When Your Demons Wear the Client's Face
The process of becoming a good clinical therapist is fraught with personal peril; we are indoctrinated pretty much from Day One with caveats about transference (when clients project their Stuff onto the therapist) and counter-transference (when the therapist projects his or her Stuff onto the client). I've encountered counter-transference with clients already; something I don't seem to have any significant issues with, is identifying it when it happens, and riding on top of that recognition to keep "dealing with my own personal shite" out of the counselling room.
But sometimes...
I saw one of my favourite clients recently, a smart and self-developed woman who has run up against the discovery that she is embodying what I have come to call, "Girl Who Can't Say No Syndrome". She's my second such client, but this one provokes all the counter-transference watchdogs because her version of GWCSNS is all about the inability to extricate herself from sexual situations that she didn't mean to get into, doesn't want to go through with, but can't stop herself from capitulating and following through, to her inevitable regret.
We did some hard, intense work around that issue; upon examination, she realized she didn't feel she was allowed to say no, to put a stop to things, for fear that "bad things will happen": she'll disappoint someone or make someone angry, or provoke someone into "bringing on the crazy"; word might get around her community that she's into headgames. All kinds of justifications come into play that rob her of her own voice, her own power to say "No" and mean it. She feels she would not be allowed, and as soon as those words were out of her mouth, I looked at her and asked her, "Whose words are those? Because I don't think those sound like your words at all." They're not. They're a script embedded during abuse she suffered in her youth, and like so many abused women, fear and shame bred silence, disempowering the voice that defines and defends the boundaries of Self.
Right there and then, in that room and in that moment, I knew I was staring my own demons in the eye, sitting across from me in that small and still space, staring back at me through the face of my client. If you've ever wondered what it would feel like to be wholly in one's Self in the moment, yet wholly present with another person, there it would be. You simply cannot be more with a person than in the moments in which you realize you wear each other's faces like that. The well of empathy then is infinitely deep; you feel the call of their pain, and you are, if you've already done even the smallest part of this battle with those ancient and ragged demons, stepping off the cliff into that maelstrom with them. You are, most divinely, in their moment with them, because it is also your moment; or it was, or has been, in times past.
But empathy so vast comes with a price, and the price is living again through that pain of realization, discovery, and self-recovery. "I have been exactly there," you think. You might even say as much to the client; it helps normalize their own experiences to know they're not alone, and also to know that their therapist is herself human, just with a few more experiential notches on the metaphorical belt. Some clients won't be helped by that; others will see it as a light to follow through the darkness until they can face those demons on their own.
"Deprogramming that kind of deeply-embedded script is the work of a lifetime," I told her gently. "There is no silver bullet here." She nodded; she's already been doing some of this work for months. She understands. So I walked with her through the valley of the shadows of demons, and I pointed out with her all of the places in her decision-making processes, even the ones which lead to regrets, all of the places in which she is making choices. Choice is an act of will; even if you don't like the selection options, you still exercise the power of selecting one of them. And in that act lies the kernel of real self empowerment. It may not yet be the power to say Yes or No, but it is the power to say This or That, and recognizing that we exercise such power unconsciously, is often the first step to harnessing that power to our voice. We may still not say No when we think we should, when we know we're not going to like where saying Yes is leading us, but at least we will be in a position to acknowledge that we *choose* not to say No. And maybe next time, catching ourselves in that moment of awareness and decision will make it easier to choose differently.
Undoing the script of shame and fear will take a long time. We considered that the fear of upsetting someone and being discovered (for whatever value of "discovery" conveys the shame inherent in the individual situation) is perhaps the hardest part of re-empowering voice in choice. I gently provoked my client with another question: "We know what the worst that could happen then was; what are you afraid is the worst that will happen now?" Articulating that demon will decrease its power; like my own metaphor of dragging my weasels out into the light of day to examine them, we find that things observed and identified often become smaller and more manageable than the sensed-but-not-identified things that go bump in the mental night. She's going to spend the week contemplating that question; what *IS* the worst thing that could happen now, were she to say No when she wants to?
Finally, we found the most poignant point of connection upon which she may yet face down these disempowerment demons; she's a single mother with a young daughter. I asked her, as I was walking her out, "How would you want to teach your daughter about the Empowered No? How would you teach her to develop her own voice? Can you learn and practice right along with her?" That put the entire exercise in the context of learning how this all works so that, even if she never completely frees herself from her demons entirely, she can perhaps help model for another generation how to avoid being caught in the same snares.
For myself, that was a hard lesson, perhaps the hardest, to learn about my own sexuality. Hearing the script in my head that I wasn't allowed to say No, that bad things would happen if I resisted, that shame would be mine to carry there-ever after if anyone found out I had pushed back... these scripts led me into a lot of my own dark valleys. I'm well aware of things I've done that I'm not proud of; I'm on a first-name basis with all of my demons there. Learning to say No has come at a cost that is only sometimes less than the cost of the regretful Yes. Those are demons I face with every new lover, every potential new interest. (There's only a modicum of useful practice that comes of turning down people on social dating sites; ask me some time how I know this.) So it is an extremely frightening thing to sit with someone who is facing that exact same fear, to feel it again in myself, to know what it feels like for the client... and to wonder, even for the briefest of moments, who the hell is coming to lead us both out of the dark valley?
This is the point at which the magician-adept therapist's training takes over and begins to pull everything back, gently coaxing the client back into the light, sometimes dragging the demons along into the daylight kicking and screaming; clinical technique comes back online, and from the fear, we build a scaffold from the client's strengths, the exceptions, the times when the problem hasn't been present in similar situations; we draw the different choices out and reframe them as an alternate storyline. We create a new narrative. And in the back of my own mind, I push away the slight bitterness that comes of knowing how much easier things would have been had someone been there to help *me* in those darkling moments. *THIS* moment isn't about me, except in the understanding that it is about leveraging everything I have learned about myself and my clinical skills, to help braid a new lifeline for the client sitting across the space from me. Staying "in the room" with the client, as we call it, becomes walking the fine line between wallowing in my shit and leaving them to wallow in theirs, while still pulling together that new narrative. In the end, we leave them with a raw patch on their self-identity (demon claws dig deep when they resist examination), but with perspective, and tools, and a slight degree of normalization. We have reintroduced the idea that there might be power within the client, just needing to have the volume pumped up.
Because someone in the room *is* listening to the No. *I'm* listening. If I can hear it, maybe someday I can help them to hear it again, too, and all our demons can be banished out into the sunlight to howl.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/3364.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But sometimes...
I saw one of my favourite clients recently, a smart and self-developed woman who has run up against the discovery that she is embodying what I have come to call, "Girl Who Can't Say No Syndrome". She's my second such client, but this one provokes all the counter-transference watchdogs because her version of GWCSNS is all about the inability to extricate herself from sexual situations that she didn't mean to get into, doesn't want to go through with, but can't stop herself from capitulating and following through, to her inevitable regret.
We did some hard, intense work around that issue; upon examination, she realized she didn't feel she was allowed to say no, to put a stop to things, for fear that "bad things will happen": she'll disappoint someone or make someone angry, or provoke someone into "bringing on the crazy"; word might get around her community that she's into headgames. All kinds of justifications come into play that rob her of her own voice, her own power to say "No" and mean it. She feels she would not be allowed, and as soon as those words were out of her mouth, I looked at her and asked her, "Whose words are those? Because I don't think those sound like your words at all." They're not. They're a script embedded during abuse she suffered in her youth, and like so many abused women, fear and shame bred silence, disempowering the voice that defines and defends the boundaries of Self.
Right there and then, in that room and in that moment, I knew I was staring my own demons in the eye, sitting across from me in that small and still space, staring back at me through the face of my client. If you've ever wondered what it would feel like to be wholly in one's Self in the moment, yet wholly present with another person, there it would be. You simply cannot be more with a person than in the moments in which you realize you wear each other's faces like that. The well of empathy then is infinitely deep; you feel the call of their pain, and you are, if you've already done even the smallest part of this battle with those ancient and ragged demons, stepping off the cliff into that maelstrom with them. You are, most divinely, in their moment with them, because it is also your moment; or it was, or has been, in times past.
But empathy so vast comes with a price, and the price is living again through that pain of realization, discovery, and self-recovery. "I have been exactly there," you think. You might even say as much to the client; it helps normalize their own experiences to know they're not alone, and also to know that their therapist is herself human, just with a few more experiential notches on the metaphorical belt. Some clients won't be helped by that; others will see it as a light to follow through the darkness until they can face those demons on their own.
"Deprogramming that kind of deeply-embedded script is the work of a lifetime," I told her gently. "There is no silver bullet here." She nodded; she's already been doing some of this work for months. She understands. So I walked with her through the valley of the shadows of demons, and I pointed out with her all of the places in her decision-making processes, even the ones which lead to regrets, all of the places in which she is making choices. Choice is an act of will; even if you don't like the selection options, you still exercise the power of selecting one of them. And in that act lies the kernel of real self empowerment. It may not yet be the power to say Yes or No, but it is the power to say This or That, and recognizing that we exercise such power unconsciously, is often the first step to harnessing that power to our voice. We may still not say No when we think we should, when we know we're not going to like where saying Yes is leading us, but at least we will be in a position to acknowledge that we *choose* not to say No. And maybe next time, catching ourselves in that moment of awareness and decision will make it easier to choose differently.
Undoing the script of shame and fear will take a long time. We considered that the fear of upsetting someone and being discovered (for whatever value of "discovery" conveys the shame inherent in the individual situation) is perhaps the hardest part of re-empowering voice in choice. I gently provoked my client with another question: "We know what the worst that could happen then was; what are you afraid is the worst that will happen now?" Articulating that demon will decrease its power; like my own metaphor of dragging my weasels out into the light of day to examine them, we find that things observed and identified often become smaller and more manageable than the sensed-but-not-identified things that go bump in the mental night. She's going to spend the week contemplating that question; what *IS* the worst thing that could happen now, were she to say No when she wants to?
Finally, we found the most poignant point of connection upon which she may yet face down these disempowerment demons; she's a single mother with a young daughter. I asked her, as I was walking her out, "How would you want to teach your daughter about the Empowered No? How would you teach her to develop her own voice? Can you learn and practice right along with her?" That put the entire exercise in the context of learning how this all works so that, even if she never completely frees herself from her demons entirely, she can perhaps help model for another generation how to avoid being caught in the same snares.
For myself, that was a hard lesson, perhaps the hardest, to learn about my own sexuality. Hearing the script in my head that I wasn't allowed to say No, that bad things would happen if I resisted, that shame would be mine to carry there-ever after if anyone found out I had pushed back... these scripts led me into a lot of my own dark valleys. I'm well aware of things I've done that I'm not proud of; I'm on a first-name basis with all of my demons there. Learning to say No has come at a cost that is only sometimes less than the cost of the regretful Yes. Those are demons I face with every new lover, every potential new interest. (There's only a modicum of useful practice that comes of turning down people on social dating sites; ask me some time how I know this.) So it is an extremely frightening thing to sit with someone who is facing that exact same fear, to feel it again in myself, to know what it feels like for the client... and to wonder, even for the briefest of moments, who the hell is coming to lead us both out of the dark valley?
This is the point at which the magician-adept therapist's training takes over and begins to pull everything back, gently coaxing the client back into the light, sometimes dragging the demons along into the daylight kicking and screaming; clinical technique comes back online, and from the fear, we build a scaffold from the client's strengths, the exceptions, the times when the problem hasn't been present in similar situations; we draw the different choices out and reframe them as an alternate storyline. We create a new narrative. And in the back of my own mind, I push away the slight bitterness that comes of knowing how much easier things would have been had someone been there to help *me* in those darkling moments. *THIS* moment isn't about me, except in the understanding that it is about leveraging everything I have learned about myself and my clinical skills, to help braid a new lifeline for the client sitting across the space from me. Staying "in the room" with the client, as we call it, becomes walking the fine line between wallowing in my shit and leaving them to wallow in theirs, while still pulling together that new narrative. In the end, we leave them with a raw patch on their self-identity (demon claws dig deep when they resist examination), but with perspective, and tools, and a slight degree of normalization. We have reintroduced the idea that there might be power within the client, just needing to have the volume pumped up.
Because someone in the room *is* listening to the No. *I'm* listening. If I can hear it, maybe someday I can help them to hear it again, too, and all our demons can be banished out into the sunlight to howl.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/3364.html. Please comment there using OpenID.