Transforming Trauma: Episode 135

Many therapists are conflicted about how to show up with their clients. While there is lots of training to be highly emotionally engaged with clients, there is also training that therapists should be more distant in sessions to avoid possible countertransference––which is the evoking of emotions and reactions within the therapist. What if, instead of attempting to be overly engaged or maintaining a distancing demeanor, therapists learned how to honor their humanness within their therapeutic role? What if therapists permitted their emotional sensitivity to balance with their curiosity and learning? How might a therapist’s self-inquiry transform the therapeutic relationship?

On this episode of Transforming Trauma, host Emily Ruth welcomes Karen J. Maroda, PhD., noted psychoanalyst and author, to discuss her fascinating research on countertransference. In addition to maintaining her Milwaukee-based private practice, Dr. Maroda is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin and sits on the editorial boards of several psychoanalytic journals. Her most recent book, The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact On Theory And Practice, has received wide recognition across theoretical originations for its focus on the early childhood experiences of all psychotherapists.

“No one develops perfectly,” concedes Dr. Maroda. “To some extent, we all have some degree of issues.” Her research bares this out. “In the last ten years (of treating and supervising therapists), I’ve observed that therapists have a commonality in their early experiences: a history of being a parentified child.” The emotional fallout can be tricky to navigate, professionally. “We’re mostly aware of these feelings as human beings, but we don’t know what to do with them in the session.” These often-unconscious emotions are evoked within therapy and are referred to as countertransference.

Therapists who’ve experienced the parentified child dynamic often retain a professional inclination towards conflict avoidance and timid attitudes around self-disclosure. Dr. Maroda asserts that their decision-making in these areas is rooted in childhood fear rather than sound clinical judgment. “The advice I give to therapists who have strong feelings toward a client is don’t just start talking about your feelings!” Instead, she urges folks to bookmark the emotions until they have space to investigate the source of activation. “Go home and think about it,” she counsels, in addition to seeking clinical consultation and one’s own personal therapy. If a therapist is able to attend to their own feelings and reactions, they are able to become more present and effective clinically. Dr. Maroda declares: “Be curious about everything that’s happening.”

Transforming Trauma thanks Dr. Maroda for her compassionate insights and commitment to enriching the therapist-client relationship.

 

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis

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Karen J. Maroda, PhD., is a psychologist/psychoanalyst practicing in Milwaukee, WI. She is also an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and sits on the editorial boards of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The author of four books, her most recent one, titled “The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact on theory and practice,” has received wide recognition across theoretical originations because it focuses on the early childhood experiences of all psychotherapists.

Dr. Maroda discusses how therapists share having been the sensitive, empathic child who was subsequently tapped to serve the emotional needs of family members, especially depressed mothers. Although the history of therapists having a depressed mother is not a new idea, Maroda’s presentation goes far beyond this reason for our vocational choice, outlining the resultant guilt and shame that therapists often feel for failing to rescue and restore family members. They then carry the need to rescue and be rescued into their work with clients.

She also outlines how the persona of the perfect mother, who sacrifices endlessly, does not serve us in our work. Having had little to no power as children, the parentified child seeks to soothe, comfort and restore. Although these capacities can serve us well in our work, the accompanying passivity, conflict avoidance, and guilt and shame over failing to rescue, do not. Seeking to remove this residue of guilt, shame repressed anger over their own lost childhood and conflict avoidance, she emphasizes the need for healthy narcissism, gratification and the facilitation of constructive conflict as an alternative to passive unconditional acceptance.