As human beings, therapists have feelings and thoughts while sitting with clients. Sometimes those thoughts and feelings seem personal. When a therapist puts their feelings onto a client, the therapist is experiencing countertransference. In traditional counseling, therapists are told to work on their personal feelings in supervision and their own therapy. While this might be useful, understanding countertransference through the lens of transpersonal counseling can transform personal feelings into intuitive insight.
Transpersonal counseling is an approach to therapy that engages the therapeutic process from beyond personal identity. We do not engage with our client’s personality from our personality. We open into awareness-based knowing and honor our clients innate spirituality as the guide to their healing and transformation.
In transpersonal counseling, the therapist is a clear mirror of reflection for their clients to increase awareness, which increases the potential for deep integration. To be a clear mirror, the therapist’s personality stays outside of the room and we allow our intuition and spiritual intelligence to guide our interventions. When we are fully present and clear in the seat of clinician, everything within the container belongs to the client. So long as we are not disrupting contact with confluence, projections, retroflections, introjections, and/or deflection, everything within a therapy session is a reflection of the client.
When personal feelings and thoughts arise within us, instead of putting it onto the client, we have the opportunity to honor this as intuitive information. For example, in the consultation portion of season one episode three of The Awakened Therapist Podcast, my guest therapist said they were afraid to say the wrong thing to their client. The therapist stated they don’t feel this with other clients, just the one we were consulting about. Instead of personalizing the fear and engaging with the client by way of countertransference, the therapist has an opportunity to be curious about construct “fear of saying wrong thing.”
Incompetence, judgment, fatigue, boredom, impulse to rescue, feeling stuck, feeling helpless, etc. are all common experiences therapists feel while holding space for some clients. Instead of attaching to our thoughts and feelings from our mind, we can bring awareness to our experience and honor it as intuitive insight.
In order to bring in our own thoughts as intuition (when the client isn’t speaking about what we think or feel), we must hold out experience loosely. Our language must communicate curiosity and potential for being wrong. And we must presence the experience with the most neutral, non-judgmental language possible For example, “I’m not sure why, but I keep getting this sense of fatigue. What do you notice when I say that?” Or, “This may seem extraneous, but since it’s here for me still I want to say it, I keep hearing this voice of judgment. What do you notice?”
When we are truly present and open to awareness, we hear and feel things that are subliminal. By bringing the implicit field into explicit awareness, the client has the opportunity to respond with what is deeply true for them, without navigating around some unspoken experience. This is true contact. This is authentic engagement. This is honoring our wholeness.
When countertransference is honored as intuitive insight, the transpersonal container is technicolor. Murkiness turns to clarity. Experiments become spontaneous. Report is built and strengthened.
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