People who become therapists often “served as emotional caregivers in our families of origin.” This results in “a preference for passivity, an overemphasis on the client as an innocent and tortured child, and a preference for avoiding conflict.”
—Karen Maroda 🎯
In practice, this means the therapist unconsciously works to keep the patient’s anger and aggression out of the therapy relationship—and so deprives the patient of the opportunity to know and understand a core part of themselves.
Instead of creating therapy relationships where all parts of the patient are welcome and can have their say, they take on the role of “good guy,” caretaker, and soother, and collude with the patient to direct their anger toward a one or another “bad guy” who becomes a mutually designated villain.
Then, neither patient nor therapist has to confront, let alone reckon with, the patient’s anger and hate.
This was a survival strategy in the therapist’s own childhood. It was a matter of emotional survival to soothe and avoid provoking a depressed, angry, or emotionally unstable parent.
The therapist carries these personality dynamics into their therapy relationships, soothing the patient and tiptoeing around aggression.
The therapist and the patient can then have a warm, mutually appreciative relationship. But when the patient leaves therapy, there has been no meaningful change. The self-defeating patterns that led them to therapy in the first place remain unexamined and intact.
This is why psychotherapists must have in-depth personal psychotherapy—to develop enough insight into their own relational patterns to avoid enacting them with their patients.
Here’s the Catch-22 of the therapy profession: if the therapist’s therapist has not done this work themselves, it remains a blind spot. The therapist may love their own therapist—but gain no real insight into their own personality and relational patterns.
Then the pattern is simply replicated and transmitted from one generation of therapists to the next.
In the end, we get therapists who function as warm, supportive caretakers, but not as psychotherapists.
People who become therapists often “served as emotional caregivers in our families of origin.” This results in “a preference for passivity, an overemphasis on the client as an innocent and tortured child, and a preference for avoiding conflict.”
—Karen Maroda 🎯
In practice, this means the therapist unconsciously works to keep the patient’s anger and aggression out of the therapy relationship—and so deprives the patient of the opportunity to know and understand a core part of themselves.
Instead of creating therapy relationships where all parts of the patient are welcome and can have their say, they take on the role of “good guy,” caretaker, and soother, and collude with the patient to direct their anger toward a one or another “bad guy” who becomes a mutually designated villain.
Then, neither patient nor therapist has to confront, let alone reckon with, the patient’s anger and hate.
This was a survival strategy in the therapist’s own childhood. It was a matter of emotional survival to soothe and avoid provoking a depressed, angry, or emotionally unstable parent.
The therapist carries these personality dynamics into their therapy relationships, soothing the patient and tiptoeing around aggression.
The therapist and the patient can then have a warm, mutually appreciative relationship. But when the patient leaves therapy, there has been no meaningful change. The self-defeating patterns that led them to therapy in the first place remain unexamined and intact.
This is why psychotherapists must have in-depth personal psychotherapy—to develop enough insight into their own relational patterns to avoid enacting them with their patients.
Here’s the Catch-22 of the therapy profession: if the therapist’s therapist has not done this work themselves, it remains a blind spot. The therapist may love their own therapist—but gain no real insight into their own personality and relational patterns.
Then the pattern is simply replicated and transmitted from one generation of therapists to the next.
In the end, we get therapists who function as warm, supportive caretakers, but not as psychotherapists.