Introduction This year, my supervision with Alan revolved around my difficulties in working relationally both in therapy and supervision and considered the need to escape the push and pull, “doer-done to” dynamics of complementary relationships. I explored Benjamin’s notion of thirdness, a combination of the ‘Third in the One’, developed through experiences where the mother holds in tension her desires and the needs of the child, and the ‘One in the Third, a tendency to respond symmetrically, to match and mirror—the shared reciprocity of two active partners (Benjamin, 2007).
In parallel, I explored the impact of my supervision work on my clinical practice through the case of Kev, a 30 year old White English man I see through an NHS bereavement counselling service. In particular, I examined parallel processes (Mothersole, 1999; Searles, 1956) and introjective, projective and erotic transference (Hargaden & Sills, 2002; Mann, 1997).
My client’s original goal for therapy was to grieve for his mother who died when he was 18; I dislike the idea of pathologising grief, but recognised that Kev’s grief was complicated by his difficult relationship with an ill and unavailable mother, a history of alcohol and substance abuse, and anger management issues that estranged him from his girlfriend and family. We were assigned 14 sessions and settled for an exploratory contract (Sills, 2006) aiming at unearthing what grieving meant for Kev, what had stopped him grieving in the past and what would help him succeed now.
My treatment plan focused on building our working alliance and helping him rebuild a self-narrative that would integrate the loss of his mother while permitting his life story to move forward (Neimeyer, Burke, Mackay & Van Dyke Stringer, 2009). Resistance I started this second year with Alan expecting to jump straight back into a fully functioning relational supervision that would not generate any storming (Tuckman, 1965) as we had done all that last year.
Our early sessions alternated fairly smoothly between Practice Based, Clarifying and Relational Field contracts (Chinnock, 2011), while focusing on my clients’ bereavement needs. In the therapy room, I took an immediate liking to Kev and, as I first met him, I surprised myself by feeling distinctively feminine, not something I had experienced before with any of my clients. Kev’s build and beard reminded me of a strong furry bear, cuddly but dangerous.
I had expected some power play in the therapy room due to our respective roles as therapist-client; however, I was surprised by the intensity of the additional gender dynamics and wondered why it seemed weighted in the opposite direction. Throughout the session, my client was playful and humorous and I responded to his teasing smile by being playful myself. With insight, I believe we were already acting out and that, even as I presented the rules, our smiles denied my power. We appeared to be building our empathic relationship easily, although I soon started worrying that our sessions were not effectual.
Alan and I questioned my helplessness and observed that, on the one hand, my client appeared uninterested in all my attempts at working on his narrative, smiling at my suggestions of him bringing pictures, writing letters or even talking about his mother at any great length. I hypothesised that this could reflect my client’s rejection of his feminine side, but felt there was more to it. On the other hand, it appeared that Kev did not need me: he had stopped the drugs, gone back to the gym and his job, and contacted his sister and his dad.
Again, Alan and I analysed this as a possible defensive denial of vulnerability on Kev’s part. Through the next few supervision sessions, Alan pulled me back time and time again to what he called “the bread and butter of TA”—racket systems (Erskine, 1979), games (Berne, 1972)—all of which I felt uninspired by. I felt Alan was constantly trying to pin me down and ignoring what I wanted to say and, infuriatingly, what | wanted eluded me, mirroring my client’s inability to express his needs by fear of showing his vulnerability.
Alan finally commented on my resistance, declaring that he thought we were back where we had been last year. He meant in terms of resistance to TA concepts; nevertheless, I interpreted this as Alan telling me I had regressed. I felt ashamed and went into adaptive behaviour, spurring me into going back to the basics to Please him (Berne, 1968). I suspect we were back to a complementary relationship where I felt pushed and pulled, tried to dominate and resisted. The presence of an observing third felt to me persecutory because of the absence of oneness (Benjamin, 2007).
We were communicating to each other the impossibility of acknowledging the other’s reality without abandoning our own: I experienced my supervisor as defending himself from my malignant emotional reality that he and his theories were not good enough; I projected my P1- onto him and repeated my childhood experiences of my mother failing to create the ‘Third in the One’ and my feelings being denied and supplanted by hers. The frustration of failing to express verbally what was going on seemed to increase my dissociation and amplify my shame at being desperate and my guilt over raging internally at my supervisor.
Our TA analysis focused on how Kev’s combination of Be Strong and Please Others drivers (Berne, 1968) and his defensive paranoid life position (I+, U-) (Ernst, 1969)came into play in the therapeutic relationship: he could not face being vulnerable and was afraid of attachment while craving it at the same time. As a defence mechanism, he would give me the impression he did not need me and generate a fake, show off closeness instead. Kev seemed to operate primarily from his A1+, charming and joking with women and friends, fighting people making him feel vulnerable, trying to get his needs met by manipulating people rather than working with hem.
We expanded on this in terms of developmental tasks and proposed that Kev needed help facing his deeply shameful vulnerability and learning to trust people around him. Thanks to Alan helping me refocus on my client’s structural conflicts, I achieved a better grasp of Kev’s internal dynamics and went back to the therapy room paying particular attention to his unspoken needs and, through the next sessions, I tried to give them a voice; by session five, I felt we had made progress as Kev was able to experience real sadness talking about his dad not loving him like he needed him to.
Overall, it seemed that we had both at least partly overcome our respective resistances and were moving forward. I feared, however, this might at least partially prove to be adaptive behaviour, inauthentic submission rather than authentic change. Discussing this feeling in supervision at a later stage, Alan and I decided that the shift was authentic in the sense that I had pushed through resistance and taken a renewed interest in the supervisory relationship. In parallel, we surmised that my sense of inauthenticity might stem from Kev being back to his racket of staying in relationships by faking closeness and intimacy.
Sure enough, Kev missed the two following sessions with little or no explanation, leading me to feel deeply rejected. The extent of my disappointment helped me realise I had been unconsciously readying myself for these sessions as if for a date, paying more attention to my appearance, applying perfume and waiting excitedly for my client’s arrival. This was now such an obvious enactment it prompted me to properly listen to my countertransference for the first time.