In another lifetime, I was a seventh grade teacher. Over the course of the years, there were two students I felt I had wronged and bided my time, seeking an opportunity to set things right. When the two of them had graduated twelfth grade, I tracked them both down and apologized for my youth, my inexperience, my mistakes, and for the impact of my actions. Both seemed indifferent to my apologies, and I still wonder if there is something I can do. Perhaps there are other students who have grievances against me, but I cannot think of any role I may have played in those grievances. And for the most part, if I have wronged a student unknowingly, I have been chalked up to a bad experience, a lousy teacher, and those students have most assuredly moved on.

As a therapist, things are much more complicated.

The therapeutic alliance, the therapeutic relationship, is the crux of therapy. It’s the pivotal piece of the therapy I do. It’s the attachment piece, it’s the transference piece, and it’s the therapist’s-self-as-tool. It’s the vulnerability of a client who has entrusted her life to me. And I dare not fail him.

The therapeutic relationship is a microcosm of the outside relationships a client encounters and what I do in the room—and out—will be the reparative work that the client needs to be a functional spouse, parent, friend, employee, or sibling.

As I always say, clients usually come to therapy because of relationship issues. It may be presented as “I can’t find a job,” but it’s really, “I don’t know how to engage with other people in a pleasant and warm manner,” which is crucial to acing a job interview.

And in the therapy room, the difficulty the client has with outside relationships emerges in living color. If she is abrasive or controlling; if she is passive or insecure; all of it plays itself out with the therapist. It will be in how she orders me to move my chair this way or that; it will be how she won’t ask for a drink of water from my cooler even if she has just walked ten blocks from the bus on a hot summer day. It will be how she wants to make me laugh; it will be how she is solicitous of my cough. It will be how she comments on my clothing or shoes, critical and disapproving; how she mentions my articles, reflective and open.

It is of paramount importance to the therapy that I establish a positive therapeutic relationship with each and every client.

But that is not always possible.

Sometimes, it’s me. I am experiencing countertransference. Something about the client puts me on the defensive, raises my hackles, makes me feel insecure or incompetent. Countertransference is the therapist’s version of transference. It’s when a therapist is reacting to a client not from the present interactions, but in response to something in the client that reminds her of other people in her own life.

When that happens, I need to work it out in supervision. I cannot let my own stuff interfere with therapy. It’s simply unfair to the client, and it’s not the client’s fault that she reminds me of my awful third grade teacher! And usually I work it out. Because I really like my clients and I admire them for their courage in coming to therapy.

Sometimes, though, it’s not me. It’s the client. It’s the transference. She is transferring her difficulties in outside relationships into the therapy room and I’m getting to feel what other people in his life feel. And believe it or not, I thrive on those types of clients. It challenges me to help that client become authentic and warm and engaging and loving in the relationship within my office so that they can transfer that to their spouses, children, and friends.

When there are breaches in the relationship, I usually bring it right into the room. Comment on it, examine it, explore it. Sometimes, I explain it so the client can understand, giving the psychoeducation of transference to help a client understand her anger at me in terms of the anger she carries around since childhood at her teachers.

When I can work this through with a client, it gives us both immense satisfaction. And my client truly notices the change in the relationship within the therapy room, and the even more important changes outside of the therapy room.

The most painful part of being a therapist (for me) is when a client is obviously (to me) experiencing negative transference, reacting to all I do—even the most seemingly benign behaviors—with anger and frustration. When the client sees everything I do, despite my most sincere desire to help—from a lens of mistrust and betrayal, and terminates without working this through. It is most painful for me; it is the place where I experience the most acute feelings of failure, when a client leaves in anger at me, at my perceived wrongs, and there is nothing I can do to repair once she is gone.

When this happens, I always consult with my supervisor. Usually, I will reach out. Once, twice, even a third time. I must keep that balance as a therapist knowing that my client may feel even more violated if I repeatedly reach out to repair. It may be felt as severely intrusive or money-hungry (that I am trying to get her back because I don’t want to lose a paying customer, so to speak). Sometimes, if I know for certain a client will never return or under specific circumstances in which I feel it would be in the client’s best interests, I will offer a free session to terminate properly, so that they can move on to another therapist with positive feelings.

When a client is angry at a therapist, the damage is far greater than any damage from a teacher can be. And I am hyper sensitive to that knowledge.

Sometimes, it’s not the transference and it’s not the countertransference. Sometimes, I really make mistakes. Not because of the countertransference, but because I am person in the here-and-now. Because I am human (yep!) and capable of being upset, angry, bored, tired, frustrated, and incompetent. And sometimes, in the room with a client, any of those very human feelings can come up and I can react in a very un-therapeutic way. I can say something stupid (yep), or do something stupid. And that is really not okay. But it happens anyway.

And sometimes, it’s not the transference, and the client—and very real human being as well, can make mistakes, too. And that is really okay. And of course it’s going to happen eventually

But in either case, here’s something you need to know and know it well. Those mistakes, human mistakes, are great! Because in the repair of the therapeutic rupture is when the real and the best of therapy occurs.

Why?

In the second part of this column I will talk about this why and the function of repair in the therapeutic relationship. I will also talk about the dangers of a therapist who harms the therapeutic relationship due to narcissistic needs of their own, the markers to know if this is happening in therapy, and what a client can do about it when it happens.

NOTE: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BINAH MAGAZINE'S BIWEEKLY COLUMN "THERAPY: A SNEAK PEEK INSIDE"

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Read current articles in my bi-weekly column THERAPY: A SNEAK PEEK INSIDE in Binah Magazine, available on newsstands every Monday.