By Michael McManus, LCSW
I’ve spent several decades in this profession, so when a show about psychotherapists starts trending, I watch it with a mix of curiosity and mild dread. Most portrayals of therapists on screen are either cartoonishly wise or cartoonishly broken. “Shrinking” surprised me. It leans into something closer to the truth: therapists are not oracles. We are people who happen to be trained to sit with pain, and we carry our own.
The premise — Jimmy a grieving therapist who starts breaking the rules, telling clients exactly what he thinks, blurring the professional distance he was taught to maintain — is dramatized for television, obviously. Nobody should actually run their practice that way. But underneath the exaggeration is something real: the character is visibly human. He grieves badly. He makes mistakes with his daughter. He gets things wrong with his clients and has to repair it. That imperfection is the point, and it’s the part of the job most people never get to see.
Therapy has always had an unspoken mythology around it — the composed clinician behind the desk, unreadable, unaffected, dispensing insight from a place of total stability. When I started out, that was more or less the model I was trained in. Keep the frame rigid. Keep your own life out of the room. Stay behind what we used to call the “therapeutic wall” — the idea that revealing too much of yourself would somehow contaminate the work.
I don’t work that way anymore, and I haven’t for a long time. Somewhere over the years, I stopped believing that distance was the same thing as professionalism. I got more transparent. More willing to let a client see that I’m a person who has struggled, who doesn’t have every answer sitting in a drawer, who is genuinely moved by what they bring into the room. That shift wasn’t comfortable at first — it went against everything I’d been taught about maintaining the “expert” posture. But it changed the work. Clients don’t need a blank screen to project onto nearly as much as they need to feel like they’re sitting across from someone real.
That’s why a show like this resonates, messy plot lines aside. It gives people permission to see therapists as flawed, evolving humans rather than emotionally sealed professionals — and honestly, I think that’s closer to what actually makes the work effective. Connection doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from two people being willing to be real with each other, one of whom happens to have some training in how to hold that space well.
Michael McManus LCSW and his wife Angela are Therapists in Santa Rosa Beach Florida. To set up an appointment Michael can be reached by text or phone at (850)-837-0123 are at the website: psychotherapy30A.com.
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