Inspired by a webinar! – Countertransference

 

I was duped for a full year by my countertransference with one personality disordered client, for an hour or two by a different one. Countertransference is casually defined as the clini­cian’s emotional reaction to the client. A little more technically, it means that our “human” side, not our professional side, has been stirred. I believe it is possible for a coun­selor, with chastity belt and dispassion in high gear, to see the border­line or narcis­sistic client accurately. We can, a few moments late owing to the primary neces­sity of our spontan­eous reaction, assess his symp­toms and review our own feel­ing reac­tion. But that’s quite hard to do if we’re going to be a person in the relationship and not merely a removed, computer program-like responder.

I am still flummoxed that I was hypnotized by a “waif”* borderline, with her sad, needy and frankly piteous tears for her childhood sexual abuse. But I was a man, and she was a woman. There is little that grabs me with the force of Jovian gravity more than a tearful, unloved female client. I – the vast helpless Inner Child with his own tremendous stillborn needi­ness – become the soother and protec­tor. Had I snapped out of it some­where in that year, I would have seen the razor finger­nails, hidden, slowly readying to be released like a switch­blade whose spring is triggered.

The second client, another borderline female, had attended the diagnostic assessment session and returned the following week. I erred, somewhat, in providing almost a half-hour of psycho­­edu­cation in the nature of therapeutic change without seeking leave to speechify. Seething invisibly, at the end of my presentation she angrily got up, informed me that she had come here to talk, not listen, and exited the room. My counter­transfer­ence? Number one, I begged her to stay as she flounced past me. I felt like a stupid, clueless person who had ruined everything. Number two, it is now eighteen months since her dramatic act, and this morn­ing her name appeared in my mind and I looked her up to see if she had ever returned to our prac­tice. I was smitten. Or rather, anti-smitten.

Personality disordered individuals have great power over us in the therapy room (and beyond). We have childish parts in us that are triggered by their peculiar kind of bleed­ing – the failed-child’s blood. A narcissist bleeds perfect superiority that brings out our envious inferi­ority. A depen­dent personality evokes the recondite anger of our depen­dent child who had to kill its needs, its self, in order to become the adult. Grow up! A schizoid, who comes to us but can’t accept our help, makes us impotent, as we once were. We, with our own child­hood bank of swallowed injustice, may feel rage about a border­line’s jus­tice rage. How dare you think you deserve so much! Why are your feelings so impor­tant? Their despair is the truth of what we could never allow our­selves to feel, and we are pulled into it, into ourselves.

I believe I’m pretty inoculated, now, against the power of the sick personality. That’s not always a matter of skill, but that I’ve become bland in my old age. I’m somewhat distant, and can aim empathy and activate neurosis at my discretion.

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* One of Christine Ann Lawson’s species of Borderline. https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Borderline-Mother-Unpredictable-Relationship-ebook/dp/B00BGMZ9CA.

To walk or to sit

 

Paul Vereshack, retired Canadian psychotherapist, wrote: “Finally we have a per­son­ality which comes to be profoundly complex. It towers into the sky on a base of untruth, ‘I am this and I am not that,’ or ‘I am that and I am not this,’ all untrue. We shall come to see that men and women are all things. There is no combustion engine without fire and heat, no matter how gently the wheels may turn.”* My version of this insight is that people are not good or bad, kind or cruel, loving or hating, caring or indifferent, smart or dumb, wise or ignorant, sophisticated or naïve, adult or child. We are the molecu­lar mess without One Nature, without identity, without labels. I have seen a facet of this in extremis in myself in the last year and as I approach my 70^th birthday. Two fully contra­dictory parts live together: a feeling of bleak uncaring, of letting myself deteriorate to sick­ness and toward death; and a feeling of vitality, or self-preser­vation and grim-to-bright robust­ness. Both feelings exist, equal in strength, one being ephemerally present in the other’s ephemeral absence.

I pride myself on being a psychological problem solver, but I have found this problem unmoving. I try to see which I am: force or effeteness, life instinct or death instinct. I’ve tried to mentally separate myself from my wife, who is both positive and negative influ­ences, to see what I may be as an alone person, an individual. This brings no answer.

One way the conundrum manifests: I picture, starting on the upcoming birth date, walk­ing several miles every night, growing stronger even into my last years. It feels good, spir­it­ual. Then I picture, as easily, continuing my sloth, an old man sitting nightly, maybe walking the dog at our mutual slumberous pace. Which will it be?

I’d say that what we’re looking at is one example of the perennial conflict of the human psyche: the meaning we lost that stalemates our birthright. We are not like photons or electrons whose nature is movement, even at absolute zero. The spirit ceases move­ment when there is no love early on, but the brain has other, lesser forms of impetus. There may be the promise of love, or later love, or the stimuli of the world, or an early internalized lesson from a parent, efforts of flight that challenge gravity. We are now life and death, reality and hope, vitality and vacuum in one. We exert will against the void. I think this would be the universe’s nature if soul and heart were embedded in it: All those particles of brightness racing forever, going every­where yet nowhere.

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* http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt20.html#9.