I'm Revest out and you're listening to a therapist can't say that. The podcast where we talk about the things that it feels like a therapist can't say. Hi pals. If you're here listening to this episode and you haven't listened to my last episode yet, episode 2.9, which is my conversation with Dr. K. Hickson about immediacy, I recommend going and listening to that first because it provides some helpful context for what I'm about to discuss here. So in that episode, which you've just listened to, right, I said that our field is defined by the wish fulfillment fantasy of the parentified child, which is that you do it right, you manage the relationship right, and your parental figure is then healed and becomes available to you. If you are a therapist and you're listening to this and you think that you were not in some way a parentified child, you're probably wrong and in denial or I will make allowances that you may be one of the very, very few exceptions to this trend. But it is grown up, parentified children who make up the bulk of this field when I meet another therapist at this point in my life and my career. I already know so much about them in a general sense. Obviously I may not know the specifics of their circumstances, but to know someone is a therapist means I know something pretty significant about a dynamic that shaped them. And out of all the many, many therapists I have known, I can think of like one, maybe two, exceptions that I know of so far. So the jig is up. It's not a secret. Of course I know I'm telling on myself too. If I'm saying therapists are a parentified children, I'm saying that I was a parentified child. And I noticed that when I talk about this here, even though I've made mention of it quite a lot on the podcast, I noticed that as I'm talking about it now, I still feel this residual shame, which I think is really interesting. But I've been trying to tease apart what that's about. And the conclusion I've come to is that for one thing, the parentified child part of us doesn't want to be seen as a child. It wants to be seen as an adult. Being seen as competent and in charge and okay and very, very able to take care of everyone around them is the primary drive of the parentified child. So even being identified and named can be a trigger of shame for the parentified child, right, because of the word child, which highlights vulnerability. And vulnerable is something the parentified child is trying very, very hard not to be. And then there's this other level where I'm talking about this in the context of our profession. And a profession of course is a very, very grown up thing to have. And in our role as professionals who are in some way responsible for the psychological while being of other humans, we are under an immense amount of pressure to be competent and in charge and okay and very, very able to take care of everyone around us and to project that image out into the world. Our parentified child shit is deeply reinforced by this professional role we have taken on. And so I think the shame that comes up for me when I talk about this is not only about the vulnerability of what it reveals about me, but it's also because I get this sense that I am telling a family secret, which is of course another thing that the parentified child usually really, really doesn't want to do. When we tell a family secret, we reveal not only our own vulnerability, but the vulnerability of the entire system in which we are embedded. And we risk blowback, we risk ostracism, we risk destabilization of the entire system and so the shame keeps us quiet and safe. Except not quiet in this case because as a member of this club of people, pleasers in various stages of recovery, the stage of recovery I am apparently in is putting our professional business on blast out here on God's own internet. I want to be clear that I'm not saying we're nothing more than parentified children in adult bodies. Don't buy into that idea that everyone is just a wounded child walking around in adult costumes. We are also actual adults here. But what I am saying is that we didn't get into doing this work because we were so self-actualized differentiated, well adjusted and emotionally and relationally balanced. That road does not lead to this job. And it actually couldn't really be like that, right? Because most of us got into doing this work sometime in our 20s and people in their 20s at best simply haven't gotten the chance to get particularly self-actualized differentiated, well adjusted and emotionally and relationally balanced yet. They just haven't. And if you're listening and you're in your 20s and you're offended by that, just wait and see and give yourself some advanced credit for all the personal growth you're going to do over the next couple of decades by which point you will understand what I'm talking about. Remember that when I interviewed Dr. Andrea Salenza a couple episodes ago, she said that we enter this profession because we have a need and that it's important for us to investigate and understand what that need is. I suspect that it's a bit more complicated and that we probably enter this profession out of multiple needs and the particular way that they converge in each of us. But I think for most of us, one of those needs is to try and live out that fantasy of the Perentify Child, which is to do it right, manage the relationship right, heal the person in front of you, and then of course in the context of the Perentify Child, your parental figure is that person in front of you who you've healed. They become available to you and you all live happily ever after. That is part of the magnetism of this work for most of us. You could call it repetition compulsion, one of Freud's most durable ideas for good reason. You could call it an enactment. You could use attachment theory language to describe it. I'm sure you somatic people would have something to say about nervous systems in relation to all this. But whatever you call it, here we are. We have this need, this urge to emotionally care for others and to try to help them heal. Okay, that's not news. It still bears talking about, if for no other reason than to challenge the us and themness, the image of therapists as the aspirational figures of wellness that I talked about in episode four of this season, but it's not news. This is our wounded healer shit. About it on here many a time, we collectively as a field have been talking about it for nion 100 years now. And of course, the archetype itself predates our field entirely. Here's what I think is news. And is certainly something that I did not expect when I found myself walking down this path all those years ago. There are ways that being in this field, doing this job itself makes healing that stuff, that wounded healer shit that we come in with a whole lot harder. I don't think we come in expecting that. I think we expect that the training we get, the understanding of human, inter psychic dynamics, we gain, the therapeutic tools. If you want to call them that, that we learn, we'll make our own healing easier. I don't necessarily think that anyone is routinely going into grad school to become a therapist with that conscious thought. I'm going to get this training and it will enable me to fix myself, but I do think that motivator is there. And it's not that that's wrong exactly. I do think the things that I learned on my path to becoming a therapist helped me make sense of myself in a way that has been supportive to me. It has given me many opportunities to apply what I learned to myself and my own life and relationships. And when I have made use of those opportunities, I have benefited from that substantially. Keeping my clients grow has helped me stay accountable to my own growth, both so I can continue to serve them to the best of my ability and for the sake of practicing what I preach, struggling to get an alignment with my integrity and not ask clients to do hard things that I myself am not willing to do. That's valuable to the point where simply calling it valuable feels like a vast understatement. I actually can't imagine at this point what my personal growth would have looked like if I were not in this field. However, it's also true that my engagement in this work that in some ways is a catalyst to my healing and growth is in other ways an impediment to it. And not only did I not expect that, I think it also took me a while to realize it. You know that thing that happens where you grow and grow and as you grow your dysfunctional patterns, your toxic traits, whatever you want to call them, start to feel tighter and tighter, more stifling like a straight jacket. I think it took that a long time of that happening for me to realize that part of what was stifling, part of the straight.
jacket was that doing this work powerfully reinforces some of the patterns that come out of our most deep-seated wounds. So I'm just going to go ahead and list now some of the things that I think doing this work makes it particularly difficult to heal. A lot of these things are associated with being a parentified child in my opinion, but almost certainly have other contributing factors as well. I'm a big believer in nearly everything about a person being multifactorial and having complex causality. But these are common traits and behaviors among people who have ended up in some kind of parentified child role. They are common among therapists. They are traits and behaviors that often cause suffering. And they are hard to change heal or heal from if you are a therapist. Okay, number one, interpersonal hypervigilance. I'm referring to particularly intense, particularly granular, thinly sliced hyper-awareness of other people's affect, behavior, verbal and nonverbal communication, and being hyper-attentive to the possible meanings of such. What differentiates interpersonal hypervigilance from its more positively valanced counterpart, attunement, other than degree, is the sense of threat, right? Someone who is interpersonally hypervigilant is particularly attuned and attentive to their relational environment because they are scanning that relational environment for signs of a threat. There is an unusual awareness of the potential impact of the other party's state of mind on the interpersonally hypervigilant person safety and well-being. Our problem is that embedded in the pattern of interpersonal hypervigilance is the skill of interpersonal hyper attunement. Being hyper-aware of other people's affect, behavior, verbal and nonverbal communication, and being hyper-attentive to the associated potential meanings of all of that is an asset as a therapist. One I use every day that I'm in the office. And more than being just an incidental asset, it's something that we actively maintain and cultivate in order to do this job better. Can you have interpersonal hyperattunement without having interpersonal hypervigilance? Sure. Is that the case for most of us? Guys, I don't think so. The hypervigilance is part of what fuels the need to do this work. And if you find interpersonal hypervigilance to be a source of pain and suffering in your life and you'd like to try to heal from it, and at the same time, you're actively and consistently using and cultivating the primary skill embedded in it, well, I think that's kind of hard. Other things that are hard to heal. Deep-seated patterns that are hard to shift if you're a therapist because the cultivation of the skills required to be a good therapist reinforces those patterns. A set of tendencies I would classify under the umbrella of what I call relational perfectionism. And I alluded to this earlier and in my conversation with Dr. Hickson, relational perfectionism is about the need to get every interaction right. To figure people out, to then based on what we have figured out, to say the exact right thing, which then lands with the person in the exact way that we intended and has the exact right effect. Also, under this umbrella of relational perfectionism is the tendency to comb through our previous relational interactions and dissect them for signs that we did or didn't do or say the right thing. Again, these are things we have to do as therapists. If we didn't do any of that or did very, very little of it, we would not be very good therapists. And so to heal from the tendency to overdo it a bit, when we are actively cultivating it as a therapeutic skill, again, pretty hard. Tendency to assume unbalanced caretaking roles in relationships where you deprioritize your own needs in favor of the other persons and de-center your own experience and focus on the other persons. I hope it goes without saying why being a therapist reinforces that tendency. And I've had a front row seat to the personal lives of enough therapists to see that this isn't something we tend to strictly relegate to our professional spheres, at least without a great deal of effort and intention. And I would also posit that deeply related to this predilection for unbalanced relational roles, this habitual embodiment of the caretaker role is also a fear of being seen. The caretaker role can often look strong, powerful, whatever, and behind that veneer of strength is a pretty effective place to hide. It's a place from which we project competence, independence, knowing what to do, and inside which we can hide our confused, messy, needy, complicated selves. And of course, this work demands that of us, as much as I embrace authenticity and my relationships with my clients, I certainly can't. It would not be in their interests for me to show up in those relationships in my fully messy, unbridled complexity. Parish the thought. So again, reinforcing this tendency to form this particular kind of unbalanced relationship every day at work. This is by no means an exhaustive list. We could probably have a great group therapy for therapy session talking about tendencies or patterns that are hard to heal because we use them and cultivate them as skills. I'm not trying to be a bummer here, by the way. I am cognizant that if someone had told me 14, 15 years ago when I first walked into the office of that therapist I talked about last episode, that I not only was not about to resolve my issues in the way that I hoped. The career path I was about to embark on was going to make resolving quite a few of them, quite a bit harder. Well, I would have found that to be a bummer. And it is a bummer, to be real. The fantasy where we heal ourselves and then heal other people and then we all live happily ever after is much more appealing. Even the slightly less fantastical fantasy where we maybe don't all achieve ultimate healing and resolution, but we just move along in our own healing and we aren't impeded by unique obstacles that our role as a therapist creates, that's much more appealing. When I first got to the point of being able to consciously realize this and explicitly articulate it, I cried. Cut to me and Dr. Hickson in my office while I sobbed, this whole job is borrowed functioning. Shout out to those of you familiar enough with bohine and theory to know what that's referring to, but whether you do or you don't, point being, yeah, this is a bummer. But that's not why I'm sharing it with you right now on the heels of the last episode. Dr. Hickson's in my conversation about immediacy. The reason I'm sharing all this with you right now is because I believe that using immediacy in our relationships with our clients can go a long way to helping us heal some of the things I just enumerated that are work generally otherwise makes it difficult to heal in ourselves. Now, some of you are getting very worried all of a sudden because I just made reference to the therapist using the therapeutic relationship as a vehicle for our own healing. That's scary to some of you because of course the therapeutic relationship is supposed to be a vehicle for the client's healing. And when you hear me say that there is an opportunity for us to heal through it, you are filling that in with the idea that this may happen at the client's expense. So I will set your mind at ease, but if you did immediately jump to that concern first, I would ask you why your first impulse is to think of healing in the therapeutic diet as a zero sum game. You may have some unresolved martyrs to work on as most of us probably do. So jot that down. Second, if you use an intervention to serve your healing but to the client's detriment, you're not actually serving your healing either because doing things that are out of our integrity does not heal us. So of course, I'm not saying use immediacy just for you because it can be healing for you. I am saying that fortunately using immediacy in a clinically indicated way to benefit your client can also benefit you and that it benefiting you is in turn good for your client. That's good news and perhaps a bit of an antidote to the bummer I just handed you. Before I get into how and why immediacy can help us heal some of our hard to heal shit, a little refresher on what immediacy is. When I say immediacy here, I'm referring to the therapist articulating something in the interpersonal dynamic of the therapeutic relationship as an intervention. And specifically today, I want to talk about the self-disclosure aspect of immediacy. So to illustrate this with an example, a while ago I was in session with a client who was really
angry with me. And I said to them something like, "How is it for you to be angry with me and have me know that?" That's immediacy, but it's not self-disclosure. Later on in that same session when I shared with them about how them being angry was sitting with me, that's immediacy and self-disclosure. And it's the self-disclosure-based immediacy that I think often packs the biggest punch for us and for them. So how can this kind of immediacy operate as a healing force for us? I think the most useful conceptual tool for thinking about this is that using self-disclosure in the context of immediacy pushes us to practice self-validated intimacy. What is self-validated intimacy? My teacher, Dave Schnarchu, you've probably heard me talk about on here many times before, coined that term in his first book constructing the sexual crucible. To contrast with what he calls "other validated intimacy," which is what most of us think of as just intimacy. Other validated intimacy is the kind of intimacy that we usually like. Both kinds of intimacy involve self-revelation, self-confrontation, and self-disclosure. In other validated intimacy, our disclosures are met with understanding, validation, and acceptance from the person that we are in relationship with. Self-validated intimacy occurs when we are able to engage in that same self-revelation and self-disclosure while validating ourselves enough to not retreat from that vulnerability, regardless of how the other person responds. Any vulnerable self-disclosure from either party in a relationship has the potential to lead to other validated intimacy, self-validated intimacy, or neither. We don't know until we try. And this is what I was referring to when I said so many times in my conversation with Dr. Hickson that immediacy is risky. I wasn't referring to risk and a risk management sense. I met emotionally risky. To reveal something about your inner world to another person comes with an inherent emotional risk, especially if you haven't done that before with that particular person and don't have prior experience from which to anticipate their response, or if a particular disclosure represents a new level of vulnerability in that relationship. Client relationships represent a unique opportunity for self-validated intimacy for us as therapists because it is part of our role obligation to our clients not to expect validation from them. So if we are going to make moves and use interventions that increase our intimacy with our clients, we had better do our best to be prepared to self-validate it. I want to ground this with an example. So let's use the example Dr. Hickson gave last episode of an immediacy-based comment that they might make with a client where they said, "As we're talking, I get the feeling that you're leaving something out of the conversation." This is an example of immediacy and self-disclosure because it would be a disclosure of a feeling, a sense, a hunch that the therapist is having about the client. This is a bid for greater intimacy with the client and whether the result is other validated intimacy, self-validated intimacy, or neither depends on what happens next. If the client responds by saying, "Yeah, you know, actually now that you mention it, I think you're right, there is something I'm not saying and it's xyz," and then you go on to have a deeper and more vulnerable session than you were having before. That's other validated intimacy. Yay, the thing we all love and crave. If, on the other hand, they respond by saying, "I don't know what you're talking about, if they get defensive or confused, then the ball is back in your court." If you respond to that by getting super flustered, trying to back out of it, becoming dissuaded from ever trying something like that again with that client, then we don't have increased intimacy of any kind. But if you respond by regulating your own anxiety, holding on to your own perspective and perceptions, remaining curious about what's happening relationally and remaining willing to continue to show your client important things about your experience of them, that's self-validated intimacy. Self-validated intimacy is an important relational skill for anybody, and I think practicing it does promote healing for anybody, but I think it especially helps that "parentified child shit." Self-validated intimacy is fucking kryptonite to the "parentified child." All of those "parentified child behaviors" emerged as a strategy for reducing anxiety in a diad or larger relational system by managing the other person or people in it. In contrast, self-validated intimacy requires tolerating anxiety by managing ourselves. When we practice self-validated intimacy in our client relationships, we directly confront the threat that interpersonal hyper-vigilance emerged to detect, which is the threat of relational disharmony, the threat of another person reacting poorly to us and the potential repercussions of that. It's a form of exposure therapy to those of us who may sometimes, and for very good personal historical reason, find relational disharmony to be threatening. When we engage in self-validated intimacy in our client relationships, we by necessity are giving up the practice of using the caretaking role as a place to hide. We are still the caretaker, the roles are still what they are, but in a moment of self-validated intimacy, we are not hiding. We are allowing ourselves to be seen and damn the torpedoes, accepting what may come as a result of that. I have particularly found self-validated intimacy to be a powerful unduer of relational perfectionism. Because in relational perfectionism, there is this embedded belief that doing and saying the right thing means that not only are no mistakes made, but both people are in a state of satisfaction with the relationship at all times. And we can know by the way in our cognitive brains that that is not possible and still be driven by a desire to actualize that fantasy. Taking the risk of self-disclosure over and over again with my clients, understanding that I have to take that risk with the knowledge that I may very well have to be the one to validate my own disclosure, and finding that most of the time that doesn't blow up the relationship has increased my relational risk tolerance. And we have to build relational risk tolerance to actually see and internalize that resilient intimate relationships are possible. And I want to say also that it's a normal human thing to struggle with risk tolerance in relationships. This is not something that is specific to therapists or to-parentified children or to people, pleasers, and various stages of recovery. Struggling with one's capacity to take the risks involved in intimacy is a normal part of the human growth experience. But especially for those of us who may suffer from some degree of relational perfectionism, particularly when many of the behaviors associated with it are being reinforced through our jobs, to be able to have this antidote, also through our jobs, is a pretty notable gift that we would do well to take advantage of. Last time I talked about why I believe that immediacy is a key to unlocking difficult clients. And by difficult, I mean clients who are difficult to engage, who may be really resistant to opening up, reactive, rejecting of attempts to help, who we tend to find ourselves in double binds with this kind of thing. I do want to say again, what I said last time that I think in at least some circles these days, we are in a moment of discomfort in our professional culture with acknowledging that some clients are especially challenging in these kinds of ways, because it can be seen as blaming or stigmatizing. And that's a fair concern, but I don't think the purpose of destigmatizing people with difficult behaviors is served well by refusing to acknowledge the reality of the difficulty. Some clients are more difficult than others. That's okay. And immediacy is one of the most powerful tools, possibly the most powerful tool in my opinion, for forming a true working alliance with a client who is difficult to form an alliance with. And when you are in the thick of trying to form that true working alliance with a difficult client, you have to use a lot of self validated intimacy or you will drown. And so our relationships with difficult clients have the potential to be powerful healing opportunities, not just for them, but for us. They have the potential to be. They aren't guaranteed to be. If we could guarantee our relational and emotional risks would always turn out well, they wouldn't be risks. And what they resulted in wouldn't be intimacy. But in the difficult client relationships, where we practice self validated intimacy well enough, and the client rises to the occasion, we have the opportunity not only to experience the mutual satisfaction of having built a resilient risk tolerant intimate relationship. We also get to feel into and to stretch the outer limits of our
capacity for self-validated intimacy, which we then, if we so choose and we have the guts, get to take out into the world and into the rest of our lives and relationships with us. A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how crucial it is for us in this work to learn to tolerate paradoxes rather than collapsing them. And what I've been talking about today is one of those paradoxes where doing this work makes it both uniquely hard to heal certain kinds of wounds and also provides us with these unique opportunities to heal them. That's a big one, a wide one to hold. And as I'm getting to know this paradox as I'm seeing how monumental it is, what a significant role it plays and has played in my life, it really strikes me how important it is not to take the opportunities to heal that this work may present to us for granted, not to let them pass us by because the hard parts are real hard. Solidarity to all of you out there in the therapist trenches and I'm inviting us all into the little bit of extra courage we need to allow ourselves to be seen in this work, just a little bit more than we were last week. If you're enjoying a therapist can't say that, please rate review and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please don't forget to share the show with a therapist friend who you know really wants to join us in talking about the things that it feels like a therapist can't say. As always, you can find me revist out at IntoTheWoodsPortland.com. I love hearing your thoughts feedback, critiques, complaints, compliments, suggestions and of course you're a therapist can't say that moments. Feel free to reach out to me via email or sending me a voice note to
[email protected]. Talk to you next time.
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