July 29, 2025 • 33 mins
This week, In the last of two bonus episodes, we’re doing another case consultation with our intern Ben, a psychology graduate student who pre-interviews the guests and helps select who gets on the show. Today we’re having an honest conversation about the session “Becca and Jake’s Marital Impasse”– and what we wish we had done differently.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
So hi everyone, It's Laurie and I'm here with Guy
as usual, but today we're here with a third person,
and that is Ben Bernstein. Ben is training to be
a therapist, and he is the person who first talks
to our guests before Guy and I have any inkling
of what we're in for. So Ben is the person
who interviews the people who write into us and helps
(00:27):
us to see who might be right for an episode.
And we wanted to talk with Ben because when we
do our session, sometimes we look back on them and
we say that went really well. We really got through
to this person, and then there are times when maybe
we didn't get through in the way that we wanted to,
and we thought it would be interesting for everybody to
hear a little bit about our process and what we're
(00:50):
thinking at certain moments in some of the episodes that
you've heard this season. So today we're going to look
in an episode where we didn't quite get through in
the way we wanted to, and we're going to unpack
that a little bit with Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
And we're going to start with a recent episode and
our guests were Becca and Jake. So Ben, tell us
about your conversations with them before the episode was taped.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Thanks for having me on. I love this episode. In
this episode, just to sort of frame it for listeners,
we hear from Becca, who is a woman who loves
her partner Jake, but she worries about his anger towards
their young children, Isabella and Dean, and she's considering whether
she should leave Jake to protect the kids. When I
first spoke with them, I wasn't sure where a potential
(01:32):
episode would go. I thought it could go in one
of two directions. Either it could focus on Jake's anger
towards his kids, or maybe additionally, it could focus on
Becka and Jake's relationship with each other, and in a way,
I was curious to see where you guys would take
it and how you would navigate what were to in
some ways separate relationships in some ways connected relationships. So
(01:55):
here's a clip of what you both said before the
session started.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Well, it's interesting because says that there's no abuse, but
lashing out at children verbally is a form of emotional abuse,
so certainly can be when it's harsh and it goes
on over time. So I'm really glad that Jake is
actually joining us today because it sounds like something we
really need to talk to both parents about to get
(02:19):
an understanding of what's going on and why and what
can change there.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, exactly. Emotional violence is abuse, and it has long
lasting effects, and it can be very traumatic, especially when
it's ongoing. And when it's ongoing, we call that complex
trauma because it's not one event, it's multiple events happening
all the time. And it sounds like Jake realizes that
something needs to change, but he's having trouble doing the changing,
(02:45):
and that's why I think it's important that we're having
both of them on.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
One of my first questions for you is whether the
problem of a father yelling at his kids brings anything
up for you both, or there are any things on
your mind as you were starting the session that maybe
influenced the direction you decided to ultimately take.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Well, I think for me as a parent, whenever I
hear something like that, I always have a visceral reaction
to it. And I think one of the challenges we
all have as therapists is if there is something that
touches us personally in our lives that we're going to
have to be really careful about separating out our own
(03:24):
feelings about it in order to get into the world
of the other person and really have compassion for that
person and be able to hold that person both in
terms of holding them accountable, but also holding whatever pain
is causing them to behave in this way.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
And for me as well, whenever I have a case
in which they're young children who are being impacted negatively,
there's a huge urgency that I feel to get a
result quickly, to do something, because every day that Puss
is in which that situation continues, is more and more
damage for those kids. And so yeah, I felt a
(04:04):
certain urgency and hope that we could actually have an
impact that would make a difference, not just for Becca,
but especially for their kids, so that their kids would
be in a better place.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
And I should say too, as our listeners know, we
don't talk about the cases beforehand, so what you heard
was in the episode being taped at the moment right
before they came on. But we don't have any conversations
before the tape is running. So when we hear the letter,
we're both just formulating our ideas out loud along with
(04:39):
the listeners so that they can hear how we're thinking
about it before we actually bring the guests on, but
it happens immediately, there's no time to process it.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Then I want to get back to that question of
what your impressions were when you spoke to each of them.
What were your impressions of each of them? And given
those impressions, where did you think the session should go.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
So I was really struck by how different they were
from each other this couple. Becca was talking, even in
our short conversation, initially about the feelings of her child
and wanting to sort of give her a feelings vocabulary,
and Jake, while present and seemingly trying to participate, I think,
just didn't have that same kind of focus when it
(05:21):
came to parenting, even though it came across to me
that he loved his kids very much. I was also
concerned about Jake shutting down because even in the pre
screen there was maybe some moments where it seemed like
his level of insight about why he was doing certain
things or saying certain things might be limited. But I
also hope that in a session that could be loosened
(05:42):
or the two of you would be able to find
a way to open him up in a way. And
I think that in certain ways you really did, and
in other ways, I think he remained pretty defended, meaning
I think he found it hard to talk about his
feelings at a certain level. With all that said, I'm
curious as you started into the session the first question
that you ask or to Jake, And I'm just going
(06:02):
to play the brief clip so you can hear it
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Jake, why don't you tell us a little bit about
your experience of early in the relationship and then the
first pregnancy and first experience of being a parent.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
What made you, guys decide to start with Jake and
ask about the pregnancy and the beginning of the relationship
as sort of a pivot point for being off the session.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Well, I think, first of all, the letter was written
by Becca, and you know, we've done a lot of
couples this season, and I think it's always interesting to
see who's writing and then to be able to hear
something from the other person, because we've already heard something
from the person who wrote the letter. And the other
part was that question was very intentional. When somebody is
(06:43):
acting in a certain way toward their children, we're going
to want to know about what childhood was like for them.
But we also want to know the origin story of
these children coming into this person's life. And as we
heard with Jake, the first pregnancy was not expected. He
was not ready for it, and he felt so much
loss around the life that he had when this pregnancy
(07:06):
came to be, So that was a really important factor.
What happened during the session was it was hard for
him to connect some of those feelings with the ways
in which he felt trapped, and then he would act
out and he would get disregulated in front of his kids.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
There's a similarity between somebody writing a letter for a
couple's session and somebody contacting us by a phone or
email for a couple session, because in each of those cases,
what we're going to do when we see the couple
is we're going to start with a person who didn't
create that contact, because now we've already had contact with
one member of the couple, we want the other member
(07:44):
of the couple to feel comfortable, so we'll typically begin
with the other member of the couple. And how someone
reacts to the news of pregnancy can be very indicative
about their feelings their positions that they will then carry
forward throughout the pregnancy and even into the early years
of the child. It was important to get a sense
of the raw moment for him.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, it seemed to really be a great way for
him to get in touch with the fear that he
had and the grief that he eventually got to about
losing sort of a single life and being able to
go out on the weekends with his friends, right.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And in this case, it was also helpful because it
was clear that now we're four years in and he
still has a lot of those feelings. A lot of
times somebody will say, well, I at the time I felt, oh,
I'm not ready for this, but by now I couldn't
imagine life without the kids. And it's clear that they've
processed things, that they've moved forward in that journey. It
(08:38):
was also clear that Jake hadn't done that much, and
so that he really was stuck a little bit back
in the Wow, I've lost so much here, And not
that he doesn't love his kids. He does, but he
hasn't processed that loss much at all, and that was
clear from his response as well.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I felt like one of the key understandings that you
guys got to pretty early on with Jake was the
outbursts and as kids were awaited to pent up feelings.
I'm going to play a clip.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Now, it's a philosophy that you have that one shouldn't share.
It's better for you to not let her know how
you're feeling.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
About things, I mean certain things. If it's a big
enough issue, yes I would share. But if it's something
that's going to blow over, or it's only a small thing,
then I'll just deal with it.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
So the question is whether it indeed blows over or
whether over time these feelings accumulate and then they come
out in other ways.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Yeah, there's definitely times where I blow up and it
comes out in anger, for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
So how quickly did you guys pinpoint that pent up emotion,
that pent up feeling as the source of Jake's outbursts?
And I guess more importantly than that even is once
you feel like you see a link like that, how
do you decide when and how to share it?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Well, that's something that we probably see very very quickly,
but we're not going to really bring it up until
we've accumulated at least a couple of pieces of evidence,
because it's not about whether this makes sense to us,
it's about whether it makes sense to the other person.
So unless we can tie it into their behavior, their
experience as they've described it, it might not resonate with
(10:23):
them as much. So we sometimes have to gather a
bit more information, and then when we feel we have
enough data points to show them a pattern, then we
can show them a pattern. But we'll usually start looking
for those data points early on because we can then
illustrate the pattern to the person.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I think that's such a great question because in the
therapy room, when we have more time, I always think
about it as timing and dosage. So it's are you
going to say it at the right moment and how
much of it are you going to deliver in one
moment or one session. And I think that the difficulty
that we ran into with Jake was just how compartment
mentalized he was in terms of holding the fact that, yes,
(11:06):
I know that this is having a detrimental effect on
my children, and then there were moments in the session
when he would even say, but I'm not going to
do anything about it. And so as a listener, you
might think, Wow, I really don't like this guy, or
he lacks empathy, or think all kinds of uncharitable things
about him. But I think that that's the power of
(11:29):
that compartmentalization. And when we did go back to explore
where that came from with his childhood, there were some
connections there, there was some stuff with his dad, but
he wasn't really able to get into it. He'd say
two different things about the relationship with his dad. No,
there wasn't yelling. Yes, there was yelling. No, there wasn't this,
Yes there was this. No, we got along. No, we
(11:50):
kind of didn't get along. It was challenging because we
didn't really have a relationship with him yet. And I
think when I look back on that session, what I
wish that we had focused more on was Becca, because
she was more accessible to us, and because she was
more accessible, we didn't really push her. We were pushing
Jake so hard because we felt that urgency. Like Guy said,
(12:13):
when there are kids involved, there's that urgency, and he
was the one who was doing the yelling. And I think,
to speak just for me, I feel like my error
was not really saying, Okay, I'm not really getting where
I want to get with Jake. I'll seem to get
there a little bit, and then there's that window in
the window is slam shut. So with Becca, the question
(12:35):
was are we holding her accountable? So she's colluding in
this too. These are her kids too, and she has
agreed to stay in this situation. Even though she might
make noises about leaving, she really didn't seem ready to
take action. She didn't really seem ready to protect her kids.
She would talk about it almost like as a threat
to Jake to get him to change. So we didn't
(12:56):
really explore with Becca what she was willing to do
in terms of making changes and what her role was
in this marriage as well.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
For me, I made a point with Jake about the
fact that he has all these feelings bubbling up and
his go to strategy for managing his anger is just
to focus on being a stronger cork to keep the
cork in the bottle. And the problem I think we
ran into with him is that he didn't want to
(13:26):
dip into his feelings at all. So this whole idea
of can we take away some of the bubbles in
the bottle so there's less pressure coming from the bottle
rather than you just trying to get a bigger cork
is where we tried to explore with him, and that's
the thing that he was very, very resistant to. Whenever
it came to talk about his feelings and his emotions
(13:49):
and what's really going on with him, he was more about,
let me just try harder not to explode, and that
obviously is not a useful gambit. And I think that's
also what happened in how he dealt with the advance.
He just deferred back to, like, I'll strain harder and
that will make a difference when when it won't. My
thinking about Becker is as follows. We have three opportunities
(14:13):
to get through to people. We have the session in
which we try to get through to them. We have
the homework, which we think about carefully as a way
for them to get those messages that we have tried
to convey in the session and to implement them and
to internalize them and think about them. But then we
(14:34):
also have the idea that they will be listening to
the session afterwards. First, they will hear a lot of
things that they didn't quite hear when they were in
the session. They will also hear us talking about things
before and after the session, and we often leave messages
for them. We often say and if you're listening, consider this,
(14:55):
So we get three rounds in which we can try
and have an impact, and I do keep that in mind.
And my hope with Beca was that we did enough
in the session and in the home book and in
our discussion that she will be able to hear things
after the session as well.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, I'd be very curious to hear how Beca reacts
when she's listening to the session and we asked, Jake,
are you willing to do something about this? Or does
it matter enough to do something about this? And then
also listening to that part where he had trouble with
imagining that letter from the kids years later when they're
(15:35):
adults if this yelling continues, and he was like, it's
not realistic. I couldn't really get into that. So he
had all kinds of reasons. But I wonder if that
will get past Becka's defenses as she listens to that.
So it's not a conversation that she's actively engaged in.
It's one that she's sitting back now and hearing. And
(15:57):
sometimes when you hear it right there, you hear that
interaction being played for you, it has a different impact
than when it's happening in the moment.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The one thing I would have done differently in that
session with Beckham is I would have helped her define
what her line in the sand is. What are the
parameters that if Jake really exceeds them, if he does
X or doesn't do why she will conclude that she
actually has to leave for the sake of the children.
I think that she hasn't defined to herself what those
(16:26):
limits are, and that's something that's making it difficult for
her and for Jake, because he should know them as well.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
The thing is, we talk a lot about boundaries on
our episodes, and one of the things we always say
about boundaries is that a boundary isn't just something you
set with someone else, it's something you set with yourself.
And I don't think that she has set a boundary
with herself that if this doesn't change my boundary, is
this for the sake of protecting my kids exactly. One
(16:53):
of the things that happens with boundaries is it's not
just setting the boundary, it's maintaining the boundary. And so
I think that Jake has gotten used to Becca setting
boundaries or attempting to set boundaries, but then he knows
that she's not going to follow through, so he has
no real motivation to respect the boundary because his motivation
(17:14):
should be for the benefit of my children. But because
he's in such denial about the long term impact of
this on his kids. The big thing that I think
is right in front of him is he really doesn't
want to lose Becca. And I think he knows he's
not going to lose Becca because Becca has shown him
time and time again. I will set this boundary, and
then you will break the boundary, and I will do
(17:35):
nothing about it except complain about it. But then it'll
blow over.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
You're listening to dea therapists. We'll be back after a
short break.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Is about that moment actually that you brought up Glory
about when he's asked us sort of imagine his kids
numbing themselves with certain things like drugs or alcohol. I'm
going to play that clip for us just we haven't
so just to set this clip up. Also, this is
at the end of the session.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Can I ask you, Jake, if we flashed forward several decades,
Isabella and Dean are really struggling in their lives. They're
struggling with how they feel about themselves. They're struggling and
their friendships and they're romantic relationships. They may be numbing
(18:38):
themselves with certain things like drugs or alcohol. Maybe they
are able to tell you you heard us constantly when
we were growing up, how would you feel about your
life choices several decades on that were the case horrible?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Listening to that, I guess I'm sort of wondering what
we're hoping would happen from saying that, from posing that
scenario to him, because it's a specific kind of like
really evocative image. I felt myself feeling in Jake's shoes, thinking, oh, man,
like I would just feel so devastated, so ashamed, and
he says horrible.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I do think that was a powerful moment because we
finally got something from him where you could kind of
hear it in his voice. Also, you have to remember
we can see the people and so you're just hearing it,
but we saw him, so there was something that happened
in his face that was different. And that was why
(19:40):
we decided with the homework to really bring that into
the present for him and have that letter be written
here we are as adult's dad, and here's what it
was like growing up with the constant yelling in the
air all the time, and the unpredictability and the explosiveness.
We thought that if we brought that into the present
(20:01):
for him, like here are your kids coming to you
now as adults, telling you, this is what the effect
of this behavior has been on us and our lives,
we felt like we had opened a little crack and
a door there. But that wasn't the thing that worked
for him in the homework. He went back into his compartmentalization.
The interesting thing about the interventions is they might not
do that intervention, but it might help them to do
(20:25):
a different one that we also suggested that they do,
or even one that they come up with on their own.
We had suggested that they read some articles about the
effect of ronic yelling on your kids, and they ended
up finding some thing on the internet, a program of
stop yelling at your kids for a week type of thing.
And so it could be that that moment opened him
(20:46):
up enough to go and try that. You just don't
know exactly where it's going to land and how it's
going to land, but I think that moment was very
important to get to.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
I think that moment was very important to get to
as well. Was an opening there, But it quickly closed
up again. In ongoing therapy, you could keep pushing on
that moment and on that opening until it remained open.
But we didn't have him for ongoing therapy. We only
had him for the one session. I was actually a
little dismayed that he decided to go with the YouTube
(21:20):
challenge or whatever that was five days without screaming at
your kid, because it's more of the cork. It's more
of the like, if I can hold it in for
five days, it doesn't mean anything. If you can hold
it in for five days unless you understand what's going
on with you and you can find ways to manage
that behavior. It's like you can go on a crash
diet for five days, it doesn't mean you can maintain it.
And so for me, it was a little more of
(21:41):
the same of him looking for an easier solution in
which he just has to strain harder, rather than one
that goes deeper for him that he really has to
look at his emotions and how those are impacting him.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
And I just want to go back to that earlier
comment I made about I wish that we had worked
a little bit more with Becca, because I think that
if we had given it the assignment to both of them,
meaning and now your kids are coming to you, Becca
and saying, why didn't you protect us? This is the
effect that this has had on our lives, and you
kept us in this environment. And I think that that
(22:14):
might have helped pierce her shield of denial a little
bit more too. It's always easy, I think, to focus
on the person who's doing the thing that is problematic,
and I think as therapist, the thing that we want
to remember is that there's a system here. There's a
whole family system going on. And we never really explored
Becca's psychology. Clearly, she was very much wanting to be
(22:37):
with him, and she was very afraid of not being
with him. She really kept saying I love him so much,
I really love him. So we didn't explore enough let's
understand what your reluctance is to protect your children, because
it might mean you will lose this kind of relationship
with Jake. We didn't step back for a minute and
say we aren't getting where we want to get with him.
(22:59):
And also, she's this family system and what's going on there,
and can we push her as hard as we're pushing him,
because she's more malleable.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I love that idea of giving her the commensurate exercise,
because I think that would have been actually quite powerful
for her to do. One of the things that we
often do with couples that we didn't do here and
might have gotten some traction with, is that when we
have a member of the couple that's not hearing something,
we say it to the other person. So we say
(23:29):
to Becker, so what is it like for you when
you hear how resistant Jake is to the idea of
his yelling causing such damage to the kids, and you
hear him responding in a very kind of close and
monosyllabic way to these ideas. What does that do for
you when you hear that level of resistance, when you're
(23:50):
so worried about the damage she's doing. You cross to
the other person and you're saying things about Jake, but
to Becker, because that allows him to hear it more
and it's being said to him, he can get defensive
and sometimes he might hear that beta when it's being
said about him to Becca.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yeah, one thought I had it. I don't know what
you guys will make of this, but Jake almost became
his daughter in the session, and he even laughed, which
Laurie pointed out in this really beautiful moment that he's
even laughing like her because he lacks the ability to
understand why he's doing what he's doing, and that's his
response to that.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
What I was saying about the laughter was that when
Isabella became uncomfortable, she would laugh, and that would enrage him.
But what was happening was she was having a lot
of feelings. I was saying that when he yells at
her and she laughs, it's not because she thinks it's funny,
it's because she's profoundly uncomfortable, and that's a reaction to that.
And so then when we were saying things that were
(24:47):
profoundly uncomfortable to Jake, he would laugh as well. When
people get uncomfortable, they have these reactions that might appear
to be one thing, but they're actually extreme discomfort. And
in fact, Isabella, because probably she had Becca there, who
was trying to emphasize feelings, would talk about her feelings
with Becca, so it's almost like she had more of
(25:09):
a language for her feelings than Jake did. And yet
Becca was spending so much time trying to problem solve
on the side of let me make up for the
deficiencies on the feelings part and help Isabella developed that vocabulary,
but she wasn't willing to really go there with Jake.
(25:30):
And that is my biggest regret of this session is
that we didn't go there with Becca to really explore
why are you not going there with Jake? Why are
you not setting boundaries? As Guy said, what is your
line in the sand? What is keeping you from facing
what is not happening in this marriage? Because as you
(25:50):
said Ben at the beginning, this is also a marital issue.
It's not just an issue about what's happening with the children,
it's what's happening with this couple. Didn't get enough into
the couple.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
One regret I have is that I actually was more
hopeful about Jake being able to do the homework than
he was able to actually do. And had I known
that that he would really struggle with the homework, especially
with the emotive parts of it that are so important.
There are options in couple's therapy to come with more force,
(26:23):
as it were, and in this case, it might have
been to say to Becker, what if Jake can't change,
paint me a picture of what your life looks like
as a single parent with these two kids, and how
you'll manage and how you'll deal with Jake. You paint
a picture of what a separation might look like, and
(26:44):
that can be a way to really bring home to
Jake and to her. These are the stakes, this is
what we're talking about. Let's actually go and imagine that,
because I think Becker avoids imagining that it's too upsetting,
and that's why she keeps folding and not maintaining the
boundary giving him.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
One thing I'm thinking about is that a couple of
the interventions, they sound like they're sort of negative consequences
for Jake. Jake, do you see how badly things could
turn out? And I wonder also, what would it also
look like to incentivize Jake. We didn't really find out.
I'd be curious to hear what kind of relationship would
Jake think would be ideal with his daughter with Becca
(27:22):
and vice versa with Becca as well. I wonder if
Jake but he could could go in that direction.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
I think incentivizing people is really important, and I do
think that we were so focused on the negative consequences
that he might have felt shame. He might have felt like,
I can't even think about this because it's too painful.
He might have felt like we were being hard on him,
(27:46):
or you know, we were sort of the parents who
were saying, here's your consequence for this behavior. I'm trying
to imagine what would have happened. I think that he
would have said, well, we're moving with the job and
we're going to be closer to family, and it'll be
better because we won't have as much pressure. And I
think that he would have just externalized the whole thing
as he was doing and not said. And I have
(28:08):
an issue here with how do I access my emotions?
How do I manage them? How do I ask for
things that I want and need? How do I work
through some of this grief and loss? How do I
embrace this family that I do love and that I
do want to be a part of. How do I
deal with a part of me that still wants to
be the child and the part of me that also
(28:29):
wants to grow up and be an adult. And when
they're in conflict, what do I do? And how do
I hide out? All those things were going on for him,
and so, yes, incentivizing certainly might have been helpful.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
It's cool to hear you reflect also on what his
state of mind was and what he might have been
experiencing during that. I think as a listener, I often
found myself blaming him in certain ways, and so it's
helpful to also remember to sort of still have empathy
and kind of be able to imagine what's on for him.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah, and I should say too this thing about kids
and maybe counter transference, which for our listeners who don't know,
counter transparence is the feelings that come up in us
when the person that we're talking to in therapy says
something that we have a reaction to that is from
our own history, from our own past. And I think
that it's one thing when therapy clients come in and
(29:21):
they tell us about something that happened in their own
childhoods that their own parents did, that we find upsetting
because we feel like I'm here to help you now
as an adult, and so they're safe with us in
that room. But these children were out in the world.
So when you hear that the person sitting across from
you is hurting children who are there out in the
(29:42):
world and it's happening right now. I think that as therapists,
we often will have a reaction to that that is
different from hearing about something that happened to our clients
in the past.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
When you have a session like this where maybe it
didn't go exactly where you wanted it to go, or
you felt them presh, what do you do with that
disappointment as a therapist after it's over. Do you find
yourself blaming yourself, blaming the client? What kind of stuff
comes up for you and how do you deal with
it well?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think, like any experience of something professionally that doesn't
go well or well enough for you, then there's due
diligence to be done because there's information there and there's
learning to be had there. So as we're sitting here
reflecting on the session, we can identify all things that
(30:32):
we might have done differently or directions that we might
have explored in our practices. If something goes poorly, we
really have to look at two things. A what happened
there that it went poorly, and what happened within us
that we weren't able to bring our usual skill set
to bear. Was something touched that was personal and that's
(30:52):
the counter transference that Laurie was referring to it's something
that triggered in us that interfered with our thinking or
our ability to have a more objective position, or can
we identify different directions that we would have taken, and
then can we eomock those as things to keep in mind?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
And in fact, what we're doing right now is what
we do as therapists. Most of us have weekly meetings
with other therapists where we go over the cases from
the week these were therapy clients. I would go to
my consultation group and I would say, here's what happened
in this session, and we would talk about it the
way we're talking about it right now. And then I
would go back the next week and I would say, hey, Beca,
and we would start there. So we have that opportunity
(31:36):
in a way that we don't hear. But I also
think what Guy said is so true that we have
these three opportunities even with this one session to reach people.
And then also since we do these follow ups a
year later from our guests from the season before, I'll
be curious to hear where this couple is a year
from now. This is one that I'm really looking forward
to hearing. What has happened in that year.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Okay, great. Thank you both so much for just being
so honest and reflective. It's both fun as a listener
and really helpful as a darpist in training.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You're very welcome.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Well. Thank you Ben for asking all these questions and
helping us to reflect on that session with Beckend Jake.
If you're enjoying our podcast, don't forget to subscribe for
free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please
help support Dear Therapists by telling your friends about it
and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really
(32:30):
help people to find the show. Do you want to
be on Season four of Dear Therapists?
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Email us at Lauri and Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Josh Fisher. Additional editing support by Helena Rosen, John
Washington and Zachary Fisher. Our interns are Ben Bernstein, Emily
Gutierrez and Silver Lifton. And special thanks to our podcast
(32:58):
fairy Godmother katiek. We can't wait to see you at
our next session. Theo Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio,
Fish Food
So hi everyone, It's Laurie and I'm here with Guy
as usual, but today we're here with a third person,
and that is Ben Bernstein. Ben is training to be
a therapist, and he is the person who first talks
to our guests before Guy and I have any inkling
of what we're in for. So Ben is the person
who interviews the people who write into us and helps
(00:27):
us to see who might be right for an episode.
And we wanted to talk with Ben because when we
do our session, sometimes we look back on them and
we say that went really well. We really got through
to this person, and then there are times when maybe
we didn't get through in the way that we wanted to,
and we thought it would be interesting for everybody to
hear a little bit about our process and what we're
(00:50):
thinking at certain moments in some of the episodes that
you've heard this season. So today we're going to look
in an episode where we didn't quite get through in
the way we wanted to, and we're going to unpack
that a little bit with Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
And we're going to start with a recent episode and
our guests were Becca and Jake. So Ben, tell us
about your conversations with them before the episode was taped.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Thanks for having me on. I love this episode. In
this episode, just to sort of frame it for listeners,
we hear from Becca, who is a woman who loves
her partner Jake, but she worries about his anger towards
their young children, Isabella and Dean, and she's considering whether
she should leave Jake to protect the kids. When I
first spoke with them, I wasn't sure where a potential
(01:32):
episode would go. I thought it could go in one
of two directions. Either it could focus on Jake's anger
towards his kids, or maybe additionally, it could focus on
Becka and Jake's relationship with each other, and in a way,
I was curious to see where you guys would take
it and how you would navigate what were to in
some ways separate relationships in some ways connected relationships. So
(01:55):
here's a clip of what you both said before the
session started.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Well, it's interesting because says that there's no abuse, but
lashing out at children verbally is a form of emotional abuse,
so certainly can be when it's harsh and it goes
on over time. So I'm really glad that Jake is
actually joining us today because it sounds like something we
really need to talk to both parents about to get
(02:19):
an understanding of what's going on and why and what
can change there.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Yeah, exactly. Emotional violence is abuse, and it has long
lasting effects, and it can be very traumatic, especially when
it's ongoing. And when it's ongoing, we call that complex
trauma because it's not one event, it's multiple events happening
all the time. And it sounds like Jake realizes that
something needs to change, but he's having trouble doing the changing,
(02:45):
and that's why I think it's important that we're having
both of them on.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
One of my first questions for you is whether the
problem of a father yelling at his kids brings anything
up for you both, or there are any things on
your mind as you were starting the session that maybe
influenced the direction you decided to ultimately take.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Well, I think for me as a parent, whenever I
hear something like that, I always have a visceral reaction
to it. And I think one of the challenges we
all have as therapists is if there is something that
touches us personally in our lives that we're going to
have to be really careful about separating out our own
(03:24):
feelings about it in order to get into the world
of the other person and really have compassion for that
person and be able to hold that person both in
terms of holding them accountable, but also holding whatever pain
is causing them to behave in this way.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
And for me as well, whenever I have a case
in which they're young children who are being impacted negatively,
there's a huge urgency that I feel to get a
result quickly, to do something, because every day that Puss
is in which that situation continues, is more and more
damage for those kids. And so yeah, I felt a
(04:04):
certain urgency and hope that we could actually have an
impact that would make a difference, not just for Becca,
but especially for their kids, so that their kids would
be in a better place.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
And I should say too, as our listeners know, we
don't talk about the cases beforehand, so what you heard
was in the episode being taped at the moment right
before they came on. But we don't have any conversations
before the tape is running. So when we hear the letter,
we're both just formulating our ideas out loud along with
(04:39):
the listeners so that they can hear how we're thinking
about it before we actually bring the guests on, but
it happens immediately, there's no time to process it.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Then I want to get back to that question of
what your impressions were when you spoke to each of them.
What were your impressions of each of them? And given
those impressions, where did you think the session should go.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
So I was really struck by how different they were
from each other this couple. Becca was talking, even in
our short conversation, initially about the feelings of her child
and wanting to sort of give her a feelings vocabulary,
and Jake, while present and seemingly trying to participate, I think,
just didn't have that same kind of focus when it
(05:21):
came to parenting, even though it came across to me
that he loved his kids very much. I was also
concerned about Jake shutting down because even in the pre
screen there was maybe some moments where it seemed like
his level of insight about why he was doing certain
things or saying certain things might be limited. But I
also hope that in a session that could be loosened
(05:42):
or the two of you would be able to find
a way to open him up in a way. And
I think that in certain ways you really did, and
in other ways, I think he remained pretty defended, meaning
I think he found it hard to talk about his
feelings at a certain level. With all that said, I'm
curious as you started into the session the first question
that you ask or to Jake, And I'm just going
(06:02):
to play the brief clip so you can hear it
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Jake, why don't you tell us a little bit about
your experience of early in the relationship and then the
first pregnancy and first experience of being a parent.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
What made you, guys decide to start with Jake and
ask about the pregnancy and the beginning of the relationship
as sort of a pivot point for being off the session.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Well, I think, first of all, the letter was written
by Becca, and you know, we've done a lot of
couples this season, and I think it's always interesting to
see who's writing and then to be able to hear
something from the other person, because we've already heard something
from the person who wrote the letter. And the other
part was that question was very intentional. When somebody is
(06:43):
acting in a certain way toward their children, we're going
to want to know about what childhood was like for them.
But we also want to know the origin story of
these children coming into this person's life. And as we
heard with Jake, the first pregnancy was not expected. He
was not ready for it, and he felt so much
loss around the life that he had when this pregnancy
(07:06):
came to be, So that was a really important factor.
What happened during the session was it was hard for
him to connect some of those feelings with the ways
in which he felt trapped, and then he would act
out and he would get disregulated in front of his kids.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
There's a similarity between somebody writing a letter for a
couple's session and somebody contacting us by a phone or
email for a couple session, because in each of those cases,
what we're going to do when we see the couple
is we're going to start with a person who didn't
create that contact, because now we've already had contact with
one member of the couple, we want the other member
(07:44):
of the couple to feel comfortable, so we'll typically begin
with the other member of the couple. And how someone
reacts to the news of pregnancy can be very indicative
about their feelings their positions that they will then carry
forward throughout the pregnancy and even into the early years
of the child. It was important to get a sense
of the raw moment for him.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah, it seemed to really be a great way for
him to get in touch with the fear that he
had and the grief that he eventually got to about
losing sort of a single life and being able to
go out on the weekends with his friends, right.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And in this case, it was also helpful because it
was clear that now we're four years in and he
still has a lot of those feelings. A lot of
times somebody will say, well, I at the time I felt, oh,
I'm not ready for this, but by now I couldn't
imagine life without the kids. And it's clear that they've
processed things, that they've moved forward in that journey. It
(08:38):
was also clear that Jake hadn't done that much, and
so that he really was stuck a little bit back
in the Wow, I've lost so much here, And not
that he doesn't love his kids. He does, but he
hasn't processed that loss much at all, and that was
clear from his response as well.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I felt like one of the key understandings that you
guys got to pretty early on with Jake was the
outbursts and as kids were awaited to pent up feelings.
I'm going to play a clip.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Now, it's a philosophy that you have that one shouldn't share.
It's better for you to not let her know how
you're feeling.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
About things, I mean certain things. If it's a big
enough issue, yes I would share. But if it's something
that's going to blow over, or it's only a small thing,
then I'll just deal with it.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
So the question is whether it indeed blows over or
whether over time these feelings accumulate and then they come
out in other ways.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Yeah, there's definitely times where I blow up and it
comes out in anger, for sure.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
So how quickly did you guys pinpoint that pent up emotion,
that pent up feeling as the source of Jake's outbursts?
And I guess more importantly than that even is once
you feel like you see a link like that, how
do you decide when and how to share it?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Well, that's something that we probably see very very quickly,
but we're not going to really bring it up until
we've accumulated at least a couple of pieces of evidence,
because it's not about whether this makes sense to us,
it's about whether it makes sense to the other person.
So unless we can tie it into their behavior, their
experience as they've described it, it might not resonate with
(10:23):
them as much. So we sometimes have to gather a
bit more information, and then when we feel we have
enough data points to show them a pattern, then we
can show them a pattern. But we'll usually start looking
for those data points early on because we can then
illustrate the pattern to the person.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I think that's such a great question because in the
therapy room, when we have more time, I always think
about it as timing and dosage. So it's are you
going to say it at the right moment and how
much of it are you going to deliver in one
moment or one session. And I think that the difficulty
that we ran into with Jake was just how compartment
mentalized he was in terms of holding the fact that, yes,
(11:06):
I know that this is having a detrimental effect on
my children, and then there were moments in the session
when he would even say, but I'm not going to
do anything about it. And so as a listener, you
might think, Wow, I really don't like this guy, or
he lacks empathy, or think all kinds of uncharitable things
about him. But I think that that's the power of
(11:29):
that compartmentalization. And when we did go back to explore
where that came from with his childhood, there were some
connections there, there was some stuff with his dad, but
he wasn't really able to get into it. He'd say
two different things about the relationship with his dad. No,
there wasn't yelling. Yes, there was yelling. No, there wasn't this,
Yes there was this. No, we got along. No, we
(11:50):
kind of didn't get along. It was challenging because we
didn't really have a relationship with him yet. And I
think when I look back on that session, what I
wish that we had focused more on was Becca, because
she was more accessible to us, and because she was
more accessible, we didn't really push her. We were pushing
Jake so hard because we felt that urgency. Like Guy said,
(12:13):
when there are kids involved, there's that urgency, and he
was the one who was doing the yelling. And I think,
to speak just for me, I feel like my error
was not really saying, Okay, I'm not really getting where
I want to get with Jake. I'll seem to get
there a little bit, and then there's that window in
the window is slam shut. So with Becca, the question
(12:35):
was are we holding her accountable? So she's colluding in
this too. These are her kids too, and she has
agreed to stay in this situation. Even though she might
make noises about leaving, she really didn't seem ready to
take action. She didn't really seem ready to protect her kids.
She would talk about it almost like as a threat
to Jake to get him to change. So we didn't
(12:56):
really explore with Becca what she was willing to do
in terms of making changes and what her role was
in this marriage as well.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
For me, I made a point with Jake about the
fact that he has all these feelings bubbling up and
his go to strategy for managing his anger is just
to focus on being a stronger cork to keep the
cork in the bottle. And the problem I think we
ran into with him is that he didn't want to
(13:26):
dip into his feelings at all. So this whole idea
of can we take away some of the bubbles in
the bottle so there's less pressure coming from the bottle
rather than you just trying to get a bigger cork
is where we tried to explore with him, and that's
the thing that he was very, very resistant to. Whenever
it came to talk about his feelings and his emotions
(13:49):
and what's really going on with him, he was more about,
let me just try harder not to explode, and that
obviously is not a useful gambit. And I think that's
also what happened in how he dealt with the advance.
He just deferred back to, like, I'll strain harder and
that will make a difference when when it won't. My
thinking about Becker is as follows. We have three opportunities
(14:13):
to get through to people. We have the session in
which we try to get through to them. We have
the homework, which we think about carefully as a way
for them to get those messages that we have tried
to convey in the session and to implement them and
to internalize them and think about them. But then we
(14:34):
also have the idea that they will be listening to
the session afterwards. First, they will hear a lot of
things that they didn't quite hear when they were in
the session. They will also hear us talking about things
before and after the session, and we often leave messages
for them. We often say and if you're listening, consider this,
(14:55):
So we get three rounds in which we can try
and have an impact, and I do keep that in mind.
And my hope with Beca was that we did enough
in the session and in the home book and in
our discussion that she will be able to hear things
after the session as well.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, I'd be very curious to hear how Beca reacts
when she's listening to the session and we asked, Jake,
are you willing to do something about this? Or does
it matter enough to do something about this? And then
also listening to that part where he had trouble with
imagining that letter from the kids years later when they're
(15:35):
adults if this yelling continues, and he was like, it's
not realistic. I couldn't really get into that. So he
had all kinds of reasons. But I wonder if that
will get past Becka's defenses as she listens to that.
So it's not a conversation that she's actively engaged in.
It's one that she's sitting back now and hearing. And
(15:57):
sometimes when you hear it right there, you hear that
interaction being played for you, it has a different impact
than when it's happening in the moment.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The one thing I would have done differently in that
session with Beckham is I would have helped her define
what her line in the sand is. What are the
parameters that if Jake really exceeds them, if he does
X or doesn't do why she will conclude that she
actually has to leave for the sake of the children.
I think that she hasn't defined to herself what those
(16:26):
limits are, and that's something that's making it difficult for
her and for Jake, because he should know them as well.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
The thing is, we talk a lot about boundaries on
our episodes, and one of the things we always say
about boundaries is that a boundary isn't just something you
set with someone else, it's something you set with yourself.
And I don't think that she has set a boundary
with herself that if this doesn't change my boundary, is
this for the sake of protecting my kids exactly. One
(16:53):
of the things that happens with boundaries is it's not
just setting the boundary, it's maintaining the boundary. And so
I think that Jake has gotten used to Becca setting
boundaries or attempting to set boundaries, but then he knows
that she's not going to follow through, so he has
no real motivation to respect the boundary because his motivation
(17:14):
should be for the benefit of my children. But because
he's in such denial about the long term impact of
this on his kids. The big thing that I think
is right in front of him is he really doesn't
want to lose Becca. And I think he knows he's
not going to lose Becca because Becca has shown him
time and time again. I will set this boundary, and
then you will break the boundary, and I will do
(17:35):
nothing about it except complain about it. But then it'll
blow over.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
You're listening to dea therapists. We'll be back after a
short break.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Is about that moment actually that you brought up Glory
about when he's asked us sort of imagine his kids
numbing themselves with certain things like drugs or alcohol. I'm
going to play that clip for us just we haven't
so just to set this clip up. Also, this is
at the end of the session.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Can I ask you, Jake, if we flashed forward several decades,
Isabella and Dean are really struggling in their lives. They're
struggling with how they feel about themselves. They're struggling and
their friendships and they're romantic relationships. They may be numbing
(18:38):
themselves with certain things like drugs or alcohol. Maybe they
are able to tell you you heard us constantly when
we were growing up, how would you feel about your
life choices several decades on that were the case horrible?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Listening to that, I guess I'm sort of wondering what
we're hoping would happen from saying that, from posing that
scenario to him, because it's a specific kind of like
really evocative image. I felt myself feeling in Jake's shoes, thinking, oh, man,
like I would just feel so devastated, so ashamed, and
he says horrible.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I do think that was a powerful moment because we
finally got something from him where you could kind of
hear it in his voice. Also, you have to remember
we can see the people and so you're just hearing it,
but we saw him, so there was something that happened
in his face that was different. And that was why
(19:40):
we decided with the homework to really bring that into
the present for him and have that letter be written
here we are as adult's dad, and here's what it
was like growing up with the constant yelling in the
air all the time, and the unpredictability and the explosiveness.
We thought that if we brought that into the present
(20:01):
for him, like here are your kids coming to you
now as adults, telling you, this is what the effect
of this behavior has been on us and our lives,
we felt like we had opened a little crack and
a door there. But that wasn't the thing that worked
for him in the homework. He went back into his compartmentalization.
The interesting thing about the interventions is they might not
do that intervention, but it might help them to do
(20:25):
a different one that we also suggested that they do,
or even one that they come up with on their own.
We had suggested that they read some articles about the
effect of ronic yelling on your kids, and they ended
up finding some thing on the internet, a program of
stop yelling at your kids for a week type of thing.
And so it could be that that moment opened him
(20:46):
up enough to go and try that. You just don't
know exactly where it's going to land and how it's
going to land, but I think that moment was very
important to get to.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
I think that moment was very important to get to
as well. Was an opening there, But it quickly closed
up again. In ongoing therapy, you could keep pushing on
that moment and on that opening until it remained open.
But we didn't have him for ongoing therapy. We only
had him for the one session. I was actually a
little dismayed that he decided to go with the YouTube
(21:20):
challenge or whatever that was five days without screaming at
your kid, because it's more of the cork. It's more
of the like, if I can hold it in for
five days, it doesn't mean anything. If you can hold
it in for five days unless you understand what's going
on with you and you can find ways to manage
that behavior. It's like you can go on a crash
diet for five days, it doesn't mean you can maintain it.
And so for me, it was a little more of
(21:41):
the same of him looking for an easier solution in
which he just has to strain harder, rather than one
that goes deeper for him that he really has to
look at his emotions and how those are impacting him.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
And I just want to go back to that earlier
comment I made about I wish that we had worked
a little bit more with Becca, because I think that
if we had given it the assignment to both of them,
meaning and now your kids are coming to you, Becca
and saying, why didn't you protect us? This is the
effect that this has had on our lives, and you
kept us in this environment. And I think that that
(22:14):
might have helped pierce her shield of denial a little
bit more too. It's always easy, I think, to focus
on the person who's doing the thing that is problematic,
and I think as therapist, the thing that we want
to remember is that there's a system here. There's a
whole family system going on. And we never really explored
Becca's psychology. Clearly, she was very much wanting to be
(22:37):
with him, and she was very afraid of not being
with him. She really kept saying I love him so much,
I really love him. So we didn't explore enough let's
understand what your reluctance is to protect your children, because
it might mean you will lose this kind of relationship
with Jake. We didn't step back for a minute and
say we aren't getting where we want to get with him.
(22:59):
And also, she's this family system and what's going on there,
and can we push her as hard as we're pushing him,
because she's more malleable.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I love that idea of giving her the commensurate exercise,
because I think that would have been actually quite powerful
for her to do. One of the things that we
often do with couples that we didn't do here and
might have gotten some traction with, is that when we
have a member of the couple that's not hearing something,
we say it to the other person. So we say
(23:29):
to Becker, so what is it like for you when
you hear how resistant Jake is to the idea of
his yelling causing such damage to the kids, and you
hear him responding in a very kind of close and
monosyllabic way to these ideas. What does that do for
you when you hear that level of resistance, when you're
(23:50):
so worried about the damage she's doing. You cross to
the other person and you're saying things about Jake, but
to Becker, because that allows him to hear it more
and it's being said to him, he can get defensive
and sometimes he might hear that beta when it's being
said about him to Becca.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yeah, one thought I had it. I don't know what
you guys will make of this, but Jake almost became
his daughter in the session, and he even laughed, which
Laurie pointed out in this really beautiful moment that he's
even laughing like her because he lacks the ability to
understand why he's doing what he's doing, and that's his
response to that.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
What I was saying about the laughter was that when
Isabella became uncomfortable, she would laugh, and that would enrage him.
But what was happening was she was having a lot
of feelings. I was saying that when he yells at
her and she laughs, it's not because she thinks it's funny,
it's because she's profoundly uncomfortable, and that's a reaction to that.
And so then when we were saying things that were
(24:47):
profoundly uncomfortable to Jake, he would laugh as well. When
people get uncomfortable, they have these reactions that might appear
to be one thing, but they're actually extreme discomfort. And
in fact, Isabella, because probably she had Becca there, who
was trying to emphasize feelings, would talk about her feelings
with Becca, so it's almost like she had more of
(25:09):
a language for her feelings than Jake did. And yet
Becca was spending so much time trying to problem solve
on the side of let me make up for the
deficiencies on the feelings part and help Isabella developed that vocabulary,
but she wasn't willing to really go there with Jake.
(25:30):
And that is my biggest regret of this session is
that we didn't go there with Becca to really explore
why are you not going there with Jake? Why are
you not setting boundaries? As Guy said, what is your
line in the sand? What is keeping you from facing
what is not happening in this marriage? Because as you
(25:50):
said Ben at the beginning, this is also a marital issue.
It's not just an issue about what's happening with the children,
it's what's happening with this couple. Didn't get enough into
the couple.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
One regret I have is that I actually was more
hopeful about Jake being able to do the homework than
he was able to actually do. And had I known
that that he would really struggle with the homework, especially
with the emotive parts of it that are so important.
There are options in couple's therapy to come with more force,
(26:23):
as it were, and in this case, it might have
been to say to Becker, what if Jake can't change,
paint me a picture of what your life looks like
as a single parent with these two kids, and how
you'll manage and how you'll deal with Jake. You paint
a picture of what a separation might look like, and
(26:44):
that can be a way to really bring home to
Jake and to her. These are the stakes, this is
what we're talking about. Let's actually go and imagine that,
because I think Becker avoids imagining that it's too upsetting,
and that's why she keeps folding and not maintaining the
boundary giving him.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
One thing I'm thinking about is that a couple of
the interventions, they sound like they're sort of negative consequences
for Jake. Jake, do you see how badly things could
turn out? And I wonder also, what would it also
look like to incentivize Jake. We didn't really find out.
I'd be curious to hear what kind of relationship would
Jake think would be ideal with his daughter with Becca
(27:22):
and vice versa with Becca as well. I wonder if
Jake but he could could go in that direction.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
I think incentivizing people is really important, and I do
think that we were so focused on the negative consequences
that he might have felt shame. He might have felt like,
I can't even think about this because it's too painful.
He might have felt like we were being hard on him,
(27:46):
or you know, we were sort of the parents who
were saying, here's your consequence for this behavior. I'm trying
to imagine what would have happened. I think that he
would have said, well, we're moving with the job and
we're going to be closer to family, and it'll be
better because we won't have as much pressure. And I
think that he would have just externalized the whole thing
as he was doing and not said. And I have
(28:08):
an issue here with how do I access my emotions?
How do I manage them? How do I ask for
things that I want and need? How do I work
through some of this grief and loss? How do I
embrace this family that I do love and that I
do want to be a part of. How do I
deal with a part of me that still wants to
be the child and the part of me that also
(28:29):
wants to grow up and be an adult. And when
they're in conflict, what do I do? And how do
I hide out? All those things were going on for him,
and so, yes, incentivizing certainly might have been helpful.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
It's cool to hear you reflect also on what his
state of mind was and what he might have been
experiencing during that. I think as a listener, I often
found myself blaming him in certain ways, and so it's
helpful to also remember to sort of still have empathy
and kind of be able to imagine what's on for him.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah, and I should say too this thing about kids
and maybe counter transference, which for our listeners who don't know,
counter transparence is the feelings that come up in us
when the person that we're talking to in therapy says
something that we have a reaction to that is from
our own history, from our own past. And I think
that it's one thing when therapy clients come in and
(29:21):
they tell us about something that happened in their own
childhoods that their own parents did, that we find upsetting
because we feel like I'm here to help you now
as an adult, and so they're safe with us in
that room. But these children were out in the world.
So when you hear that the person sitting across from
you is hurting children who are there out in the
(29:42):
world and it's happening right now. I think that as therapists,
we often will have a reaction to that that is
different from hearing about something that happened to our clients
in the past.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
When you have a session like this where maybe it
didn't go exactly where you wanted it to go, or
you felt them presh, what do you do with that
disappointment as a therapist after it's over. Do you find
yourself blaming yourself, blaming the client? What kind of stuff
comes up for you and how do you deal with
it well?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think, like any experience of something professionally that doesn't
go well or well enough for you, then there's due
diligence to be done because there's information there and there's
learning to be had there. So as we're sitting here
reflecting on the session, we can identify all things that
(30:32):
we might have done differently or directions that we might
have explored in our practices. If something goes poorly, we
really have to look at two things. A what happened
there that it went poorly, and what happened within us
that we weren't able to bring our usual skill set
to bear. Was something touched that was personal and that's
(30:52):
the counter transference that Laurie was referring to it's something
that triggered in us that interfered with our thinking or
our ability to have a more objective position, or can
we identify different directions that we would have taken, and
then can we eomock those as things to keep in mind?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
And in fact, what we're doing right now is what
we do as therapists. Most of us have weekly meetings
with other therapists where we go over the cases from
the week these were therapy clients. I would go to
my consultation group and I would say, here's what happened
in this session, and we would talk about it the
way we're talking about it right now. And then I
would go back the next week and I would say, hey, Beca,
and we would start there. So we have that opportunity
(31:36):
in a way that we don't hear. But I also
think what Guy said is so true that we have
these three opportunities even with this one session to reach people.
And then also since we do these follow ups a
year later from our guests from the season before, I'll
be curious to hear where this couple is a year
from now. This is one that I'm really looking forward
to hearing. What has happened in that year.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Okay, great. Thank you both so much for just being
so honest and reflective. It's both fun as a listener
and really helpful as a darpist in training.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You're very welcome.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Well. Thank you Ben for asking all these questions and
helping us to reflect on that session with Beckend Jake.
If you're enjoying our podcast, don't forget to subscribe for
free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please
help support Dear Therapists by telling your friends about it
and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really
(32:30):
help people to find the show. Do you want to
be on Season four of Dear Therapists?
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Email us at Lauri and Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Josh Fisher. Additional editing support by Helena Rosen, John
Washington and Zachary Fisher. Our interns are Ben Bernstein, Emily
Gutierrez and Silver Lifton. And special thanks to our podcast
(32:58):
fairy Godmother katiek. We can't wait to see you at
our next session. Theo Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio,
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