of difference. To call oneself neutral is to claim that your position, your whiteness, your straightness, your neuronormativity, your class, is simply “human.” Everyone else becomes biased, deviant, and excessive.  

This isn’t just a quirk of psychotherapy culture. It is the inheritance of colonialism and white Western medicine, of which modern psychotherapy is born. Frantz Fanon, writing in Black Skin, White Masks, showed how psychiatry was used as a weapon of colonisation, pathologising colonised people as “primitive” and “sick.” Jennifer Mullan reminds us that modern therapy was born inside white-supremacist, patriarchal, colonial frameworks.

Neutrality has never meant the absence of bias. It has meant siding with the dominant culture.  

As a white therapist, I have to name this. My whiteness means I am more likely to be read as professional, credible, “neutral.” Because the 'norm' of psychotherapy is a white body, for the therapist. That privilege is real. It sits alongside my marginalised identities as queer and neurodivergent, but it is not erased by them. To ignore it would be to collude with the very structures I want to resist.  

The Cost of Silence for Neurodivergent Clients

And for my clients, the cost of blankness is not theoretical. It is lived.  

So many neurodivergent clients arrive in therapy with a lifetime of being misread, scolded, and shamed. They’ve been told they are lazy, dramatic, difficult, and disorganised. They’ve been punished at school for blurting out answers or moving too much. They’ve been asked by therapists to mask harder, to “just use a planner,” to “make more eye contact.” These are not neutral suggestions. They are retraumatising messages that echo a lifetime of dismissal.  

So when such a client sits down with a therapist who insists on blankness, what does that feel like? It feels like the same wall of silence they’ve already met in so many places. Therapy, the space meant to be healing, becomes another site of non-recognition.  

Safety Comes From Recognition, Not Erasure

Safety does not come from silence. It comes from recognition. It comes from honesty. It comes from presence.  

It would be absurd to deny someone therapy in their spoken language, and yet we routinely deny therapy in the languages of identity; race, culture, queerness, neurodivergence. Clients look for signals: pronouns, photographs, tone of voice, the words on a website. They are asking: Will you understand me? Or will I have to translate myself again?  

When I first named openly on my site that I am AuDHD and queer, my practice shifted, in a really good way. The majority of my caseload is now multiply neurodivergent and queer. People come because they wanted someone who speaks their language, not just literally, but culturally and politically. These disclosures didn’t make the therapy about me. The space remained theirs. But it dismantled the fiction that safety can come from pretending to be blank.  

Bias Is Always in the Room

The blank slate is dangerous in another way, too: it hides bias. Every therapist carries prejudice, even me, and even you. We all carry internalised racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, and neuronormativity.  

Pretending neutrality doesn’t erase these forces. It simply makes them harder to see, harder to name, harder to unlearn.  

Good therapists are not the ones who are blank. They are the ones who are honest. Who admit their bias. Who apologise. Who do the work of unlearning.  

Because microaggressions are not small. They land in therapy rooms like stones: "We’re all a little ADHD". "Maybe you just need to try harder to fit in". "Have you thought about masking less?" For clients, these are not neutral comments. They replay a lifetime of invalidation. They say, once again: you are not valid.

Neurotypicality as a Fiction

  Nick Walker has written that “neurotypicality” itself is a fiction. Nobody is truly neurotypical. Some people just perform neuronormativity well enough to avoid being pathologised. Blank-slate neutrality is part of that performance. Sonny Jane Wise takes this further, naming neuronormativity itself — the cultural standards that position certain ways of thinking, feeling, and being as superior to others. Blankness, in this sense, is not neutral; it is compliance with those standards.

Queering and Neuroqueering the Blank Slate

What’s the alternative? For me, Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers one path.  

IFS begins with the idea that multiplicity is normal. We all have parts. We all hold contradictions. There should be demand to be tidy.  

And when we queer and neuroqueer IFS, as my colleague Alessio Rizzo and I have written about, we take this further. We disrupt the demand for heteronormativity and neuronormativity. We refuse to erase difference in order to appear “safe.” Therapy becomes a space where both client and therapist can show up as human: messy, layered, imperfect, and alive. Not symmetrical, not boundaryless, but real.  

Decolonising Therapy and Rethinking ‘Normal’

Decolonising therapy takes us further still. The neurodiversity movement, rooted in the social model of disability, reminds us that people are not broken; environments are. Decolonising practice insists that even the idea of “normal” is a colonial construct, used to punish deviation and enforce conformity. Psychiatry was built on that punishment. Blank-slate neutrality reproduces it. The silence. The dismissal. The refusal to recognise.  

I want to be clear that I am not conflating neurodivergence with colonial histories. These are not the same. What I am pointing to are parallel legacies of dominance: colonial frameworks that punish deviation from the ‘norm,’ and neuronormative frameworks that pathologise neurodivergence. Both share roots in systems of power, and both demand resistance in therapy practice.

But therapy doesn’t have to collude with those legacies. Therapy can be part of liberation. If we are willing to give up neutrality as the goal, we can begin to imagine therapy that is identity-affirming, relational, political, and alive.  

My Position as a Therapist

I hold myself in that tension. I am white, queer, AuDHD, UK-based. I hold huge privilege: whiteness, education, and relative safety. And I carry marginalisation: neurodivergence, queerness, the experience of not fitting in the boxes training rooms set out for me. Both matter. Neither can be erased.  

My presence in the therapy room is not blank. It never could be, it never was. And neither is yours.  

Closing: Therapy as Liberation, Not Neutrality

Therapy isn’t about erasing ourselves. It is about being human with each other, safely, boundaried, imperfectly, but present.  

If we let go of the blank slate, we make space for something more radical: therapy as recognition, therapy as relationship, therapy as part of a wider movement of decolonisation, neurodivergent affirmation, and collective liberation.  

That is where healing happens. Not in the silence of neutrality, but in the courage of recognition. Not in blankness, but in the meeting of two complex, real people willing to be seen.