The number of words in this article is 4000+｜It is expected to take 11min
article｜Dai Wenmin (Simple Psychological Certification·Psychological Counselor)
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A small piece of "attack"
Suddenly caught a cold and fever in the middle of the night, and I was still a little dizzy until the morning. This acute cold made me not have time to ask Xiao A for adjustment consultation, so I could only carry my drowsy brain into the consultation at the agreed time. When the consultation was conducted for more than twenty minutes, my head ached again and my attention was a little distracted.
Xiao A is telling a dream she had a few days ago, and I asked her to associate with the dream.
She thought of her childhood following her parents on a train to visit her relative's house. At the crowded station, she held her mother's clothes tightly and was afraid that the crowd would be dispersed. Her mother went to the bathroom and asked her to follow her father. She stood beside her father, while her father called and smoked, and seemed to forget her around her casually.
Speaking of this, she paused, looked at me and said: You seem very tired and sleepy. She looked a little hesitant and dissatisfied when she spoke.
I asked her: What does my tired look make you feel?
She paused again and said incoherently: You are a little unserious in this way. Consultation is your job, shouldn’t you take it seriously? I have always been very serious and dedicated to my clients or leaders at work, but maybe you are tired, it doesn’t matter! Work is always tiring.
After she finished speaking, she looked at me nervously, as if she was uneasy about expressing her dissatisfaction with me.
Then we were silent for a moment. I quietly and seriously thought about what Xiao A just said, as well as the dreams and dream associations he mentioned when he entered the consultation, and felt the dissatisfaction and uneasiness flowing in her heart at this moment. It seems that she saw the desire deep in her heart flashing in her consultation just now.
I said: It is really not easy for you to express your dissatisfaction with me.
After hearing this, she looked aggrieved and sad, and said in a low voice with red eyes: It's very difficult.
I continued: It is very important that you can say it. Maybe you just felt that I was not very serious and devoted to being with you. Just like when you were a child, you were with your parents. They always paid attention to your own affairs, making you feel that you were not valued, and it seemed that they would forget your existence at any time.
At the same time, you are worried that you will drag them down. You tell yourself that they are tired and have no energy to take care of you. You always feel so wronged that you dare not express your dissatisfaction or make demands.
The difficulty of accepting the client's "expressing attack"
When I heard Xiao A express dissatisfaction with me, I also felt uncomfortable in my heart. I worked so hard to keep working, but she was dissatisfied, and even had the urge to admit that I was not focused enough and end the consultation in advance.
As a psychological counselor, I know that expressing aggressiveness is very difficult and dangerous for many clients. If I take action at this moment, it will undoubtedly repeat Xiao A's inner expectations that "it is not important to be abandoned."
In Xiao A's growth experience, she was pushed away by her parents countless times for various reasons such as "tired work, hard work, and lack of energy", making her feel that she is a burden to others and that she is not important. For this reason, she suppressed her anger and aggressiveness, and weaved various rational reasons for her parents who do not care about herself and are self-centered.
Psychological counseling work is to present the client's continuous repetition of important relationship patterns, provide a corrective emotional experience, hold her in her heart with complex emotions of anger and uneasiness, accept and affirm her feelings and needs, let her experience that her needs are seen and affirmed, and it is important to experience herself. This corrective emotional experience of
makes her self more powerful and further develops recognition of herself.
Why does it take us to express aggressiveness to psychological counselors?
The more we don’t know, have no chance to interact for a long time, and have a lower level than ourselves, the more we are, the more difficult it is to express aggressiveness to those who are familiar with and have higher power and status than ourselves.
For example, when we are shopping or dining outside, we are neglected by sales staff or service staff, and we can easily express dissatisfaction or even blame them. Just like " kicking cat effect ", some negative emotions accumulated in the heart and nowhere to release, people's dissatisfaction and bad moods are generally transmitted in sequence along the social relationship chain composed of hierarchy and strength.
spreads from the spire of the pyramid to the bottom, and the weakest element that has nowhere to vent will become the ultimate victim. When facing a teacher or a person with a relatively higher leadership position, it is difficult to express even if he is dissatisfied and he tries his best to maintain a respectful and obedient attitude.
In psychological counseling, psychological counselors maintain a neutral work attitude, providing clients with open consultation space that can be discussed freely.
Since the psychological counseling process, the interviewer is mainly focused on listening. Psychological counselors rarely reveal personal information and talk about themselves, while the client is asked to reveal his inner world during consultation as much as possible.
This makes the personal information of both parties in the consultation relationship unequal, and in the eyes of the visitor, the psychological counselor seems to be covered with a mysterious and majestic veil.
The client walked into the consultation with his own troubles for help. As the consultation deepened, deep emotions and unmet needs in his heart inevitably emerged, which also put the client in a weaker and helpless position.
Therefore, in the consultation relationship, the client is in a fragile and unequal position. Even if he is dissatisfied with the performance of the psychological counselor or the psychological counselor during the psychological counseling process, it is difficult to express negative emotions such as anger and dissatisfaction. How does "attack" occur in
psychological counseling?
In the early stage of psychological counseling, the client felt that the psychological counselor was unconditionally actively concerned, empathized with sexual understanding, and responded to the client's complex emotional experience without judgment, making the client feel safe and trustworthy.
then develops positive emotions such as love, like, trust, care, and obsession for the psychological counselor, and obtains some changes from psychological counseling. The consultation relationship gradually enters the "honeymoon period", and the clients have more ideal expectations for the psychological counselor.
At this stage, the client wants to get closer to the psychological counselor and expects to get more satisfaction. On the other hand, deeper subconscious dilemma is also looming, and clients are more uneasy and vulnerable from this threat, and have created more demands and higher expectations for getting stronger, safer and more beneficial support from psychological counseling.
As psychological counseling deepens, the consultation relationship also produces deeper connections. The consultation relationship is like the intimate relationship in our lives. The closer gets, the more flaws you see, the more ideal image of the psychological counselor in the client's heart, gradually deteriorates and destroys .
The client begins to feel that he cannot be understood by the psychological counselor at all times. Some unspeakable needs are not seen by the psychological counselor. The client suffers frustration and feels angry, and even has a "disillusionment" about the idealized impression of the psychological counselor, so he has negative emotions such as dissatisfaction, distrust, resistance, jealousy, belittling, disgust, resentment, anger, and hostility towards the psychological counselor.
In psychological counseling, clients may express their attacks on psychological counselors by being negative, joking, late or changing counseling settings, accusing or questioning psychological counselors, or even aggravating symptoms.
At the beginning, when the mother satisfies the baby's nutritional needs, relieves his hunger, and gives him sensory pleasure - when he experiences the stimulation by sucking his mother's breasts, this stimulation makes him happy and satisfy - he loves his mother; such satisfaction is a very basic part of the child's sexual traits and is also the initial manifestation of sexual traits.
However, when the baby is hungry, desire is not satisfied, or feels physical pain or discomfort, the whole situation suddenly changes, the feeling of hatred and attack are aroused, and the baby is dominated by an impulse of destruction, and he wants to destroy a person who is the object of all his desires. In the baby's heart, this person is related to everything he has experienced, whether it is good or bad.
- Excerpted from Melanie Klein's "Love, Hate and Repair"
Psychological counselor's understanding of the "attack" of clients
Clients can express attacks on psychological counselors, indicating that the counseling relationship has established a trustworthy foundation and a relatively stable emotional connection.
The client has grown up, has strengthened his own strength, is able to protect his own interests, express more unmet needs, and promotes the change of form of the consultation relationship through attacks to adapt to new developments.
Psychological counseling arrives at the client's deeper growth issues or trauma. The client is full of in-depth but afraid of in-depth contradictions and creates impedance. It is expected that the psychological counselor can provide more positive and powerful help. Behind the attack is a more eager desire to grow and repair trauma. Through the attack, we test whether the psychological counselor can accommodate his negative emotions and whether the consultation relationship is stable enough.
In the view of Winnicott, a psychotherapist of the British object relations genre, aggression is equivalent to vitality and motivation . He believes that the earliest evidence of aggression is that in the uterus or in the mother's arms, the baby's innate aggression is expressed in contact and confrontation with the mother, and it also exists in eager and greedy sucking and chewing.
As the baby grows up, the nature of aggressiveness is changing. This change is entirely dependent on the environment. In a sufficiently good nurturing and promoting environment, children's aggressiveness is gradually integrated. If the environment is not good enough, aggressiveness will be displayed in a destructive, antisocial way.
If the mother can survive being attacked by the baby, it will make the baby realize that the mother is not part of him and is not under his control, so aggressiveness is an important developmental force.
If the mother cannot cope with the baby's attack on her, especially when she retaliates, the destructiveness that occurs at this time will become a feature of the child's personality, and the child may defend against it by suppressing the attack or turning the attack to itself.
In this context, Winnicott proposed that in clinical situations, the healthier the child is.
What happens if you attack the psychological counselor in psychological counseling?
When the client expresses negative emotions about psychological counseling and expresses dissatisfaction and attacks towards the psychological counselor, this leads psychological counseling into an important moment and a major therapeutic turning point. The client bears the risks and pressures of disrupting the counseling relationship and puts higher requirements for psychological counseling in an aggressive manner.
Anyone's instinctive reaction after being attacked includes counterattack, silence, avoidance and other manifestations. A psychological counselor is also a human being, and may also produce instinctive reactions without self-awareness.
However, the consultation relationship is completely different from daily interpersonal relationships. It is a therapeutic relationship. One of the professional competences of psychological counselors is to understand and tolerate the negative emotions and attacks of the client, to withstand the attacks of the client with an open and sincere attitude without retaliating against them, tolerate the misunderstanding, accusation, and denial of the client without defensive self-judgment, and to withstand the test of challenge and growth from the client.
and still focus on the client's inner experience and inner feelings, express real emotions to the client, communicate and discuss with the client honestly, respond to a deep understanding of the emotional needs behind the client's negative emotions and aggression, and interpret the dilemma of the client's personal growth issues. The needs and emotions behind the client's attacks are accepted, seen and understood, and the attack driving force will also be alleviated.
In Winnicott's view, destructiveness has positive value. If the self becomes real first through recognition, then the object becomes real first through aggressive destruction.
The object is destroyed but in fact it withstands the damage, which makes the object located outside the control of children's power.
If the object bears all the damage of the subject and does not retaliate, then the subject can regard the object as a completely real individual that transcends his power. It is in this way that the object develops its own independence and life.
It can be seen from this that in Winnicott, destructiveness is an achievement, because children risk aggression, experience the survival of the object and the limitations of their own sense of omnipotence.
Destructiveness is an achievement, because it means tolerance of contradictory emotions and accepting individual aggression. The objects that bear attacks and destruction must be resilient rather than repulsive, and can withstand attacks without revenge.
Click on the business card to see other articles of the author
Melannik Moyin "Love, Hate and Repair"
Journal of Nanjing Normal University Xi Haoli "Psychoanalytical Interpretation of Children's Aggression-Winnicott's Aggression Theory"
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