Three Point Turn

How To Get Out Of Your Client’s ‘Stuff’

Have you ever had a client that became a problem for you?

In an ideal world, we as practitioners can stay out of our client’s problems and provide dispassionate help as they sort out their issues.

Unfortunately in the real world a client’s problem, or the client themselves, can become a problem for us.

Maybe something about them ‘rubs you up the wrong way’ and you start to feel triggered by them.

Perhaps when the client falls into the ’trance of the problem’, you fall in with them, and now you are both stuck in the problem.

Or perhaps your client takes control of the session, thwarting all your efforts to bring things back on track.

It may get so bad that your client becomes what is known in the medical profession as a ‘heart-sink’ client - you only need to hear their name for your heart to sink.

For example, let’s imagine you have a client called Sophie, who is struggling with her relationship with her mother.

When you work with Sophie, there is something about her that is troubling, you can’t quite identify it, but you start to feel bad when you see her. What you do doesn’t seem to work, and you may start to feel hopeless or trapped. This is obviously not a good state to be in if you are trying to help someone.

If you have client that affects you in these kinds of ways, here is a three stage process to help you get back your practitioner mojo.

Stage 1. Defuse the triggers

If your client somehow makes you feel bad, then taking care of these bad feelings is a good place to start.

Of course, it isn’t appropriate to try to work with your feelings during the session, so you need to set time aside to work on those feelings after the session.

The simplest way to conjure up the troublesome feelings you had in the session is, in your mind’s eye, go through the memory of a session until the feeling is triggered. You can read about this approach in Tapping For Problems That Aren’t There.

Once you have a sense of the uncomfortable feeling you could start tapping on it right away, but I think it is worth exploring this feeling a little more, it may lead to something deeper.

If this feeling is a familiar feeling to you from difficult relationships or experiences in the past it is worth taking care of the originating experience so you can take the feeling out by the roots rather than just tapping on leaves.

The easiest way to do this is to feel the feeling and ask yourself “How familiar is this feeling?”

If the feeling is familiar, ask yourself “When is the first time I can remember this feeling?” and noticing what comes to mind. If a memory presents itself take care of it and try to get the old feeling back.

If the feeling is not familiar, you can just tap on it, there won’t be any history to undo.

For more about this approach read Tracking Down The Right Memory With 3 Questions

Run through the memory of the triggering session to make sure you have processed all the triggers.

Once you have defused the triggers you can go on to:

Step 2. Repair unconscious dynamics

In some ways defusing the bad feelings that come out of a session with a ‘challenging’ client is simple, but it’s much harder to identify unconscious patterns that are operating between you and the client (sometimes these are referred to as transference and counter transference).

We all have patterns of interacting with others that were established when we were younger and that we can unconsciously fall back into.

For example, if your mother gave you a certain look that let you know you were in trouble and your client gives you a look just like that, it might make you uncomfortable even if you don’t know why.

To unpack, and neutralise, those dynamics use the 3 Perspective Tapping process I described in an earlier newsletter to uncover and process those responses. It can be fascinating and alarming to find out what triggers and perceptions are running below the surface.

Using The 3 Perspectives Tapping Process

In this process, you use your imagination to explore what is going on for you and the client (who isn’t present) by marking out three positions on the floor in the form of a triangle. Each position is about a couple of paces apart. I use two chairs facing each other and a third chair as a position for the observer.

To illustrate the process, I’m going to ‘role-play on paper’ a scenario with an imaginary client to illustrate how the process works in the therapeutic situation. I’m going to call this fictitious client Mike.

When I met Mike, my first impression was that he was quite fragile although in good health and about the same age as me.

I noticed during our first session together that I was being overly  cautious when I was working with him, in a way that was quite different to my usual style.

After this session with Mike I decided to use the 3 Perspective Tapping process to work out what was going on between us and how I could change it.

I arranged my chairs in a triangle formation and sat in the ’therapists chair’ and looked at the ‘client’s chair’, imagining the client sitting there, being himself.

Using this procedure will typically provoke thoughts, feelings and reactions in me which I process using tapping.

In this case, let’s say I had the thought ‘he is fragile and weak’ mixed in with a little anger.

I tapped on those reactions and after a couple of rounds removed the charge on that perception.

Note: This process requires that you are very aware of what is going on in your own reactions and responses, and that you can accept and work with what you find. However, since this is what you expect your clients to be doing it’s not unreasonable to expect it of yourself as well.

Then I checked again by ’looking’ at ‘Mike’ to see if there were any other reactions being triggered. There was no residual charge so I could move on.

Then I got up and sat down in the chair I use for the observer. From this dispassionate perspective, I imagined myself and Mike sitting opposite one another and observed the quality of the relationship between them.

From this observer’s perspective I could see that I (as the therapist) was frightened of challenging him. I tapped on this fear until it was released.

When the charge on that had dissolved I looked again at how ‘Mike and I’ were interacting.

I noticed that they were walking on eggshells. Another round of tapping took care of that.

With those aspects cleared I moved from the observer’s position to the client’s chair, as I sat on it, I imagined sitting down ‘into’ my client’s experience. Imagining how this situation appeared to him from his own perspective.

The thought ‘I am incredibly weak’ arose in my mind. So I tapped out this perception let my attention rest on that thought. When the charge on this statement was cleared. I, as the client, imagined looking over at myself as the therapist and noticing if there were any untoward reactions.

A thought arose that ‘He is judging me’. I tapped out this perception and checked again, this time there were no reactions.

I returned to the observer position to check how the relationship was. There were no apparent glitches, so I moved back into myself as the therapist.

When I was back in my own seat ’looking’ at the client I felt much more relaxed and open, the previous uncertainty and inhibition was gone.

When we met in person for the next session, I was much more direct and helpful and my client seemed much more robust than he had at the first.

Even though Mike is an imaginary character and this is an invented scenario, this account is typical of the kinds of thought processes that can be uncovered and resolved using this approach.

You could ask: “Aren’t you making up all these reactions and perceptions?”

All these interactions are going on in your head not the real world.

The answer is yes, but it probably doesn’t matter for two reasons:

First, if you have any degree of empathy (and if you don’t, what on earth are you doing being a therapist?) then you will have at least some reasonable understanding of other people’s experience to go on.

Second, your reactions in the session will be to your ideas and projections of what that client is like anyway.

Think of a difficult client for a moment.

Notice your reactions to them as you think about them. You probably get a similar reaction when you are with them in person.

The fact that you can get these reactions without being with them in person tells you that these reactions are due to your inner representations of this client as much as to the client in reality.

In this process, you are changing your inner representations of the client so your reactions and behaviour will be different when you are with them in person.

You could ask: Isn’t this process going to take hours for each client?

No, because once you have addressed this particular kind of entanglement you will be much less snagged by it in the future, so that all your future encounters of this type will be smoother and easier.

Although it takes a little time to run this process, eventually it will make you a better therapist.

If you don’t do it, then you run the risk of being snagged and snagged again by the same kinds of triggers. How much trouble is that going to be.

I have used the 3 Perspectives Tapping process many times to untangle therapeutic relationships that seemed to be unbalanced in some way.

Each time I have learnt something about myself and the client and been able to respond in a better way. It’s been a valuable part of my work to become a more effective, less entangled therapist.

Step 3. Ongoing Maintenance

By now, you have probably made quite a change in how you view and relate to your client, but there may still be some things cropping up in the session that don’t feel right.

In that case, you can use the following Repair and Prepare strategy to clear up residual triggers as you go along.

After each problematic session, process the memory of the session until it is free of stress or distress.

Not only will this help you feel better about what has just happened, it will neutralise those triggers so they are not triggered in future sessions.

This approach allows you to get out of a vicious circle and into a virtuous circle.

Bonus Points: Get good mentoring / supervision

In my opinion this a must for anyone working as a therapist or coach. It is very difficult for us to see what’s going on because we are in the thick of it.

Having an experienced practitioner on the outside of the situation as a guide helps us to reflect on what is going on and to get new ideas for ways to go forward, as we continue to learn.

An experienced mentor acts as a safety net for both clients and therapist alike.

Summing Up

If you have got this far, bravo!

For symptomatic relief, taking care of the triggers will be very helpful, running the three perspective-tapping process will give deeper systemic relief.

This may seem like a lot of work, but it has value beyond this one troublesome client.

If you are triggered in a particular way, you may have many clients who trigger this unhelpful response. Neutralising this trigger for one, will probably neutralise it for all.

The three perspective tapping process might seem like even more work, but once again dismantling an unhelpful dynamic for one will dismantle it for all.

Over the long run this effort pays big dividends, it will give you greater clarity and help you become more resourceful in your sessions. Remember if someone is struggling in a session, it probably shouldn’t be the practitioner.

If after all this you are still having problems with this client, refer them on to someone else.

It would be nice to think that we can work with everyone, but we all have limitations and some people may just be too much to handle.

Making sure you have a good intake process can help you assess if you are able to work with a client before you even start tapping. If you keep getting ‘difficult clients’ it may be time to adjust your intake process to help filter out people who are too challenging for you at your current level of development.