The empty chair, used carefully

What it actually is

The empty chair is a piece of experiential work in which a client speaks to an imagined other — or to a part of themselves — placed in an empty seat. The therapist facilitates the dialogue, sometimes moving the client between chairs to represent different positions.

It comes from Gestalt therapy, and its purpose is not catharsis. The purpose is to move a relationship that exists only inside the client's head into the room, where it can be seen, heard and revised.

Why coaches borrow it, and why that is risky

It is dramatic, memorable and often produces visible change in a single session. That is exactly why it is dangerous in unskilled hands.

The technique deliberately activates unfinished business. In a client with a trauma history, that activation can exceed what a coaching container can hold — and the session ends in twenty minutes regardless.

The empty chair does not create the emotion. It removes the client's usual defences against it. If you cannot manage what comes through the door, do not open it.

Three conditions that must all be true

1. The client has a stable present

They are sleeping, eating, working, and not in acute crisis. Experiential work is destabilising by design; it needs a floor to stand on.

2. There is consent, specifically

Not “shall we try something?” but “this involves speaking to someone who is not here. It can bring up strong feeling. You can stop at any point. Would you like to try it?”

3. You have somewhere to put what surfaces

A closing sequence, a grounding routine, and a plan for the next 24 hours. If the session ends and they are raw on a train, the technique has failed regardless of insight.

How to run it without overreaching

1. Set the scene concretely. Who is in the chair? What do they look like? The more specific, the more contained the work.
2. Start with the present complaint, not the history. “Tell them what you needed and did not get” is safer than “tell them what they did to you.”
3. Keep it short. Three to five exchanges is usually enough. Longer is not deeper; it is usually just hotter.
4. Switch chairs only if the client is steady. The switch is the most destabilising move in the technique.
5. Close deliberately. Leave the chair. Name something true about the present room. Drink water. Agree one small action.

Where it goes wrong

• The coach performs. Long interpretive speeches turn the exercise into theatre with one audience member.
• Anger is treated as success. Raised volume is not resolution; it is arousal.
• No closing. The most common failure. The client leaves open.
• Used on the wrong person. Clients with dissociative symptoms, active psychosis or recent bereavement should not be doing this with a coach.
• Used to prove a point. If you already know what the client should say to the chair, you are directing, not facilitating.

When not to use it

Do not use it when there is unresolved trauma you are not trained to hold, when the client is in acute grief, when the relationship in question is currently dangerous, or when you have not been trained and supervised in the technique.