Ask a Therapist

Do I ever get frustrated when I’m working with a client? Well, what is frustration? For me, frustration is a desire to express something which is held in or held back by a fear of the consequences of expressing it. It’s a bit like having your foot on the accelerator and on the brake at the same time: it burns a lot of fuel, but you don’t get anywhere.

All sorts of emotions happen in the therapy room for the therapist. It’s even got a fancy name – we call it countertransference. So best case scenario is if I start to feel frustrated during a therapy session, I might say something like, “I’m noticing that I’ve got a kind of frustrated feeling in my chest right now, and I’m wondering what it’s like for you in your chest”, or, “I’m wondering if there’s anything frustrating for you in this particular scenario”. It could be that me feeling the frustration first is like a good ‘in’ for helping the client to realise that there is some frustration that perhaps we haven’t explored just yet.

Now, if the frustration is a bit stickier and maybe I’m feeling frustrated after a session ends, then I might practise what I preach and use one of my dynamic meditations or anger meditations to give voice to the frustration and shout it into a pillow or kind of punch it into a mattress, something like that. That’s a good way, usually, of moving stuck energy.

Now, if that doesn’t work, we have to have a bit of a think, either on my own or in professional supervision, about what is it that’s frustrating me here? What is it that I’m not expressing in the room? Is it maybe something from my life that I can pay some attention to and kind of unstick myself, or is there something about the vibe between me and the client? Maybe they’re kind of grinding my gears a bit; we’ve got different values on a thing.

If that’s not something that I can get through and maybe find a way to express in a responsible and kind of exploratory way, then that would be perhaps an indication that bringing our sessions to a close and maybe referring on might be a good idea.