Category Archives: Inner Work

The Upside of Counter-Transference

No matter what experience level you’ve achieved as a clinician, you can always benefit from discovering and engaging in ongoing inner work. This vital aspect of being a great clinician is both an important wellness practice and a professional tool. When you participate in my Avenues For Inner Work programs, you’ll explore key issues — such as how you can work more effectively with counter-transference.

Knowing how to work with counter-transference strengthens our ability as clinicians to serve as a therapeutic presence in our interactions with clients. That, in turn, helps their personal work move forward more quickly. If dealing with it can be helpful, why is counter-transference often at or near the bottom of the list of important issues we address?

Many of us hold a negative association with the word counter-transference. That’s because we were probably taught that it has to do with our own unhealed issues and the negative triggers that can arise within us toward our clients. We were strongly advised not to ‘have’ any counter-transference — and, if we did, we were to avoid letting it seep into the therapy room. End of story. Such a mentality, however, often makes counter-transference a taboo subject within the therapeutic setting. And that stashes it firmly in the ‘uncomfortable to talk about’ corner of our profession.

Most of us — myself included — weren’t trained in how to work with counter-transference, let alone given any validation that it’s a natural part of our humanity and doesn’t need to be pathologized or feared. So, do we just pretend counter-transference is not part of our authentic experience as wounded healers? Such an approach often breeds ‘imposter syndrome’ and perfectionism within us. We can become over-focused on finding and using the latest techniques, interventions, and skills — the ‘doing’ aspect of our role. And that can keep us feeling inadequate and involved in a seemingly endless cycle of accumulating more and more professional training credits. All the while, we bury and deny what we’ve deemed as the less-than-desirable parts of ourselves, afraid they might pop up around a client. That’s a recipe for burnout.

By noticing only the negative and fearful aspects of counter-transference, we may miss seeing its positive elements. (Yes, we can find good things about this topic!) For example, when we’re willing to reflect on what a client’s ‘stuck-ness’ in therapy brings up in us (such as feelings of helplessness, frustration, or inadequacy), we can work through our end of the dynamic outside of the therapy room and with support. Often, we’ll find when something is no longer being re-enacted within us toward the client, the client’s stuck-ness releases and their process moves forward. This is a very useful and positive aspect of counter-transference. If we think of counter-transference only as something negative — if we’re afraid of it, or we haven’t learned how to work with it — we’re likely to ignore the great potential of these positive events.

Like most things that feel difficult or challenging, when we bring an issue out into the open — within the context of a healthy support system — we begin to loosen its grip on us. Surely, we want that for ourselves, as well as our clients! As clinicians, we can choose to address, collaborate, and support each other in working with and through our experiences of counter-transference in a community of like-minded and like-hearted professionals. Such an approach can make all the difference to our success as we learn how to harvest golden nuggets from the places that scare us.

Practitioners: Improve Your Therapeutic Presence to Benefit Your Clients

Now more than ever — amid the latest innovations for guiding clients toward lasting change that currently flood the field of psychology — we are being called upon as a profession to lead the culture in resolving our individual and collective trauma. Yet, our own trauma as wounded healers rarely receives enough attention as a valued focal point. It’s not so much that, as clinicians, we don’t recognize the fact that we’ve experienced trauma. It’s more that if we’re not addressing our own unhealed trauma in an ongoing and responsible way, we may not be able to truly help those who seek our guidance. What will happen when we sit with our clients during their darkest moments? How will we shepherd them wisely if we don’t “know” — personally, and in an embodied way — the power and healing potential of the latest and greatest therapeutic modalities?

The fields of psychotherapy and, especially, trauma healing have recently experienced one of their greatest growth periods to date. However, the well-being of the practitioner remains sorely under-addressed. In particular, a gaping hole exists around the issue of how the attention to practitioner well-being directly benefits our work with clients. The therapeutic relationship is continually being recognized as the strongest healing agent for the client. Healing can happen within this framework because it carries a unique ability to provide corrective lived experiences in the here-and-now. Through these improved real-life experiences, clients can be empowered to relate differently to themselves and their world.

Cultivating therapeutic presence as a clinician means showing up in real time, unencumbered by our own unhealed stuff. We need to recognize our personal triggers, our personal reaction to a client, and how we may project our stuff onto a client. Such counter-transference will always happen within the therapeutic setting. But when we get stuck in it or avoid dealing with it, we’re unable to show up fully for our clients and for ourselves. Because counter-transference is a normal part of the therapeutic process, we need dedicated resources specifically for working through our own issues outside of the therapy room. And we need to leverage all aspects of our humanity and our own situations to get counter-transference working in our favor.

But how do we, as practitioners, develop the skills, resources, and mind-set that supports us in becoming an effective therapeutic presence? Very few graduate programs require a defined personal healing component as part of the rigorous curriculum. Why not? Because the valuable experiential context of inner work can be challenging — but not impossible — to address within an academic setting. Regardless, we must work toward this goal. If we don’t — if the theoretical and clinical application pieces do not build upon a foundation that includes a component of experiential inner work for clinicians — how well-equipped are we to address our client’s needs?

I’m suggesting we include personal healing alongside the academic portion of all graduate clinical training programs, but not in a check-the-box sort of approach. We must address these issues at more than a surface level. Otherwise, it’s like the difference between reading about a place you’d like to travel to and actually traveling there. You can capture the flavor of the location by reading about it, but when you experience it firsthand, with all of your senses, the place actually comes to life. If that’s what we desire for our clients in their personal healing journeys, we must learn to do it for ourselves, both within the academic setting and beyond the classroom.

As our profession begins to openly address the necessity of inner work for clinicians and starts to build it into our academic programs, ongoing conversations, and professional/post-graduate training, we begin to shift away from the mentality of putting ourselves last. That also helps us break the stigma of needing to “have it all together” or to somehow be “perfect” in order to do good work with the people who seek our counsel.

Programs and services from Avenues For Inner Work are designed for clinicians who want to begin or continue their journey toward becoming an effective therapeutic presence.

The Value of Inner Work for the Contemporary Mental Health Practitioner

I have yet to meet a clinician who doesn’t agree that inner work is a vital part of our ongoing personal and professional development. This sentiment is automatically followed by the next universal agreement that the profession itself doesn’t necessarily reflect these shared truths—at least, not when it comes to academic and licensing requirements.

With the progression of the mental health field and our accompanying skill sets toward more integrative, experiential modalities, we are what we have to offer our clients. When we experience inner work as therapists in the ways we ask our clients to, we receive a secondary gain—deeper empathy—setting us up to richly attune with them on their healing journey. It’s like the difference between reading a book about a trip to Italy versus actually traveling there. We can imagine the adventure with great detail, but nothing allows it to come to life like experiencing it in person.