TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore a phenomenon that, from what I’ve seen, is much more common than people realize, and that is when the therapy client is healthier than the therapist. I never knew such a thing existed. I just assumed, before I ever went to therapy and before I became a therapist, that such a thing was impossible. Naturally, of course, obviously the therapist is going to be healthier than the client. That’s how they help them.
Well, it first dawned on me that this wasn’t necessarily the case when I started to go to therapy. I started spending a lot of time, twice a week for quite a while, in therapy, and I started having a lot of conflict with my therapist. Over time, the question started coming into my mind. I’d never heard of such a question before, but it came into my mind: ‘Am I healthier than my therapist?’ and I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. I even did what I was supposed to do by being so honest in psychotherapy, by talking about it with my psychotherapist. She totally, absolutely, fundamentally denied that such a thing was possible. She just went with the assumption, and she probably even believed it, that ‘No, obviously, Daniel, you’re less healthy than I am. I know more about you. I have my stuff more together.’
Well, as time went on, I thought about it more and I became a therapist. I listened to so many of my clients talk about their relationships with their past therapists. I had a lot of friends who were in psychotherapy, and I listened to them talk about their relationships with their therapist, and I brought up my idea. Over time, I started to formulate an idea of why it is so common—not always true, but so commonly true—that therapy clients are healthier than their therapists.
The first one, the first one actually is very simple, and I have two basic areas that I’m going to talk about. Maybe I’ll think of some more as the video goes on, but this is the two basic areas. The first one is that therapy clients so often are humble. Humble. They’re ready to learn, they’re willing to grow, they’re willing to look at themselves and consider that they might be wrong. That is a very healthy state. That is a state that is healthy and provokes more healthiness, provokes more growth.
Whereas, being really humble, it’s not a common quality in psychotherapists. It should be. A good psychotherapist will inevitably be humble, but most are not. That’s what I’ve observed over time. I’ve observed quite a lot of therapists, and mostly what I see is they’re the opposite of humble. They are arrogant. Now, there are different ways that they can hide it. They can hide it by being professional, they can hide it by using all sorts of fancy language, they can hide it from themselves by being in denial. But so many therapists, perhaps most, are very arrogant. They believe they have the answers, they have the tools, they have the techniques, they have the diagnostic power on their side. They know what to do in every situation, and if they can’t help someone—and so much of the time when people have real problems, really open problems, people are really open and emotional about their problems—therapists really don’t know what to do.
They know how to try to tie up a person’s problems and make it seem like it’s gone away, but they don’t know how to really help them through their problems, because most therapists haven’t figured out how to help themselves through their own problems. That’s what I’ve observed again and again. And so what the therapist does if the client absolutely, fundamentally remains open and humble and growing? Well, the therapist has ways to get rid of them, push them out.
If they can’t figure out how to push the client’s feelings down, make them bury their feelings, perhaps even through pathologizing them, shaming them, breaking them down, hurting them in different ways—perhaps even replicating the very traumas that caused the client to have his or her problems in the first place. If the therapist cannot do that, which they often do, they often succeed at doing this and shutting down the client in the therapy relationship, then they get rid of them. They say: ‘Your problems are too serious for me. You need to go see a psychiatrist. You need a higher form of care,’ or simply, ‘I just can’t work with you. I can’t deal with your problems,’ or ‘You need medication. You need something more.’
In other words, ‘You are too fundamentally growth-oriented for me. You are too healthy for me. You cause me too much stress.’ Actually, what they’re really saying, if they could be really fundamentally honest, is: ‘You are threatening my arrogance too much. You are threatening my facade too much. You are threatening my denial too much. You are too healthy and health-oriented for me. I am too shut down to be able to work with you. I need to get rid of you.’
The problem is, none of this is said out in the open. It’s not said using these actual words. The therapist would have to be very, very humble to say these things to the client, so instead, they don’t say it. They just blame the client. And so often, because the client is looking for love, looking for acceptance, looking for a caring ear, looking for empathy—sadly underneath it, in a replication of their unresolved traumas, looking for a parental figure, having the fantasy that they finally have found this parental figure—they believe the therapist. They believe that this person knows better, and they feel ashamed. Often, they shut down and want to crush their own growth process in order to do ‘what the therapist says is right,’ even though it is wrong.
This is such a common dynamic in psychotherapy, where the therapist is less healthy than the client, and yet the therapist has more power. So the client actually shuts down and doesn’t grow. Can shut down their whole growth process sometimes, and what’s so sad is the greater mental health system so often says that this is good. They side with the psychotherapist. They say: ‘Oh, now that you’re more shut down…’ They don’t actually say this, but what they say is: ‘Oh, you’re actually experiencing fewer symptoms,’ because often people who are not growing at all, who have pushed all their feelings down, buried everything under a wall of dissociation and denial, well, they don’t look like they’re as much in despair.
This is often the case with people who have a ‘good reaction’ to psychiatric medication. It makes a lot of their feelings go away. It makes a lot of their despair go away. They become less healthy, but by society’s standards, by the mental health system’s standards, by the therapists’ own standards often, ‘they have fewer symptoms.’ They have become, on paper, healthier. They are improving. They can have ‘higher functioning’ sometimes, whereas in reality they have become less healthy. They have actually gotten dragged down to the level of the therapist.
So the second area actually is kind of related to the first area. This is about the different levels or stages of the healing process. When people are the least healed, when people are the most stuck on their emotional healing process from the traumas they have experienced in their life, they are dissociated. They’re blocked from their feelings, they’re blocked from their post-traumatic feelings, they’re blocked often from knowledge or awareness of how much they are traumatized. They are not really suffering that much, they’re not growing that much, they’re really out of touch.
This dissociated state is extremely common in psychotherapists. I’ve seen it again and again and again. They’re not in touch with their deeper feelings, they’re not in touch with their deeper traumas, or actually this is probably more common: they’re in touch with a small number of their traumas but not a greater scope of their traumas. By and large, they have fit into society’s and the mental health system’s conception of what healthiness is, and that is to be dissociated. To be dissociated, to push down traumas, to not heal them, to forgive all your traumatizers, to ‘rise above,’ to be close with your parents and other people who might have harmed you. This is called ‘healthiness.’ You have come out the other side, you’ve learned how to live in the now, you can be present, you have maybe ‘some’ of your feelings back, you have figured out how to function in the world, but fundamentally, on a psychological level, these people are dissociated.
And they get a lot of perks for being dissociated, because one of the perks is society.
Calls them healthy. Well, people very rarely come to psychotherapy as a client if they are in a dissociated state. People who are in dissociated states rarely go to psychotherapy, because if you’re dissociated enough, often you feel pretty good.
People come to psychotherapy when their dissociation is not working. People come to psychotherapy when they are in a healthier state than dissociation, when their dissociation has broken open and they are suffering. They are in pain, they’re feeling horrible, they’re feeling frustration, anguish, existential despair. Perhaps they’re feeling anger, perhaps they’re feeling rage. Perhaps they’re being flooded with memories and all these terrible feelings of loss for what they went through, and they’re looking for the psychotherapist to help them.
Now, if the psychotherapist is actually healthier, they can help the person deal with their suffering by going up to an even healthier state, which is moving into grieving. Grieving is where the person acknowledges their loss, starts to integrate all these different feelings, steps forward into making sense of what they are going through now and where it came from, really making sense of their childhood history, of the traumas they suffered, of the losses and the abandonments and the neglects and the violations and the abuses that they suffered.
This is how people heal from suffering. This is how they make sense of suffering and get their life back, reconnect with the truth that’s deeply within them underneath their traumas. But that’s not what most psychotherapists do for their clients, because most psychotherapists haven’t figured out much, or sometimes at all, how to do this for themselves. Some whole schools of therapy are about not dealing with this at all!
In fact, what most psychotherapists do with the backing of the mental health system is they take people who are in suffering and try to help them go back to dissociation. That’s what the psychotherapists themselves have done. This is the ideal of the mental health system in society, and they do this to their clients. They take people who are in a healthier state and they try to make them less healthy.
What they do is they try to make the clients become reflections of the therapists themselves. And this is very common. And the sad thing is, they don’t say to their clients that that’s what they are doing, because they don’t even know it themselves! They’re not healthy enough, they don’t have enough perspective on their own selves as people, as healing people, lack-of-healing people, or as psychotherapists to know that this is, on an emotional level, what is going on in this dynamic.
They actually believe often that they are helping their clients when they are taking their clients and pushing them, pressuring them, manipulating them often back into dissociation. And often the clients believe them, because the clients have come so vulnerable and so humble. They want to believe that this person with the fancy office and the fancy degrees and the fancy clothes and the person who accepts their money and the person who has knowledge and societal backing and a license and malpractice insurance, they want to believe that this person knows what they’re talking about, whereas so often the case is this person doesn’t.
Well, when it becomes interesting is when the client doesn’t accept what the psychotherapist says. Often the client has a little voice inside their head that says, ‘I don’t think this is right,’ but so often the psychotherapist has so much power that they crush that voice, sometimes for months or years, sometimes forever in people. But there are some psychotherapy clients, I see myself as having been one of those all the times I went to psychotherapy, and I’ve met quite a few other people who just know, they’re like, ‘No, what my psychotherapist was doing to me was not right! They were not helping me grow, they were trying to push me to do the opposite of growing. They were trying to break me down, shame me, replicate the traumas that I already went through.’
And this is where psychotherapy relationships between client and therapist can become very problematic, very dramatic. There can be a lot of conflict between therapist and client, there can be a lot of sparks, it can get ugly. It can be extremely threatening to the psychotherapist. I’ve heard some psychotherapists even describe this dynamic to me where they’re not even aware of what’s going on, but it can really cause a lot of existential crisis inside of the psychotherapist, because the client is actually trying to wake up the therapist.
In effect, what the client is saying to the therapist is, ‘Wake up, wake up! Feel your feelings! Go back to what you went through in your life so that you can help me!’ And the psychotherapist doesn’t want to do it because it is too painful. They don’t want to break down the facade of their life, so instead they go to war with the client and they try to break the client down.
And what will happen in the end is they will win and break the client down, or the sparks will continue forever. But what I’ve seen is it doesn’t last forever, because usually what happens is either, and this is the best case, somehow the relationship ends and the client quits and moves on in their life and figures out how to process what actually happened in the psychotherapy. Or, and I’ve seen this happen sometimes and it’s really sad, this is when the therapist actually can do some pretty nasty things to the client.
Sometimes, for instance, they can get the client hospitalized psychiatrically. ‘Oh, this person is having a psychotic breakdown or xyz,’ and sometimes they’re actually driving their client crazy, driving them mad literally, and can get them forcibly hospitalized, things like that, if the client is simply too healthy and will not quit.
I think in the best case scenario when these kind of dynamics happen and the client starts to become aware that they are healthier than their psychotherapist, the best thing that they can do is get out, pull out as quickly as possible. I’m glad that I was able to do that and figure it out, just move on, because being with someone who is in a position of power over one who is actually less healthy is a very dangerous situation.
And so what I found for myself, and I’ve seen it with some other people, is that they quit, they get out of the therapy and they begin to do self-therapy or even get some sort of peer support. Find friends, find other people who are equals or maybe people who are role models who are actually healthier, who can help one. Or I have seen some people who switch psychotherapists and actually find someone out there, the rare psychotherapist who is actually healthier, who is actually moving forward on their own healing process, who has taken on their suffering and not tried to bury it and, instead, has moved forward into grieving and has even, heaven forbid, processed a lot of their grieving and has a lot of wisdom and insight and really can be useful to a person who is suffering.
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