As I read Sarah Gundle’s essay “I Can’t Remember His Name” (Intima, Spring 2023), I recognized a young and eager clinician who felt both moved by someone’s story and inept at affecting change, a dissonance that can reverberate throughout decades of practice. I, too, remembered my earliest encounters, when my own therapeutic skin was most supple and soft, vulnerable to the bruising weights of trauma, addiction and injustice. I recognized the writer’s spontaneous tears – and the impulse to minimize and dismiss them in accordance with the guidelines of rational detachment and therapeutic rapport.