“I Don’t Feel Held.”
April 2nd, 2014 adminDVD Day with Susan is fast approaching on 4/26!! Join us as we devote a day to the study of rich, live case material, imagining ourselves in the room and considering DEFT approaches to the rapidly occurring therapeutic challenges presented by a variety of clients. Working with dreams and role playing emotions to gain access to the roots of trauma are some of the skills that will be demonstrated.
Register: http://deft.eventbrite.com
Therapist Devaluation: How to Turn Lemons into Lemonade
The client asked me to tell him what to do regarding his therapy, as he was at a crossroads in our work, and my impression was that he wanted me to make this decision for him. I steadfastly reoriented to what the client wanted for himself. His tendencies to be led by others even at his own expense caused me to not want to reenact the same thing. Also, I was not withholding something I knew but rather believed there was an exploratory process needed for both of us to arrive at more clarity together. For 2 sessions, his resistance was intermittently intractable. Ultimately, my failure to be omnipotent resulted in him saying, “I don’t feel held by you. I don’t feel heard by you.”
These statements were followed by a string of negatives about my flaws, and a mal-attunement that occurred months before was held up as evidence of my shortcomings as a therapist and as a person. I was charged with being someone who does not take responsibility and who doesn’t own her stuff. While I believe in self-examination on the part of the therapist and acknowledging counter-transference, I was also reacting to the tone of contempt that was occasionally acted out in our relationship. As I watched this trending towards devaluation and distancing, I found myself especially challenged.
When I tried to speak, he also complained that I was interrupting him. Whatever I said, it was not going to be seen as good enough… and no matter what I tried, and I tried all the interventions at my disposal, he was not going to let me in. I wanted to interrupt this toxic flow but struggled with how to do so in a way that would not shame the client and express empathy around an injury that had apparently occurred, and also be true to myself? I wanted to be optimally responsive to him and also responsive to the feelings that were swirling inside of me.
What made this especially confounding is that we had done some exceptionally profound work together, and it was recently that he had acknowledged several areas of significant improvements in his life alongside deep feelings of gratitude. Suddenly there was an invitation, as a result of projective identification, for me to feel “all bad.” While we can assume the “perpetrator” was activated by all the progress and a deepening relationship, there was still the reality of the state of our relationship to deal with. His contempt was threatening to override our successes in his mind and for some moments, in mine as well.
The client expressed distrust of my ability to help him and ended the session with, “I may be transitioning out soon.” Distancing against closeness and dependency had been primary themes of our work and I also saw rage and envy that I might have something the client was not able to provide for himself. This is very understandable given the nature of extreme emotional abandonment in the client’s history of trauma. In no way did I want to re-traumatize this person but I also didn’t want to abandon myself.
Interestingly, in the week to follow, the client opened the session as though his hostility towards me had never occurred. In the interim period, I had become acutely aware of my own desires to not expose myself to the toxicity of unbridled devaluation. While I confess that the thought crossed my mind for an instant to let sleeping dogs lie, I knew that would undermine the essence of what I teach in my training program regarding courage, and for the sake of my own sense of integrity, this wasn’t an option.
With the help of a dear colleague, I was able to connect even more with my own boundaries. After all, it was not only the client who had the right to choose regarding the therapy but I had the right as well. When we speak about the necessity of having a working alliance for therapy to be productive, it is equally important that not only the client’s but also the therapist’s will be engaged in the process as well. And if the trend of the prior couple of sessions were to continue unabated, my will would not endure.
At the same time, I had immense respect for this individual and deeply caring feelings for him. In fact our work together had been extremely moving. So a possible, impending abort would be a sad ending indeed to a most rewarding therapeutic relationship. So with anxiety as well as determination in my heart, I began with, “I realize I’m interrupting your train of thought, but I believe your comments about not trusting me and your last statement, “I may be transitioning out soon,” present a priority for us to address. Because obviously, if you do not trust me and you do not think I am a responsible person and you don’t believe I own my stuff to a sufficient degree, then why would you want to work with me as your therapist? At some point I also mentioned that from my perspective, it was not that I did not hear him but that there were times when we saw something differently and I wondered if there could be a place for both of us to exist and be different? And that as much as I wanted to be attuned to him, I had no doubt that there were times when I’d fall short. The question I wondered was whether the relationship could be felt to be good enough.
His cool and calculating response was rather jolting, about wishing to exploit my skills so he could get what he wanted from me and being willing to put my shortcomings aside. I immediately responded that my work is based on an attachment relationship and that I was experiencing a wall between us. I could not work in such a compartmentalized fashion. We needed to see what could be done about this wall, about the disdain and judgment that I was experiencing, because otherwise I couldn’t see a successful outcome. I found this devaluation to be destructive to me personally and to him as well. Perhaps another therapist could work according to his parameters, but this was not something that I was able to do. This was very impactful and painful for him to hear but yet it was the reality. He was having an experience of me as a separate person, the reality that I did indeed have human feelings and limitations.
What unfolded was a powerful breakthough of grief due to new insights about the cost of having been cruelly devalued by his parents for the ways in which he was different from them, and also their obliviousness to how he had been hurt by them. He saw how he had similarly hurt me, as well as a number of other important people in his life with his own contempt and judgments (he also used the word exploitation) and he felt remorse for this. He had been told by others that he had narcissistic traits and he brought this up with a new felt understanding of how this was operating within him. We were also able to discuss his splitting defenses, how all the good parts of what we’d experienced suddenly evaporated when the reality of imperfection reared it’s face. The “ good enough” option that I presented to him became another possibility for his consideration. A renewed alliance grew from this exchange on both our parts. In fact, as he softened and allowed more vulnerability, we were both able to reconnect with the affection and respect we have for one another. With another person, this could well have turned out differently. But this is the risk we take when we respond to the best of our ability and from the truest place within ourselves.
