Why is my therapist suddenly wearing a mask during our sessions after I asked her about yawning? Have I done something wrong? Is it affecting the connection between us? #Therapy #Questions #FacialExpressions #Yawning #ClientTherapistRelationship
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People yawn for many reasons: tiredness, boredom, lack of oxygen in the room, stress relief, you thought of a kitten yawning and now you’re yawning too…
Tell your therapist about this, ask them if they’re wearing the mask because of that yawn situation, and that you prefer to see their face. If you cannot communicate your feelings and worries to your therapist, something in the relationship is not working and it will be detrimental to your therapeutic process.
you yawn because your brain needs oxygen. it’s not inherently a bored/tired response. you need to educate yourself on basic human biology and apologize lmao
i’d be extremely uncomfortable and try to hide my face, too, with someone who didn’t even know that.
You expressed perceiving her as bored, tired or sleepy as a result of your story or speaking skills. Took it incredibly personally. Now she is wearing a mask to try and not hurt your feelings and you’re shocked?!
People yawn. Humans yawn. Sometimes it’s hard to suppress and it’s nothing personal. Maybe she is a new parent running on minimal sleep, got woken up during the night, you never know. Maybe she is burning the midnight oil, completing more education and studying into the night. Even poor ventilation/low oxygen can cause people to yawn.
I’m a house mom for a transition house and when people see me yawn at work (at my day job) or run out for a third coffee they never see the night I had before, breaking up a fight at 3 am or driving a sick client to urgent care and sitting with them for 3 hours in the middle of the night. It’s nothing personal I’m just $&@? tired and love my day job way too much to not push through or leave my clients hanging.
Relax.
This would be a great opportunity for you to talk through your concerns. I’m not sure why she didn’t respond originally to tell you she is tired or whatever was going on but since it is affecting your therapy it is worth bringing up.
Human beings yawn from time to time.
I suggest asking her why she wears a mask, and then do her the honor of believing her response. Then, tell her how it is affecting your experience. If she can be trusted with your life story and emotional health, she can be trusted with this too.
I’m not sure it was appropriate to query a typical human response to working and eventually getting tired. I doubt she was doing it intentionally and now that you have asked her about it I’m not sure how to unring that bell.
FYI people yawn burp sneeze cough itch and scratch and fidget at various times during the day. Implying that you are the cause is a neurotic thought
If you have been seeing your therapist for 2 years you should feel comfortable enough to bring this up. I’m a therapist, and if a client commented on my yawning I would have responded instead of side stepping the situation. If you discuss the mask and it isn’t going to change I suggest you get another therapist.
It happened to me and I quickly excused myself and apologised. I explained I was suddenly very tired but I was still very much engaged with the person. We are human after all.
This sounds like a good topic to discuss with your therapist
I think you’re taking this personally when it didn’t have anything to do with you. People yawn for reasons other than being tired or bored.
My husband actually started taking antidepressants recently and he noticed he was yawning a lot more excessively since upping the dosage. Apparently yawning more can be a symptom. Your therapist may have reacted the way she did and not responded to your question because it was a reason such as this and wouldn’t be the best thing to tell a patient.
My therapist yawns during our sessions sometimes. I also know she has two young children and an entire life of her own that could make her tired/yawn, I also know sometimes I’m sure I’m boring, or sometimes a person yawns out of nowhere. it’s just a yawn lol find a new therapist as some others said
Why are you seeing this therapist? I’m serious. You’re describing basic anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and low self esteem. These are all important and need to be addressed. But after two years of seeing the same therapist, you should be able to work through something as simple as “she yawned when I was talking”. Therapy involves progress.
Wearing a mask is something many people do when they work in small offices with different clients all the time. Sometimes it IS an excuse to hide facial expressions, it can it to help prevent the spread of germs to people who aren’t often the best at caring for themselves. Such as people who are in therapy for anxiety and depression. She likely also wipes down the chair and anything a client touches after every session.
Seriously, as someone who has battled anxiety and depression for well over 35 years, therapy should involve progress. It should be comfortable for you, but therapy should not become your comfort zone.
she could just be wearing the mask becuase she lives with someone with a illness, or whatever. I doubt shes been wearing a mask for 2 years because you asked her why she yawned
My dude, I yawn 70,000 times a day. It generally has no bearing on the situation I’m in; I’m just always exhausted.
This is hilarious. I’ve been in therapy a few years now and in all that time, my therapist has yawned once. I thought at the time it was lack of sleep. I ignored it and we just kept going. People are allowed to be human.
Then OP starts talking about the mask. Connected to the yawn? Who knows? Intention behind the mask? Who knows? Has OP asked her directly? Of course not.
OP find another therapist. One you feel comfortable raising these kinds of issues with.
With all due respect, I can see why you’re seeing a therapist.
People yawn. It’s an involuntary response. Typing the word ‘yawn’ just now made me yawn. It’s not indicative of someone feeling bored or disinterested.
For some reason, you associate yawning with boredom, and you’re convinced that that boredom is because of you. There are 2 mistakes here. The first: it’s not necessarily about you. The second: you don’t know why she’s yawning. Maybe her kid fell sick and she was up for hours. Maybe she tossed and turned. Maybe she had a fun night with friends. Maybe she worked late.
You don’t know why she yawned, yet you immediately assume she was bored because of you. You observe an action and fill in what you think happened, severely misinterpreting a situation. Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not judging you, I was like that too. And because your self-esteem is clearly very low, your brain assumes she’s bored because of you.
And you know what? Yawning actually happens when the body tries to keep us awake. So the whole assumption you made is incorrect. See how far off the mark you were?
I hope this gives you some perspective on the whole matter. But I have to agree with other commenters: it’s probably best for you to find a new therapist. Clearly, this isn’t it. The last place you should feel unheard is at your therapist’s.
Just an FYI. Not everyone wears masks because of covid.
My rheumatologist wants me to wear a mask on public because if I get sick, I get super sick. It has nothing to do with covid, just general illness.
Therapist here. Yawning happens and almost all the time it’s just because we need to yawn. Not that we find a client boring, or that we don’t care, it’s literally because we’ve got to yawn. It’s possible your therapist sucks and genuinely finds the people they’re trying to help boring.
That said, if I yawned and someone seemed to take offense, I might get really self conscious about it and feel bad that I did. I wouldn’t go so far as to wear a mask, but I could understand wanting to hide a yawn if a client seemed upset by it.
Back when I used to do English lessons, I had one student report that I’d yawned during a lesson. The report was passed up through the school’s chain of authority, and each person who received the report called me up over the next several days with increasingly dire assessments of my value as a human being. At no point did anyone ask why I’d yawned.
So I can understand the reasoning behind just putting on a mask so as not to have to run through a punishment gauntlet because of a basic body function.
Well that was rude. People yawn for many different reasons and not all of those are about you.
Dude, if it has been 2 years and you no longer feel a connection, change therapist.
Also, don’t ask your therapists why they yawn. Human beings yawn. It’s incredibly awkward to ask if I am boring you when you are paying them to listen to you.
Sometimes people just yawn man. She probably had a long day or something, and it seems kind of silly to bring attention to it or allow it to bring tension into the conversation. It’s not personal. People yawn.
I used to have a teacher like this. He would get *really* offended when we would yawn, and directly ask us if he was boring us. Like no dude, we’ve just been at school for over 8 hours. We were mentally exhausted and sleepy.
The room may be too warm. She may breathe shallowly or have narrow airways and has to compensate by yawning regularly.
I’m curious, do you yawn in reply? Yawning is an indicator of empathy in all species…I wonder what no yawning indicates?
Look, this is not a derogatory comment or a judgment on you as a person. We all have our own quirks and insecurities, some of them quite far fetched (I know I do). But the lesson to be taken, I think, is this–not everything is about you. If you need to find a new therapist, then do so! But be forewarned that your mentality will follow. Something else mundane may happen that makes you paranoid about that person as well. This is no hating on your experience at all. The point is that if you perceive other people’s actions to be about you, this situation will be played on repeat.
Bro you made her feel guilty for yawning, which everyone does all the time for many reasons. Maybe you should discuss with her why you take things like this so personally and how you can work on it
These actually are still COVID times. You have no idea why she’s wearing a mask. Stop assuming and have a convo about it.
I’m a therapist.
Sometimes we yawn in session. Sorry. It’s not you. It’s just a thing people do. The frontrunning theory for why we yawn is that we are attempting to renew alertness. Please bear in mind that therapists spend a lot of our days sitting in the one spot.
She should have acknowledged it and said something to the effect of it not being about you. Also could have been a good jumping off point to talk about “personalising” cognitions.
She yawned… two years ago. I see you have a lot of anxiety. Perhaps a change of therapist would help.
I mean, I get it. I personally had a therapist who reapplied her lipgloss while I was recounting my sexual assault. That was 10 years ago and I still think of it sometimes. But I stopped seeing her immediately after.
You sound exhausting. I mean in the sense that a relationship with you must be like walking on eggshells. You need to the learn the balance of giving people the benefit of the doubt, and not assuming the worst from their actions.
Like I’m saying, balance is the key, your intention could be correct at times, you just have to determine if it is something that annoys you is really worth a confrontation. Not all annoyances garner attention.
She yawned once because she needed to yawn
Your response: omg she must think I’m so boring!!!
Firstly your relationship with her is personal but her relationship with you is professional, its her job to listen and help/give advice.
Don’t mistake that for friendship, I doubt she tells you all about her personal life and she shit she’s going through.
So, you don’t even know whats going on in her life so how could you possibly know why she now wears a mask
What if she’s sick?
What if the clinic she works at changed some rules (you know… right after a huge global pandemic) and now they all have to wear masks? You literally admitted that she wears masks for other clients and yet you still insist it has to be about you, specifically? Where’s the logic there?
You go to therapy to better understand what you’re going through and to figure out how to improve you mental well-being not to get distracted with why your therapist wears a mask or not.
Focus on what’s important here and what you’re actually paying for.
this happened 2 years ago, and in the nicest way possible, i am wondering what sort of progress you have made with your anxiety in that time. i’ve been seeing an anxiety specialist for 2-3 years, and these sort of thought patterns should be deconstructed in therapy over time.
As a therapist, I yawn during sessions because human beings yawn. I’ve never been asked, but I’m also not worried about being asked. This is something you should talk to your therapist about
I’m not sure that I’ve ever yawned from boredom. Like so much so that I’m now wondering if that’s even a thing? Do people actually yawn from boredom? Why am I having an existential crisis over this😭😂
>These are not COVID times anymore.
They actually still are. It’s just no one’s really talking about it much anymore, except disabled people. Which you never know her reasoning for wearing the mask. Maybe it was because of what you said. Maybe it’s because of Covid. Maybe she got sick and was trying not to pass it along to you. Who knows. But she’s fine if she wants to wear one, there are plenty of reasons she might, most of them have nothing to do with you personally.
I…can kinda get wanting to see someone’s face when talking to them, but this post has a bit of a weird vibe to it that feels really entitled.
In this case, I’d say you need to suck it up and learn to respect her choices about her own health and either be fine with her choice to what she wants to with her own body; or you can decide you can’t deal with that and find a new therapist. Those are really your only two choices moving forward.