Retraumatization
so doing, whatever traumas we may have sustained in the past or present there is the potential of remaining STUCK in their effects. We wouldn't be experiencing countertransference if our past has been worked through. We experience countertransference because it hits us where it hurts the most, where we are the most vulnerable and where we HAVEN'T healed ourselves. So it is good to remember what we can do to ourselves as well as our client.
One of the most traumatizing thing we can do to our clients is to project our own countertransference on to them as being their transference. In so doing, we not only retruamatize them by reenacting previous experiences in which, and because of which, they feel blamed and that they are to blame for whatever is happening, but the saddest part of this phenomenon is that the therapist remains blinded to their own issues and the need to self-examine. It is one of the easiest cop-outs for a therapist to avoid looking at him/herself by turning errors back onto their client, e.g. "due to your abuse, I can see how you think this, behave in such a manner, preceive me as doing whatever". How often have we relieved a twinge of guilt by projecting onto our clients, what we need to look at in ourselves? We retraumatize ourselves and don't even know it! I am not proud of the fact that I have done this.
Retraumatizing a client who transfers to us all the emotions, reactions and behaviors that were felt and shown to significant figures long since removed from their life either literally or figuratively, occurs in different ways.
It can be in not recognizing at what developmental stage such feelings belong; in the therapist garnering adoration to her/himself because of the need to be idealized, needed, admired etc. There could be an inability to handle intense and sometimes primal emotions such as rage, terror, indescribable emotional pain and in the response to any of these on the part of the therapist by unrecognition, avoidance, neglect, dismissal, denial of them being real, said therapist can reenact the exact responses shown to their patients. Shown at a time when they were too small to comprehend such lack of understanding from those they loved, or too afraid to question what didn't make sense in the abuse, punishment and total lack of love and nurturing.
Retraumatization of a client
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