A Matter of (Mis)perception

One of the things that makes the therapeutic relationship unique is that it is one of the rare cases where the other person in the relationship will be honest with us about how our actions and our assumptions are affecting the relationship – without those things necessarily having to end the relationship – thus creating a safe place for us to experiment with new approaches to interpersonal relations.

Another unique aspect of the therapy relationship is the imbalance of power – in what other relationship is one party expected to divulge their most personal information while the other party reveals next to nothing of themselves?

The imbalance of power is something that creates its own set of uncomfortable issues for people on the client side of a therapy relationship – but these two aspects of the therapeutic relationship working together are also one of the factors that make therapy the powerful tool for learning and change that it can be – if we use it to best advantage.

Because the less we actually know about the therapist, the more we fill in the numerous blanks with our own expectations and projections and beliefs, casting the therapist in roles of our own choosing. Absent any real facts to the contrary, we tend to see in our therapists the characteristics of other important people in our lives, and we react to our therapists based on the assumptions connected to our pre-existing perspectives.

These assumptions can be positive or negative, but it is the negative assumptions that provide the most grist for the therapeutic mill, because by virtue of this process, we are effectively recreating some of our most problematic real-world relationships within the therapy relationship.

If we’re willing, we can then learn from this. We can learn to recognize how our history is affecting our current view of the therapist, we can learn to recognize other places in our lives where this same effect has occurred, we can learn how our actions and reactions in these situations are viewed by someone outside ourselves, and we can learn to separate past from present so that the first does not so automatically and pervasively affect the second.

This is probably not a new concept to anyone who has been in therapy – the concept of therapeutic transference is as old as Freud, and has been very thoroughly studied in the decades since. However, despite its familiarity, and although most people agree that the concept makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, it is still true that most people have great difficulty in actually applying the concept in their own therapy in order to benefit from the valuable learning opportunities it offers.

The problem is that, in order to achieve this learning, we first have to get past a lot of really sticky points. We have to get past the challenge to our immediate response, past feeling criticized and wanting to defend ourselves or “attack back” at the therapist. We have to get past taking it personally. We have resist the inclination to turn the issue back on the therapist, making it their fault and then letting the matter end there – and we have be willing to look honestly at ourselves.

We have to get past the desire to abandon the therapy relationship, even in those moments when it feels like our therapist is acting just like our mother / father / sibling / neighbor / whoever – we have to stick with it especially in those moments – because if we are seeing echoes of a figure from our own history in what our therapist is doing, it is an absolute guarantee that we are not seeing current reality clearly.

These are the moments when we can learn the most from therapy – the moments when our histories are creeping forward to cast their long shadows over our perceptions of a current situation, the moments when we can actively learn how to disentangle the one from the other.

Unfortunately, these are also the moments when many people tend to walk away from a therapy relationship in varying degrees of anger, disgust, resentment, or high dudgeon – at which point, all opportunity for learning has been cut short.

These issues which provide such valuable learning opportunities are invariably also charged with high emotional intensity, making it incredibly difficult for us to see anything but our current emotional upheaval. Each and every one of these opportunities is a struggle to overcome our natural responses and to really think about what our therapist is saying and how it applies to us.

To illustrate what I mean, consider this basic example –

Imagine that historically you have issues with your mother. When you were a child, she was cold, uncaring, and neglectful. She didn’t respond to your needs or give you loving and caring attention.

Years later, you begin to work with a female therapist. You initially perceive her as caring and attentive and insightful, all the things your mother never was for you and which you have grown up longing to have, so you feel an immediate bond with this therapist. You think she is wonderful and perfect and every good thing, subconsciously attributing to her all the characteristics of the ideal mother that you’ve always dreamed of having, and you want to feel close and connected to her at all times.

But then suddenly, for some reason, your therapist becomes less available to you. This can be due to something as simple as a vacation or a family crisis that results in a temporary absence, but it feels much bigger than that to you. It feels like all the times when you were left neglected and starved for maternal attention and affection. It feels like your therapist is acting just like your mother – and instantly you attach to your therapist all the negative feelings and beliefs and assumptions that connect to the “cold mother” image you have lived with all your life. Although you don’t realize it, you begin to respond to your therapist’s actions as if she were your mother. The therapist is now the target of the intense bitterness and anger and disappointment and hurt spawned by a lifetime of neglect and longing – your reaction makes sense to you, but it is also totally out of proportion to the reality that prompted it.

From this distance, it’s easy to see that this reaction isn’t really about what the therapist is doing – it is gaining all of its force and direction from the old unhealed wound of feeling unloved and unwanted as a child.

But if we were the person being swamped by these feelings, it would be a lot harder to realize how profoundly our current perceptions were being skewed by our historical experiences.

We might get as far as thinking “my therapist is acting like my mother” or “I feel just like I used to when my mother did this” – but in terms of resolving the problem, the historical implications are usually ignored.

The situation arose because of something the therapist did, an event which we are interpreting through a perspective tainted by history – but when it comes to resolution, the obvious point is that the therapist did something. So the initial stance for most people is that the issue at hand is the therapist’s fault, because they acted in a way that reminded us of our mother (or whoever) – although in fact, it is our own interpretation of the situation which is causing us to see our history recreated through the therapist’s actions.

It is the task of the therapist to help us see these flaws in our own perceptions and reactions – but not every client is willing or able to tolerate hearing that the flaw is on their side, when what they want is to blame it on the therapist and have the therapist be responsible for making whatever changes are necessary to repair the situation and prevent it from happening again (such as, in the above example, not going on vacation, or putting the client ahead of a family crisis).

Again – from this distance, it is easy to see that the client’s expectations and desires are unrealistic – but again, this is much harder to see when we are the one in the middle of the emotional distress. At such times, it can be difficult to fully appreciate that the only way our distress will actually be resolved is for us to address our own issues rather than to insist that the therapist (or anyone else) change what they’re doing for our comfort and convenience.

Until we address the flaws in our own perceptions, we will keep seeing our history recreated by the people around us, and nothing they do to appease us will ever succeed in resolving our problem.

But this is a difficult point to grasp. And as a result, it is at this juncture – when the client is experiencing the intense emotionality of their reaction and not receiving the response they desire from the therapist – that many therapeutic ruptures occur.

Because if we refuse to accept that our interpretations and reactions are the product of our own issues, if we insist that they are the fault of the therapist, and yet the therapist does not accept the excess of responsibility we are attempting to assign to them, then a termination of the therapeutic relationship is really the only recourse left to us. After all, how can we work with a therapist who is so unresponsive to our needs, so insensitive to our pain, so unwilling to accept responsibility, so defensive in making everything our fault when we know that everything is really their fault…

How many times have you heard that list of justifications to explain why someone has left therapy?

Therapeutic terminations occur as a result of this kind of circumstance all the time – and this is truly unfortunate, because not only are those who terminate therapy due to this kind of scenario dooming themselves to repeat the same scenario over and over forever (or until they finally realize where the actual problem is), but they are also missing the some of the most valuable learning that therapy can provide.

For those who are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort of these situations and actually look past it, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vehicle of deep learning and growth.

By learning where and how history is influencing our current perceptions, and learning to separate history from current day so that our feelings about the former do not inform and influence our every reaction in the latter – we are learning something from which every relationship in our life will benefit.