So I'm sitting there listening intently to my client. I'm a young therapist at the beginning of my career

and I'm trying really hard to be a good therapist, you know, and I'm loving being a therapist therapist I love helping people and I love seeing

results and I also love the way each session is like a puzzle or like a maze

or I don't know a fascinating walk in the woods with someone down a trail a nice

pleasant trail fraught with all sorts of you you know, twists and turns and with discovery and with

with love and with pain, but ultimately with growth. How about that for a metaphor? So I'm listening to my client and I feel like I'm doing really well. I'm being

empathic, I'm attentive, she's telling me about her emotional experience everything is going

according to plan and then she says and that's why you're a terrible therapist

and then she really lays into me. She's super angry at me. She's not

happy with me and she knows exactly what to say to hurt my feelings. She's

insulting me. She's telling me that I'm too young, I'm

to this, I'm to that. I'm a terrible listener. I haven't listened to her at all. Everything I've

done up until that point has been wrong, and my breath is

taken away and I start to panic.

And I'm thinking, what?

I'm a terrible therapist.

Wait, I thought I was doing a good job. She accuses me of not knowing

what I'm doing and if not really listening to her and of being a man who could never understand

her. I'm devastated and I'm terrified and I suspect she's right.

I'm a terrible therapist. She's right about that. In this episode I will provide a self-analysis of my counter-transference during that moment.

This is a common succor dynamic practice to self-analyze.

I will discuss what happened, my emotional reaction reaction what I did in the moment my

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