(a.)
I have been in therapy for a few months. I was sexually abused by my brother
and grandfather. I also have abandonment issues concerning my mother. My
problem is, I have developed this tremendous feeling of caring for my therapist,
and I don’t know whether to tell him of this. Also, I recently have
begun feeling rejected by him, and I don’t understand these feelings.
The last session, it was all I could do to sit there. Are these feelings
normal?
(b.) I have been in therapy for about three years, and have a good relationship
with my therapist, however I left her today feeling murderous feelings towards
her, this rage towards her is building up, and I am very scared at these
feelings, as they are too violent for me to cope with. . . .
I am worried I will explode at her. . . . Please assure me
this is normal, and have you any suggestions how . . . I can protect
me and her from these feelings.
Both of these questions touch on similar
issues.
First of all
I will assume that your psychotherapists have not done something grossly
incompetent or illegal that would warrant such feelings on your part. And
I will assume that the writer of the second question hasn’t actually
murdered someone before.
In regard to
feelings of caring for a psychotherapist, see the other questions about
transference issues, especially the erotic
transference.
Now, the
flip side
of caring and love is hate, and that brings us to the
rage because of feeling
rejected. Most likely, the psychotherapist has simply done something during
the ordinary course of psychotherapy that has touched on some emotional wound
from your past, thus stimulating a whole reservoir of your unconscious
anger. Yes, you
feel rejected by your psychotherapist for some actual event, but
those intense feelings of yours really point right through the psychotherapist
and back to unspoken anger from your own childhood.
Such a thing
is common in psychotherapy, but the intensity of such anger varies
from person to person. Usually, persons from dysfunctional
families—families characterized by alcoholism, violence, marital infidelity,
or physical or sexual abuse—have deep wounds and can have very strong
and frightening experiences of anger within psychotherapy.
In this respect,
it is important to understand that a child in such a dysfunctional family
learns to survive by suppressing and hiding any intense feelings. That kind
of emotional suppression is what fills that reservoir of
unconscious anger
in the first place. But the only way to find healing for all the emotional
wounds of childhood is, as an adult, to give voice to all the emotions that
were suppressed as a child. By speaking about them you essentially put them
into language and give them names; it’s a bit like the fairy tale in
which by naming Rumpelstilzchen the queen set herself free of his
power over her.
Thus your task
in psychotherapy is not to get angry with your psychotherapist but
to talk about the fact that you feel hurt, no matter how frightening
your feelings may seem. By learning how to speak about feelings of hurt and
vulnerability in psychotherapy you essentially learn to do what you didn’t
learn as a child: to be emotionally
honest.
Furthermore, having learned
to face your anger,
you can then face the true pain of your wounds that underlies the anger—and
if you do that successfully, you will be able, eventually, to
forgive those
who hurt you. Then you will be healed.
So don’t
hide anything from the psychotherapist. Speak it.
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