This study employs discourse analysis to explore a group supervision meeting in which graduate students who are training to become school counselors debate their counseling experiences at local high schools. Centering on metadiscourse, or talk about talk, it unites Ochs’ epistemic and affective stance notions and Tannen’s debate on linguistic strategies as equivocal and polysemous in terms of power and solidarity in order to show how counselors-in-training build their identities as what Woodside et al. call ‘boundary-dwellers’ in their professional community of practice. Exploration of metadiscourse concerning address terms and the speech act of asking questions – and especially pointing out how participants employ negatively valenced affect words, the verb feel, and what Tannen calls ‘constructed dialogue’ – discloses their stances of insecurity and inconvenience, their transitional professional identities as involving an uncomfortable navigation of relationships, and their admission of the central role of language in the process.