Clinical Conflict II: The Threat of Difference
Consciously Uncoupling from Countertransference
My boyfriend and I originally sought out couples therapy for two main reasons. One, he wanted to have a non-monogamous relationship, and I felt unready for that, in part because Two, I have hearing and vision disabilities, and my vision loss is progressive. We had come to an impasse and were stuck in the same dynamic, repeating the same fights, and so we decided to seek out a couples therapist who might have some experience with one or both of these issues.
The first therapist we worked with was an older gay man, who presumably had experience with queer and gay clients who had navigated non-monogamous relationship styles before, and his profile also noted that he had experience working with patients who are blind or low-vision. It felt like an amazing find, so we started to see him. At first it felt somewhat helpful just to have a third person there hearing us discuss our struggles and affirming their complexities and difficulties, but after a few sessions I started to feel really bothered by things he would say in response to my discussing the challenges of navigating social spaces with vision and hearing disabilities. His background working with blind and low-vision patients was apparently from having worked previously in a school for blind children; after I would try to describe often intense feelings of isolation and grief in social settings, he would say something like, “You know I used to say to my kids, being blind is just like being gay. It just is!” And that was that. I was kind of speechless in these moments and, after it happened a few times, I talked about it with my boyfriend, who affirmed that it was weird and really fell flat. It felt like he couldn’t leave his own field of vision to enter mine and really empathize, let alone understand how my blindness was specifically affecting me, my boyfriend, and our relationship.
Another time, I talked about the difficulties of not being able to hear well enough to follow along in a group conversation, and he responded by saying, “Yeah, it’s as if everyone around you is speaking French!” Which, again, felt completely off. I didn’t even know how to respond to him, how to explain that that actually wasn’t true, especially because I speak French and have studied many languages, and the experience of having a hearing disability is quite different from not speaking a language very well or at all. I’ve actually experienced both together and surely they interact, but each is distinct. I was talking about not being able to hear a conversation in my native language, which is surely different from being in a conversation with people speaking a language I don’t know at all, right?
After just a few months my boyfriend and I decided to terminate with this therapist because these kinds of sessions kept happening and we were still unable to work through our conflicts on our own, although I guess being pitted against our therapist in this way did have a kind of bonding effect. We told him we were terminating and we’d like this to be our last session. Our therapist asked why and I started to explain some of the ways I’d felt unheard. His response was unbelievable and extremely defensive. To each of the examples I’d offered as things he’d said that left me feeling unheard, he doubled down and explained why he’d said each of them, and they were all, without fail, specific to his own life. When I said that “being blind is just like being gay, it just is” just didn’t make sense to me and also that that just wasn’t true, he talked about what his generation had gone through, being gay at a time when it wasn’t possible, and we couldn’t imagine, and we young people have it so differently than when they were young. Which is certainly true, but he didn’t seem to be able to see how he was proving my point. This escalated even more when I brought up what he said about how it’s like everyone around me is speaking French—but this time he went into a whole story about how he said that because his friend invited him to a cabin trip somewhere with some people visiting from France who didn’t speak English and he told his friend that he would only go if they spoke English together and the friend promised him that they would, but then everyone just spoke French for the whole trip and he felt left out! I almost felt bad for him. My pointing out these moments as times I felt unheard was clearly so activating for him, as if I were his therapist and wasn’t validating his experiences, as if I was just there to affirm trauma he had gone through and hadn’t had the chance yet to process. The session had escalated enough that we had to just end the call and laugh about it afterwards. A week or two later he individually texted me an apology; I felt bad for him, but I never responded. I was too annoyed that I was being put into that role as his patient.
“She said she was all in favor of protesting for Palestinian people, but she wanted me to know that JVP was actually founded by Iran (pronounced “eye-ran”) and that she thought we should know that it might not be what we think.”
We looked for another therapist, eventually finding one that accepted my boyfriend’s insurance. This therapist was a younger white woman, straight and Jewish. Working with her was extremely different from the previous therapist. She helped us work through some very intense conflicts, cheating, fear, and grief, and, finally, the opening of our relationship. She was very good at listening to us and empathizing with my experience and understanding its complexity and specificity. But after about two years of working with her, we started to feel like she was really good at listening to my experience and perhaps only my experience and was asking a lot of my partner, rather than challenging me and the ways in which I can rely on my disabilities to perpetuate certain unhealthy dynamics in our relationship. My boyfriend and I also talked about how some of that might be racial, as I am a white Latino and my boyfriend is a brown Arab—half Jewish, half Muslim. We started to feel, very subtly, that our therapist was reinforcing, or at least not questioning, a dynamic where my partner is the angry brown man and I’m the white disabled person who needs him to be endlessly understanding and patient and helpful. We were starting to feel like we needed a therapist who was more psychoanalytically inclined in their method and who would be able to challenge racialized tropes and dynamics in our relationship.
I don’t think we had yet ever even gotten the chance to bring up these concerns with our therapist when October 7th happened. We had to cancel one session in late October 2023 because my boyfriend and I went to a rally for Palestine organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. The following week I signed on before my boyfriend, who was running late, and our therapist asked if we had gone anywhere the week before. I told her about the rally, and her entire face went pale, as if she had seen a ghost. She said she was all in favor of protesting for Palestinian people, but she wanted me to know that JVP was actually founded by Iran (pronounced “eye-ran”) and that she thought we should know that it might not be what we think. I laughed uncomfortably and told her I didn’t think that was true, but she could send me her source if she wanted, and then my boyfriend called me on the phone. Apparently he had been waiting to be let into the session. But our therapist said, “Oh, yes, I see he just signed on!” Our therapist and my boyfriend then had a short back and forth about the rally; she went into her political views and reservations about JVP in a much less specific way, and my boyfriend said he felt differently but really didn’t want to talk about it. We continued with our session.
My boyfriend and I debriefed that night. He was confused about why I hadn’t said more to support him once he signed on, and I told him what had happened before. He was furious. Not only did it confirm the unconscious bias we had been perceiving in our work with her, it also was blatantly Islamophobic and unethical not to admit him to the session while she was sharing an Islamophobic conspiracy theory specifically with me, and then to lie about his having just signed on when he had been waiting to be let in. We considered whether to terminate with her at that point. It was not worth continuing with a Zionist therapist as Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza was beginning, but we’d done valuable work with her over the prior two-plus years. We had been thinking about needing to be challenged more anyway, so we thought we’d see if we could use this rupture to push our work more in that direction.
The next session she initially only let me into the session, even though my boyfriend had signed on before me, and apologized to me individually. She said her sources about JVP were wrong and she was sorry that she had said that. I felt very uncomfortable and asked if my boyfriend had signed on yet and she said that he just did and let him in. Immediately my boyfriend confronted her for not having let him in, pointing out that it is unethical to do so, again, to say something to me and not him and to isolate me as the person deserving apology, as opposed to recognizing the impact that this would have on both of us and on our work together with her. This conversation, too, escalated quite a bit. We had decided to use the opportunity of this rupture to bring up our concerns about our therapist’s unconscious bias, but we couldn’t even get to this at first because our therapist kept cutting us off to apologize. Each time my boyfriend would start to describe in more detail how he’d felt in sessions, she would interrupt to say that she took accountability and was sorry, as if she couldn’t bear to hear his experience without that self-protection. Eventually he told her that she needed to stop apologizing and let him speak, because she didn’t even know what she was apologizing for.
My boyfriend talked about feeling pinned as the “angry person of color” sometimes in our work together, and she responded by saying, “I don’t see you as colored at all. I just see you as pixels on the screen!” Quite the slip, coupled with the classic “white woman feigning innocence” phenomenon of color-blind racism. It felt absurd to have to be our therapist’s therapist again and explain to her what unconscious bias is; that we live in a racist world and that’s okay; and that we need to be able to acknowledge and talk about those dynamics in our work. The session escalated, and we were left disappointed and feeling some déja vu. The following session we terminated and a few weeks later started seeing a great psychoanalyst whom we still work with today.
In some ways I think we wouldn’t have been able to do the great work with our current analyst if we hadn’t had these major ruptures. We told our current analyst about all of these experiences in our first session and I think it has really shaped the work we’ve been able to do with her since, and she has been able to challenge us in ways that are directly in response to the dynamics that our previous therapists unconsciously reinforced around race and disability.