Relational Psychotherapy: A Primer

Five. The Terribly Hard Part of Relational Psychotherapy

Your Writer Is in Trouble!

I'm ready to write this chapter and I want to write it, but I've been stopped in my tracks by an uncanny turn of events. I find myself in one of those difficult passages I just promised to write about: I'm trying to get through a painful model scene with my therapist. It began two chapters ago, and I was hoping it would be over by now. I don't know how I'll get through it. I'm thinking that maybe this time I will have to leave therapy. More of me thinks not, as I remind myself that I've been through these hard times before and I've come out all right.

That's exactly what this chapter is about-getting through hard times like these. But if I don't know whether I'll get through my own trouble, how can I write the chapter? I tell myself, "Just speak in your therapist's voice." From my therapist's chair, I'm always more confident (though never sure) that a client and I can find a way to work through difficult interpersonal feelings. But to speak in that voice now, I'll have to dissociate from what's going on for me. My writing will be here and I will be elsewhere. I'd rather not enact such falseness in a chapter that's supposed to be about honesty and integration.

So I have decided to begin this chapter from inside my current experience and find out if that can take me to what I need to say to you, my readers. Just now you might be wondering why I'm still in therapy, since I'm an older, experienced therapist. Or maybe you understand that relational therapists are uncommonly committed to becoming as clear as possible about their own organizing principles and relational processes. In any case, let me make a brief case for any therapist being in therapy at any time.

In the first place, silent therapists are ordinary human beings to whom painful things can happen, we need as much help as anyone does to work through difficult times. Second, the job demands large reserves of emotional presence and resilience, and since therapists can't talk about their work at home or with friends, we often bring the trouble stirred up by our work to our own therapy. In a more personal way than a supervisor or consultant does, a therapist attends to our feelings of confusion, frustration, or depletion.

presence and resilience, and since therapists can't talk about their work at home or with friends, we often bring the trouble stirred up by our work to our own therapy. In a more personal way than a supervisor or consul- tant does, a therapist attends to our feelings of confusion, frustration, or depletion.

Third, most of us therapists take up the work because we know something about emotional pain and psychological dissonance from the inside. Many of us were parentified children in troubled families. Emotional attunement is second nature to us, and we thrive on providing the empathy we once longed to receive. But this means, too, that we live somewhere on the continuum of relational trauma, and also, then, on a continuum of dissociation. A good connection with a therapist can keep us in touch with what we feel, essential connectedness that enhances our daily lives and keeps us grounded in the face of all the emotional complications of doing relational therapy.

And finally, of course, we therapists are in therapy when we still feel bad from the inside. In the business of helping others feel better, we are perhaps more optimistic than some about our own chances of being helped. We believe in the process, and so we keep trying.

For all of these reasons, I have been in several different rounds of therapy over the course of my career as a therapist. The only reason good enough to keep me in this current therapy is the hope of feeling better because of it. I doubt anyone stays with the terribly hard part of relational therapy unless it's to try to accomplish something worth the risk. That's my purpose in my current therapy. Now I will tell you what's happening there.

The Story behind the Trouble

Not long ago, after completing the opening chapters of this book, I was beginning to feel quite excited about writing it and I said so in a session. My therapist not only empathized with my feelings, he also seemed to think that the book was a valuable project that could make a worthwhile contribution to our shared field of work. He seemed genuinely interested. A few sessions later, I brought him a photocopied draft of the first two chapters of the book. He thanked me and told me that it might be a while before he had a chance to read them. My heart sank. After I left the session I knew that I had to get those chapters back-to undo my asking as soon as possible.

I got my chapters returned to life, difficult, at the end of this litAt session. Then I began to try to talk about what had happened. A model scene was clear to me. I had dared to hope that my analyst's interest in my

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work was genuine and that he shared my excitement about it. But in his response I'd heard no excitement, only polite self-protection, with maybe a subtle tone that my request was a burden. Then I was filled with shame for having asked. I knew at once that I had asked for far too much; the only time he owed me, of course, was paid-for time in session. I had made a terrible and humiliating mistake. It was as if I had been caught asking him to put a childish drawing of mine on his fridge.

I tried to say all this, but his silent listening felt like a cold, critical void. I ran stuck and fell silent myself. I hated having to talk to him about what I felt; it completed my humiliation. I told him, "Shame is like a burn, a bad burn. And talking about it is like having to strip the dead skin away so that it can heal." I wanted him at least to hear how horrible I felt. I felt flattened and grief-stricken, though I didn't know what I had lost.

In the first days after this rupture, I went for long walks, trying to calm myself. Slowly I did grow calmer, and I began to get my feet under me. My equilibrium returned as I was able to think that I didn't need his approval. I didn't need him to share my excitement. My book was an adult project in the real world, and what mattered was to do it well and find a publisher. I would do that. He would never hear about the book again until it was a finished project. Or, if it turned out to be a failed project, he would never hear about it again-period. I could feel myself gathering up my angry humiliation and using it as fuel to keep my project going and thus to keep myself going. Indeed, that was the move I had been making from the very moment when I knew, "I have to get those chapters back."

I know that from the outside my feelings look like a huge overreaction to my therapist's expectable, reasonable response to my request. That in itself is embarrassing. But those feelings may be more understandable if I provide some background that explains why this simple interchange was actually a potent model scene for me.

My father was a theologian in a religious tradition that did not allow women to be leaders or thinkers. This might not have mattered a lot to me, except that as his oldest child, I identified with him and couldn't help but want to follow in his footsteps. Ours was a complicated relationship, because there was also deep trouble in his personal relationships with women, especially the women he loved. And so I tried to find a place with him as a pseudo-son. I learned from him how to hammer a nail, paint a room, drive a mowing tractor, shoot a rifle, and pitch a tent in the rain. I developed, during the years of listening to his preaching, a passion of my own to put words together in ways that would make people think. But I was never invited into fall

In my second year of university, I wrote my first philosophy paper, and I brought it home to him in hopes that he would read it. He never mentioned it again to me. Weeks later I found it lying crumpled behind the couch. As I understand my own history and how it stays with me, that philosophy-paper model scene is itself a condensation of many earlier experiences that convinced me that what I felt and had to say as my own person didn't matter much to my father. What did matter was whatever he wanted me to think, feel, say, and do. He was easily troubled, easily angered, and I learned very young to do whatever I could to keep him happy. I also learned that I should never ask for too much from him-or from anyone. In fact, I shouldn't really ask for anything; I should always just be grateful for what I had been given.

And now, as an adult with that history, I have chosen to be in therapy with a man who is not just my senior but also a psychiatrist trained as an analyst. This puts him well "above" me, for although I work as a psychotherapist, I am a social worker by profession-one of the feminized professions well down in a mental health hierarchy dominated by mostly male psychiatrists. In my professional life, I have lived in the shadow of the tall towers of psychoanalysis, but I have been barred from the castle. Or so it seems sometimes. As an academic, I have written about psychoanalysis, but I am outside the fraternity, I believe, and always will be. And part of that is by choice, because I don't want "them" to own me. I want to think and speak for myself. Yet my complicated interest in psychoanalysis is like tilting at windmills, or so my organizing principles say. It will amount to nothing. I could just as well have tried to be a woman theologian trying to speak my truth in my father's patriarchal religious tradition. (Or I could just as well have tried, as a very small child, to resist his powerful need to control my feelings and shape my being in ways that would mirror him.)

This was the fraught relational context in which I became brave enough to talk to my analyst about my own place in the world of relational psychotherapy. After countless tests of his empathy, including careful repairs of previous misunderstandings and ruptures in our relationship, I was secure enough to risk it. I could dare to say to him that maybe what I had to offer was valuable even if it wasn't psychoanalysis, that maybe my writing could say something that was both quintessentially me, in my own voice, and also useful. I had reason to hope that this particular man and psychiatrist and analyst might see that my ways of thinking and feeling, of being and expressing myself, were worth something just as they were. I wanted my self to matter in his eyes-and in his feelings, I think.

That's how much was riding on my casual request that he read what I had written about the work we had in common. In retrospect I can see that the situation was for more than I could have anticipated. The situation was too fraught for him simply to be friet. The situation had to shatter-so that I could experience what it was all about. I thought that if only he had responded with just the right degree of enthusiastic pleasure when I gave him my writing, then all would have been well, even if he hadn't been able to read it for a while. But that response would have just kept the model scene moving, fraughtness intact, toward some other moment when his response would fall short of my hopes. I doubt he could have kept on being "perfect" enough to protect us from the implosion of shame that happens at the heart of the model scene I am reliving with him. That shame is too large a part of my life experience, with too many trip wires running off in every direction. Furthermore, the situation I set up seems, in retrospect, uncannily calculated to bring the old model scene to life between us. The implosion of shame was hardly an accident. I must have known that I would see some hesitation if I asked him to read a long piece of my writing on his own time and right before his holidays. As I have said to him bitterly since, "I knew better."

Readers might well wonder, "Why did you do it then?" First of all, I didn't knowingly choose to do it. I chose my small action, of course, but I didn't see the large picture with its quality of model scene before I chose, or notice the clues that I might be setting myself up for shame. It seems I was compelled to set up that particular old/new scene and risk the shame. Something drew me, an unchosen "why" I think it was a compelling hope, just out of my awareness, that my therapist's positive response to me would wipe out that whole other system of self-with-other feelings and meanings that had been constricting and tormenting me for years. I believe that I thought, without consciously thinking it, "If I set it all up again and he is the exact and perfect opposite of my father, I can at last be free." There's a powerful logic there, and in fact, in very small, imperfect increments worked out over time, that's exactly how relational psychotherapy makes space for change.

But the model scene in which I don't matter is far too powerful and too thoroughly entangled in my personality to destroy with one blow. I can't vaporize the fraughtness; I need to feel it. As I was saying in the last chapter, integration means to reconnect with the core self-with-other events and feelings that are at the heart of relational trauma. And that's a third answer to the question, "Why did you do it?" I guess I needed to reconnect with a part of myself who has been too painfully humiliated to reach out or to be embraced. I'm not sure I want to know her now or that she wants to be known. For in that split-off relational world where she lives, others have no time or space for her. She feels like nothing, a nobody, to them, and then she feels greedy and disgusting for wanting more. That's the core relational truth at the heart of my model scene, though the scene takes the shape of an offer to change that truth and the inequitable failing of others.

Other scenes are clustered around that relational truth but further from the center and more protective of it. I could mention winning a prize, when

I was six, for the second highest marks in my class, and my bewildered surprise at my parents' pleasure. And then the penny dropped: "Oh, this is how I can matter!" My father didn't read that philosophy paper of mine, but I finished my philosophy major with honors. I can feel myself doing it again, typing away at this project, looking for a publisher, determined to get it done in spite of my therapist.

The last time I saw him I said, "I'm bigger than whether this therapy turns out okay or not. I can leave it if I have to. And it feels really good to say that. My life, my self, is bigger than this. You can't destroy me. I will survive. No, I'll do better than survive."

Bravado. But also a way to keep my balance-to keep from falling into that powerful self-with-other fragment of not mattering, that pit of shame. After a lifetime of practice, I do it well. I also know it's only a second-best solution. But it might be all I have, and if so, it's far better than nothing.

I imagine readers wondering, "If you can see all of this so clearly, why aren't you over the shame already? Why do you have to keep playing your game of 'I don't need you'?" To tell you the truth, I don't know for sure. I think it's because I feel all alone in this. I wish insight were the cure. I wish that just the repetition, the powerful experience of "old" feelings surging through me, a catharsis of pain and grief, would release me. I wish there was something I could do to change how I feel. Even writing doesn't help.

Although I can't see my way out, I'm not without hope. My hope is that I won't be alone in this forever. I can't feel that it's happening yet, but maybe if I keep on telling my therapist what I feel, I'll begin to know that he's still there. That would help. And maybe if I'm calmer I'll be able to make those brief, careful visits to that unbearably humiliated little girl and find out that we can survive the contact.

But my feelings go back and forth, up and down. Right now I can't shake the conviction that my therapist is against me. Whatever he says is dangerous; his voice makes me angry and afraid that I'll lose my shaky balance.

Yet I still want to keep on hearing from him. I want the danger to wear off. I want to be able to survive that contact, too, especially the part where my unbearably humiliated self is right there before his eyes.

Right now that's what I can't stand. I want to be very far away.

But I keep coming back, because I believe in the slow, patient work of integration. Surely the feelings will become less intense with each visit to the site of shame. Bit by bit, acknowledged and respected, the danger will diminish. My therapist can't be a parent I never had; he can't even complete one perfect gesture to right a wrong done to me. But he will keep offering many ant and intentional momento of understanding, and they will help me find my way back to the security of the relationship.

That's the theory. The problem is that I still can't feel that he understands.

But as I've said, I still want to hear from him. I want those moments of understanding again; I miss how they feel. In spite of everything, it must be true that I still trust him, because I'm counting on him to hear, without giving me defenses or explanations, how I hate being with him, how I despise what I feel, and how I wonder whether I can ever trust him again. As the danger wears off, perhaps I'll once again feel his understanding and my trust.

I can say all of this hopefully, but I can't imagine how my next hour of therapy will feel much better.