AND LAUGHTER, AND TEARS, AND LOVE... This article is about the therapist's feelings in therapy. About the expression of feelings by the therapist. And I think there are no clear answers to the questions raised in this article. This article is about my own answers to them. I was completing short-term therapy with a five-year-old boy who had trouble making friends. There were supposed to be 10 meetings in total, and the boy knew that after that the work would be completed. At the ninth meeting, he scattered all the animals that we had previously played with and that “had just learned to be friends.” “All the animals are dead,” he said and sat down, turning his back to me and facing the wall. There was a lot of sadness in this session. I wanted to cry unbearably. For some time there was an internal struggle inside me: should I hold back my tears or allow myself to cry? I opted for authenticity and cried for most of the session. Interestingly, the child took this completely calmly. I cried and continued my work. That day I made a decision. Since then, I have allowed myself to cry when working with clients of all ages, whenever I feel like it. I cry with the client when his story is tragic and full of pain. I sometimes pay for a client when it is unbearable for a person to come into contact with these feelings in himself. Thus giving confirmation: yes, it really hurts a lot, but you can endure it. I pay for myself when my own wounds and losses begin to ache in communication with a client, my own pain resonates. After some time, I found myself at an open consultation with a more experienced colleague and saw her crying not just in the presence of clients, but in the presence of a large group of observing specialists. Perhaps there are many of us working this way. But therapy is not only pain and sorrow. There are sessions when you just want to laugh uncontrollably. Sometimes it becomes funny for both: me and the client. Then there are no internal doubts - laughter together, there is joy in it, there is energy, there is a resource. I probably recognized the ability to laugh during consultations with a client as a feature of my work even earlier than the ability to cry. However, in sessions there are moments when I feel funny, and at that time the client is in some other feelings. And here the same question arose inside me: should I hold back my laughter or allow myself to laugh? And again, I made a choice in favor of authenticity and laugh in consultations when I laugh. I laugh with the client. I sometimes laugh with joy for a client when he suddenly does something significant during a session or makes an insight. I laugh sometimes, and I understand that this is a defensive reaction from the difficult material that comes into the session (I usually explain this kind of laughter out loud to the client). I also laugh when something funny just happens to me in a session. These features (crying and laughing) persist even when I work in an open format, in the presence of colleagues. I noticed that when colleagues give feedback after completing work, tears receive a neutral or even positive assessment, while laughter more often causes criticism, and concerns are expressed about how it might be perceived by the client. During the session, the clients themselves usually react calmly to both my tears and my laughter. Not long ago, at the end of a session, I had a chance to hear from a client the words: “Thank you for crying,” and for me this means that the value of expressed feelings is sometimes higher for the client than insights and discoveries. Dear colleagues, what choices do you make in your work? Should I cry or not? To laugh or not to laugh? And why is this your choice? Dear clients (those who actually sought in-person therapeutic help), how did you experience the moments when a psychologist cries or laughs during a consultation? Have you ever observed such manifestations of feelings on the part of therapists??