Whose Anxiety Are We Soothing?
There’s a moment in the room therapists experience at one point or another: a client is trying to understand why someone in their life treated them in a specific way and suddenly, you’re pulling apart the person’s behavior with them. For example, let’s say you’re sitting with your client who has a history of experiencing infidelity in multiple relationships and they begin talking about how their girlfriend said they were going to spend time with their friend, but never mentioned the gender of their friend:
“They didn’t want me to know. They’re hiding it from me.”
”I can imagine there’s maybe a fear here?”
”Well, they always cheat. She’s cheating on me, isn’t she?
Neither the clinician nor client know if infidelity has occurred. All we know is that his girlfriend was spending time with a friend and didn’t specify gender. From what we know, the girlfriend hasn’t done anything, yet it activated something in the client. When the client wants to focus more on the girlfriend’s behavior rather than his own inner world, what happens when we follow?
“Well, has she done anything to tell you that she has?”
“She just likes having control in the relationship you know? She wants to feel wanted, and so she goes out with her friends, and makes me figure out it’s a guy and tries to convince me nothing is happening. She was out until late, with alcohol on her breath. She keeps telling me her other friends were there, but it’s hard to believe when she didn’t tell me this guy was going to be there.”
“It almost sounds like the mix of what she was saying and doing started building up for you. Were you wondering if she’s trying to convince you?”
“Yes, exactly! Why are you trying so hard to get me to believe that you didn’t do something?”
The more nuanced and harder truth for us as therapists to confront is that our countertransference could be a substantial factor that leads us to move outward with our client. Having the client shift inward rather than outward would have required us to confront the uncertainty we have all sat in through the entirety of the session: the only person who knows if infidelity has occurred is the girlfriend and she isn’t in the room. We won’t know the answer to this question in 50 minutes. What we do know is that the client doesn’t feel secure in his relationship, his history of infidelity is showing up in this relationship, and he is feeling activated by the events that occurred with his girlfriend. Nothing more, nothing less. What could we do with the uncertainty?
“I wish I had that answer for you, and it also sounds like she told you she didn’t cheat on you. What’s making it hard for you to trust her?”
“She just likes having control in the relationship you know? She wants to feel wanted, and so she goes out with her friends, and makes me figure out it’s a guy and tries to convince me nothing is happening. She was out until late, with alcohol on her breath. She keeps telling me her other friends were there, but it’s hard to believe when she didn’t tell me this guy was going to be there.”
“Tell me if I’m off, I can imagine that this would be incredibly confusing to hear and it’s disorienting, feeling so confused when the floor is falling from under us.”
“Yeah. Why would you be drunk, out late, with a guy you didn’t even tell me about? Like I get you didn’t know he was going to be there, and you were going with your friends, but why wouldn’t you have at least told me?”
“Is there something you might’ve needed here that would’ve made the ground feel more stable?”
“I just wish she would have told me the guy was there. A text. Something, you know?”
“Yeah, I hear you, like you just want to be thought of and considered.”
“Why is that so hard?”
It is unsettling when we don’t hold the answer to our client’s pain, yet that’s not our role. Our role is to help our clients handle uncertainty with more ease and to better understand themselves amidst the uncertainty. This requires us to confront our own anxiety when we don’t know if a betrayal has occurred in our own lives, when we don’t know if someone likes us or not, and when we are uncertain if a previous pain might be showing up again in the present. This client left asking why being thought of and considered is so hard. It’s worth asking ourselves the same question about uncertainty. What makes it so difficulty to accept that we simply do not know?