Forthcoming · 2026

When the Therapist Is Ill.

Navigating Vulnerability, Self-Care, and Self-Disclosure in Clinical Practice.

When we have an illness, a disability, or an impairment, our personal lives are thrown into disarray. We feel vulnerable and terrified, and we need to care for ourselves with compassion and sensitivity for our particular needs. As our personal and professional lives converge, we face a range of painful questions, clinical responsibilities, and ethical concerns. This groundbreaking relational book for psychotherapists, and anyone in the helping and healing professions, will help us navigate this unfamiliar and unsettling terrain.

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For: Clinicians · Supervisors · Training Institutes
By: Roberta Rachel Omin, LCSW
When the Therapist Is Ill: Navigating Vulnerability, Self-Care, and Self-Disclosure in Clinical Practice, by Roberta Rachel Omin, LCSW
Why This Conversation Matters

The missing chapter in our training.

We are clinically trained in working with beginnings, processes, ruptures, repairs, boundaries, and ethical care. Yet, like most therapists, we receive little guidance about the ethical dilemma: what to do when illness enters our own lives and begins to impact the safety, trust, and integrity of the therapeutic relationship and environment.

When the Therapist Is Ill addresses the relational, clinical, ethical, practical, and deeply personal questions that emerge when a therapist must face:

This is not a peripheral issue. It is one of the missing conversations in our profession.

A More Personal Invitation

If you have ever asked…

i.

What do I disclose?

ii.

How do I know what is relationally appropriate?

iii.

What do I owe my clients if my health changes?

iv.

How do I care for myself without compromising the work?

v.

What if I need to pause, transfer, or stop?

vi.

How do I prepare for what I hope never happens?

This book was written with you in mind.

Inside the Book

A relational and human approach.

This book does not approach a therapist's illness as a purely technical and logistical problem to be solved. It understands illness as a relational event. Drawing from over 150 qualitative interviews, lived experience, clinical reflection, parts work, and attachment theory, it offers a compassionate roadmap through the themes below.

Vulnerability Reframed

An expanded view of vulnerability that distinguishes present-moment experience from its roots in our historical wounds and uncertainty.

Self-Led Disclosure

How to discern whether to share, what to reveal, when to disclose, and what serves the client's best interests, with beginning conversations that are respectful and compassionate of ourselves and our clients.

Attachment Stories

How our own and our clients' attachment histories shape our responses to illness, disclosure, and self-care, and how to use the experience for individual and relational growth.

The Therapist's Inner Work

Trailheads for shame, caretaking, unmet needs, grief, privacy, dependency, and identity. The therapist's inner work frees the therapist to be judiciously authentic with clients.

The Client's Inner Work

How a therapist's disclosure can create an opportunity for clients to tend to their own unhealed wounds, a trailhead toward a reparative attachment experience.

The Role of Colleagues

How consultants and peer colleagues can support, and even accompany, an ill therapist, serving as an objective sounding board and offering insight.

Professional Wills & Continuity

What is involved in preparing a practical, traditional professional will, or a relationally focused one, and what gets in our way of starting and completing it.

Endings & The Good Goodbye

Why how we say goodbye matters, and how to navigate transition, closure, and meaningful relational endings.

Core Themes

The ideas the book returns to.

✦

Illness narrows the distance between the personal and professional.

✦

Disclosure is not merely informational; it is relational.

✦

Clients are affected not only by what we say; they are also affected by what we leave unspoken.

✦

Healthy vulnerability is not weakness; it is grounded openness.

✦

Self-care is not abandonment of the client.

✦

The therapeutic bond deserves honesty, self-determination, preparation, continuity, and thoughtful endings.

✦

Our humanity is not outside the work; it is part of the ground of the work.

A book about how therapists can remain deeply human.
Relationally grounded.
Ethically clear.
When life does not unfold according to plan.

Who This Book Is For

For those holding the work, and those who already know.

✓ Clinical social workers, psychologists, MFTs, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and mental health counselors, in private or group practice
✓ Counselors, coaches, and clinical staff in other settings (educational, hospital)
✓ Therapists living with illness, disability, or medical uncertainty
✓ Clinicians and colleagues supporting one another
✓ Supervisors, consultants, and training institutes
✓ Clinicians seeking a relational, clinically sound, and ethically grounded framework
✓ Those who have already lived this terrain, and know its loneliness
Advance Praise

What colleagues are saying.

“Roberta Omin sorts big questions, reviews potential ethical dilemmas, lays out options, and offers useful templates. Let this book take your hand.”

Martha Sweezy, PhD
Assistant Professor, part-time, Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; author on Internal Family Systems Therapy

“This brave, soulful, and deeply important book fills a profound gap in our therapeutic conversation. She brings extraordinary warmth, honesty, clinical wisdom, and ethical clarity to crucial, complex questions of vulnerability, self-disclosure, and the delicate boundary between the personal and the professional. This book is a gift to the field.”

Patricia L. Papernow, Ed.D.
Psychologist; Director, Institute for Stepfamily Education; author of three books on stepfamilies

“Roberta Omin’s book shines an unwavering, bright, and insightful light on a complex and often unacknowledged issue in the world of mental health professionals. This book is good medicine for our collective soul.”

David Chernikoff, M.Div.
Author of Life Part Two; guiding teacher, Insight Meditation Community of Colorado

“An invaluable and overdue resource for mental health practitioners struggling with one of the most difficult dilemmas clinicians ever have to face.”

Laura Melano Flanagan, LCSW · co-author, Inside Out / Outside In

“A brilliant and needed contribution to therapists and health care providers. The therapeutic relationship is a sacred one, built on love, trust, and encouragement.”

Patricia Kuusisto, LCSW · founder, the Diversity Center, White Plains

“She encourages us to be brave as we consider both our needs and our clients’ needs. A must-have for therapists, new and experienced.”

Katie Devine, Ph.D. · psychologist; instructor, Adelphi University

“A gift to therapists and clients: where the unspeakable becomes spoken, shared, and human, and brought back into the therapeutic frame.”

Sarah Parad Rowen, LCSW · former adjunct, Smith College School of Social Work

How we say goodbye matters.

Bring This Conversation Into the Field

Speaking, workshops, and consultation.

The profession is ready for a more relational, more truthful, and more compassionate conversation about therapist illness, vulnerability, self-care, self-disclosure, continuity, client care, and a relational goodbye.

Invite Roberta to Speak Explore Consultations →
Free Guide for Clinicians · Coming Soon

The 7 Biggest Concerns.

When therapists face their own illness, the same seven concerns surface again and again. This free guide offers compassionate guidance for navigating each one, in Roberta's voice. Join the list and it is yours free, with updates as the book launches.

Westchester County, NY · IFS, IFIO, Gestalt — Roberta
About the Author

Roberta Rachel Omin, LCSW

Roberta has practiced psychotherapy and counseling for over fifty years in Westchester County, New York. She holds a Master's in Social Work and Post-Master's Certificate in Advanced Clinical Social Work, and is certified in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO), and Gestalt Therapy.

She has served the Westchester County, New York State Society of Clinical Social Work as President, Annual Conference Chair, Education Chair, and Annual Film Discussion Facilitator. She worked with Westchester Oncology Social Workers from 1986 to 2012.

Her own experience living through breast cancer informed her sensitivity to clients navigating illness, grief, and transition, and seeded the questions inside When the Therapist Is Ill.

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