I had a psychology professor once tell the class that his job as a therapist was to lease his emotions in 50 minute intervals. I did not understand what he truly meant until years later when I learned about mirroring and matching. Then it all made sense.
As I wrote in “How To Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re An Adult: A Path to Authenticity and Awakening”, “Mirror neurons do not fire via text message,” meaning that during those 50 minutes of authentic soulful relating, therapists are trained to validate the patient’s emotional experience. Having another person non-judgmentally bear witness to whatever you are feeling — mirror your facial affect and match your body language while reflecting back what they hear — can be extremely healing.
Psychoanalyst and author Adam Phillips writes that therapy “is the most intimate relationship you will ever have without having sex.” This is one aspect of therapy that many patients new to therapy don’t understand. They conflate therapy with advice. And while I seldom refrain from advising a patient about something that may be in their blindspot, this is really to raise consciousness and have the patient explore new possibilities. As Helene Cixous said, “Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.” We all need thought-mirrors to reflect back to us the limitations of our paradigms; while our intimate partnerships and friendships can be therapeutic, they should not be therapy.
Intellectually, regarding therapy I espouse an eclectic paradigm and many of the theories that I have learned about the subconscious are not in vogue today in America. My lens has been tinted by an unconventional melange of Lacan, Winnicott, and Bowlby, buttressed by a healthy foundation of Nietzsche, Foucault and Buddhism.
So on the one hand there is an intellectual component to being a therapist — being able to be somewhat of a tour guide through your patient’s subconscious — and there is an emotional component, which is just “holding space” and validating the patient’s emotional experience. It’s a dance. An emotional and mental dance.
Lastly, there is also potentially transference. Transference involves the repetition of repressed historical past experiences in a new context with the therapist; the patient “projects” an identity onto the therapist and re-creates a dynamic such as the dynamic that existed many years ago with, say, their smothering mother or emotionally withholding father. To bastardize James Carville’s famous phrase: “It’s about the relationship, stupid.”
Irrespective of the emotional intimacy that may or may not exist in a therapeutic relationship, I recently heard Gabor Maté state that his job as a therapist was to get fired as quickly as possible. That seriously resonated with me. Sometimes even, firing a therapist is an essential part of the patient’s growth and healing.
For my full approach to psychology, therapy and the moves I may make in order to get fired as quickly as possible, check out this recent interview: