countertransferancve

Transference and countertransference
I have already talked about intersubjectivity.  Remember?  Intersubjectivity is how I feel about you and how you feel about me.  But it also includes my sharing with you what my experience is of how I feel about you.  Countertransference, on the other hand, is also how I feel about you but it is not something I would share!
Transference is the idea that a client will transfer their feelings, either positive or negative, about other people including their mother or father, on to the therapist.  When we recognize that a client is attributing some attribute to you which is clearly incorrect, then we can work on why a client may be misidentifying other people's responses to them.
For example, I was working with a kid in foster care.  We were playing catch and at one point, because I have no athletic skill whatsoever, I  accidentally hit him.  We were playing with a very soft ball because I have no athletic skill whatsoever!  However, he cringed and said, " Please don't hit me!".  I said, "Don't you know that I would never hit you?"  He said, "Well , I am 99% sure."  This is countertransference.  The kid was transferring his idea that all adults will hit him on to me.  I am 100% sure I would never hit him, and even though he felt pretty safe and comfortable with me, he just couldn't imagine that there could be an adult who would not hit him since that was what he experienced with his parents.
Now, countertransference is a whole other ball game.  Countertransference can either be useful or it can be very detrimental to the client relationship and the therapy.  I think this is especially useful when working with kids, because I can always ask myself, "What would it be like to live with this child seven days a week?"  There are many kids who elicits a desire to throw them right out the window!  I have not had very many clients who I have disliked.  When I do dislike them, I know this is something about them that needs to be addressed.  That is eliciting behavior.  The client is eliciting this by their behavior.
But sometimes the countertransference is something that I am transferring on to a client's and this is not useful for the therapy.
When I was working at LifeLink and had just been diagnosed with MS, this became a much more powerful issue for me.  I had many clients, the parents of the foster children, who were attempting to recover from drug addiction.  Something like 80% of kids in foster care, and least in Chicago, were placed there because their parents were addicted to drugs.  I had many parents who were attempting to recover from heroin addiction.  Heroin withdrawal is especially painful, and I would have many women say to me that they couldn't stand the pain and had to relapse.  This made me crazy because it was very hard for me to think that they were having any harder time than I was, and I didn't need to be on heroin!
Of course this is a very false analogy, and I knew that it wasn't fair of me at all to suggest that are situations where similar in any way. Most of these women were from the south side and the projects and had no education or even opportunities for education.  They were in the cycle of poverty and had been brought up in, at the very least, unsupportive families and at the worst, abusive families.  Most of them could tell me about horrors they experience when they were young, including physical and sexual abuse, homelessness, parents being addicted to drugs, you name it.  Did you ever see the movie, Precious?  As horrific as the experiences depicted in this movie seem, they are not far from the truth.  Most of the time, when working with parents who had been through these experiences, I had a lot of compassion.  After the MS, it was more of a struggle.
Okay, now that I've gotten all intense, I want to keep writing about countertransference, but with the idea of letting you know that kinds of things that therapists think, that they will never share with you.
But that will be a topic for another blog.