When I was about 18, I realized that saying the truth I saw in people gave me an immense power over them. Most of us suffered greatly from not being truly seen as children, and if you have any kind of sight or just a very keen perception of humanity, like I did, it’s very easy to get people to give you their power in exchange for seeing them. As a young woman, I then made it a rule for myself to stop blurting out what I saw.
Years later this lesson was driven home even further by a shamanic healer that I was working with. She was extremely clairvoyant, and had no qualms or filter about saying everything good she was seeing in me. I was in a very vulnerable period of my life and I immediately latched on to her, replaying obsessive attachment patterns, or transference, that I had played out with multiple people before, but never in a therapeutic relationship. Because of her clairvoyance, I thought she realized what was happening to me, and the intensity of the transfer I was doing on her. I myself was very aware of it, but as these things go, could do little about it. I overestimated her self-awareness and understanding of human dynamics. For all her clairvoyance, she really didn’t understand what was happening, nor did she realize how she was encouraging my transference on her.
If we’d continued working remotely and the relationship had remained professional, I could have managed this by myself, because by then I knew this pattern well and would have found a way out at some point. But then she signed up for the training I was taking that year, and all hell broke loose. Any therapist will tell you, it’s a very bad idea to interact with your clients outside of the therapeutic relationship, let alone join them for a one year intense training. Long story short, things didn’t go well. I was lucky that I was as resourced and self-aware as I was, and already had 20 years of therapy behind me, because even like that there were several times that year I thought I was losing my mind.
At first I held myself fully responsible for the situation that I was in, because I was the one with the unhealthy attachment, the one she had to “defend against”. Then as the year progressed and I could see more clearly, if not less painfully, I started noticing all the things she was doing or had done on her end that had facilitated my transfer. That drove the point home even more, of how careful and aware of your own power you have to be, as a therapist or someone working with others in a therapeutic capacity.
If prompted, most therapists/healers will tell you that they don’t want power over their clients, and that as a result they don’t have any. But that’s just wishful thinking. The reality of our society - how we are trained from birth to submit to authority and look outside of ourselves for validation of our existence - plus the fact that people’s biggest wounds revolve around their parents make it so that the moment we step into the role of therapist we ARE the authority, and therefore have power whether we want it or not. I would even go further : if we didn’t enjoy that on some level, we would probably not be a therapist, because it is a profession that by nature gives us an incredible amount of power over people. And the more we know that, acknowledge it, accept it, digest it for ourselves and find neutrality with it, the less likely we are to enter into dynamics with our clients that will get them to transfer onto us.
It might be impossible to entirely avoid it (as my teacher Gary Strauss would say “we’re human beings: you’re always going to be somebody to somebody”) but there are ways that we can greatly encourage it, or greatly discourage it. Anything that is a pronouncement and remotely true will make a pathway for someone to invest you with the power of a parent. And if you want to work that way it’s completely possible. It can be very useful to lend ourselves to that kind of projection (after all, that fateful year of training, I did some of the deepest self-work of my life). A lot of therapists work like that, more or less consciously. Personally, I was really cautioned against it by what happened to me as a client with the person mentioned above. So, I remain extremely careful about what I say and how I work, in order to avoid it.
I understand that, for many healers, this relationship with power is hard to look at because it dents our image of ourselves as a “good person”, who doesn’t want any power over others. But isn’t that the ultimate practice, to accept that we do not fit our own definition of a “good person” so that our clients can break free of the stifling “good child” prison they’re locked in most of the time?