From the start of our therapeutic journey with a client we are likely to underestimate the impact of breaks in the work. We might gauge theoretically the meaning, aligning a break to any kind of rupture in the client history can feel regressive, but to feel the prospective rupture comes often in surprising forms as we start out in practice.
The fundamental core of our therapeutic endeavour is the consistency. The framework to contain and hold, building a trusting and predictable alliance. It may be subtle the value that comes with a designated time each week, the 50-minute hour, a consistent and reliable basis for a relationship to be predicated upon. However, by providing this secure base we are potentially circuit-breaking a pattern of unreliability, unpredictability and inconsistent care at the heart of the client’s world.
If we are working with clients whose early object-relationships were at best inconsistent and at worst abusive/ unpredictable, it is likely that from this core experience that patterns of self-inflicted neglect become repeated, acted out and turned to like internal negligent care-givers and in multiple ways get played out. Patterns, however destructive, can become a soothing way to repeat what’s known. The familiar is the attachment, even when the harm is obvious in its ritualising surrogate parental care, it is a relationship of sorts. Noticing these patterns and destructive patterns as a method of making sense of early neglect is key as we build our understanding of our clients’ needs.
Our breaks in the work are part of an understanding that carry meaning and require acknowledging with an emotional language, however awkward and uncomfortable it might feel.
Often our breaks are dismissed as of no importance. For example, I might say at the start of the session:
I am letting you know that I will be having a break between…. And we will resume on….
Oh fine…. Of course, you need a break, must be draining listening to all my problems.
On the face of it, the client welcomes a break from therapy. It’s a financial saving and a break from the routine of attendance. It is likely to be far from obvious that a break has any meaning other than it being a break that suits both!
The importance of alerting the client to the break at the start of the session is illustrated here in the hiding in plain sight response. Here, it is important to bank how already so much is being said. You having to endure my problems. I’m a drain.
As the session unfolds what I would listen out for is further laments, feeling let down, over-looked, unheard…. And here it would be worth pointing out an appreciation of the thing they are consciously unhappy about, while also pointing out that I too am not always available. For instance, when I let you know about my break….your response is .. I’m a drain….
There are multiple ways to bring into the session a recognition that this relationship too isn’t always reliable giving scope to address the way in which the client automatically reaches for you need protecting from me….. Their sense of self is unconsciously illustrated as a problem as the break is announced. But this also leads us to resentments that come with a break that isn’t initiated by them, it’s not in their control. How unfair that when you the counsellor take a break there’s no fee but when I take a break I have to pay!
Here we have multiple opportunities to address not only the unfairness in unreliability but also underlying resentments that stem from announcing a break.
Here is an example of what can get missed as the counsellor returns from their break. All the following material is disguised and mainly made up. I refer to the client as T and the Counsellor as C:
T: Hope you’ve had a good break? I found it a relief not to have to be here for the last 2 weeks….climbing that hill haha…..
Pause
I told Lucy about the friend who ghosted me and I cried with her. You remember that friend I told you about? I tried to keep the information down, but I had a dream about a mentor and that friend kept appearing in my dream…I felt irritated when I woke up from it.
I knew you’d say it makes you think of my Dad… (client rolls his eyes)
Pause
I’ve a colleague at work who reacts and keeps batting me off at the smallest slight….blanks me.
C: Maybe you’re filling in the blanks like you had to when your Dad was away?
T: I never felt it was my fault that my Dad wasn’t around. I knew my Dad was having an affair. My mum eventually told me herself but not until I was in my twenties. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d always known. She had to be both parents.
C: You could see your mum as a whole person but only saw your Dad in parts.
T: Dad was always kind to me – but that’s all I knew and saw of him. Mum would say – it’s hard for you but harder for your Dad who misses all of us. How strange a family is who don’t talk about what’s actually going on and there we were, kept in the dark.
Would I have been more self-critical if my Dad hadn’t been around at all? Maybe… I’ve been trying over these 2 weeks to make sense of my past experience on my own.
By the second week I wanted someone to talk to. I wanted my Dad to be there because he wasn’t there. I’d wished my Dad was around more as a child – I still wish this. But I never say it!
How supervision helps
The counsellor cannot quite hear what underlies the complaints and longings. On some level the story of the absent father is a welcome relief as a focus rather than settling on the additional meaning of how these longings occur in the counsellor’s absence, reminiscent of familial absence.
It’s a very acute example of how a client can talk to us about the feelings and needs that surface during a break but in a very unconscious subtext. This is not to discard remotely the importance of the thoughts and reflections the client is making regarding the absence of their father in childhood – a recognition rarely acknowledged in previous sessions, but it is the fact that this occurs during the break that’s key to the unconscious communication.
These conversations and explorations are so important in a context where neglect and troubled early object relationships have shaped the subsequent patterns that cause such a client to be compliant in the counselling. In other words, the client’s concern for their counsellor may well disguise the underlying hurt and rage potentially inclined to surface in a therapeutic break.
An example of how invaluable it is for us to listen out for and to be curious about these underlying communications.
