Friend and Foe
by Thomas Pope, MFT

Changes are wanted or necessary at times. But the difference between the desire for change and in making it happen can be vast. The support of a therapist is sometimes helpful when we are stuck or in crisis, and with that support changes can be implemented with ease. But at times the needed change is elusive, is hard to make, is too scary, even when it seems simple or obvious.

Some schools of psychology don't like to focus on change. They emphasize acceptance. However, accepting oneself is sometimes a major change. And whether we say we are focusing on change or acceptance doesn't really matter. Life is about change. Allowing change is allowing life.

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Much has been written about the supportive aspects of psychotherapy, and its importance in healing. Ideally therapists are allies, extending positive regard where there hasn't been, helping clients feel supported in their struggle so that inner and relational conflicts can be resolved. Support is necessary in creating a good alliance and in building trust and a container for clients who are suffering. With such support a client can feel the encouragement and safety to walk into territory that has been dangerous and to face the demons obscuring the path to freedom

However, sometimes the role of therapist is more than one of support. At times we need to not support our clients. We need to challenge behaviors, beliefs, and long-standing characterological traits which cause the client and others suffering. The question is how do we continue to support, to be "the friend,Ó at the same time that we challenge the very strategies and defenses which once made a person safe in life. When we do this we become "the foe."Our role as therapist is complex. We are both the friend and the foe.

Even the act of support can be experienced as a threat. It may be a new experience, not to be trusted. Also, the therapist represents change, and symbolizes the unknown, whether we are simply supportive or are challenging. As the symbol and the agent of change, the therapist is sometimes perceived as dangerous.

All of us develop, grow, and become the people we are despite huge hurdles. We have human parents, teachers, and playmates. Life isn't always fair. We creatively do our best to survive, to prevail. We create a view of life and make sense of the chaos around us. Our ego organizes the uncertainty into order. We build a picture of life, of others, and ourselves. We find ways that we can manage the intensity, regulate the emotions, and find a precarious stability.

Sometimes the life we create is the very thing that keeps us from growing. It keeps us repeating behaviors that no longer work for ourselves or others. The therapist needs to confront these traits. But to do so we are opposed to the view and experience of life that the client holds as the truth. In this way we are dangerous to our clients. We are to be resisted. We are to be fought. We are to be defeated. We are to be challenged. We are the enemy.

When this predicament is not recognized, therapists can be easily engaged in power struggle, can take very personally a client's resistance. Failed therapies often result from not recognizing the precarious position of both client and therapist as conditioned thought, belief, and behavior is challenged. The therapist is the symbol of possible change, and movement from the status quo is a serious threat to the tenacious ego and its grip at organizing reality. Therapists overly identified with being the friend ignore the power of their role, and its inherent dangers.

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John came into therapy for help in figuring out how to leave a relationship without destroying his girlfriend and losing the friendship. He knew he had been in this predicament before. He was attractive, likable, intelligent, funny, active, capable, and in his mid-thirties. His problem wasn't that he didn't have interests and options in life, but that he had trouble committing to anything for long, especially relationship. Words and stories came easily, and I found it easy to understand why he needed to leave his current relationship. But I also heard the outline of his pattern of leaving relationships, jobs, and locations quickly. When I asked whether he had been in this situation before he became defensive. He had good excuses.

At this early stage John had no trust in me, or in anyone really. I worked to establish an alliance; I listened to his stories and dilemmas. I made sure he knew that I understood what he was telling me and that I understood his pain. We had to have that understanding if we were going to explore his resistance to intimacy. I also explained that he needed to look at the repetition in his life, that there was something to learn from the patterns that recur. John agreed that the repetition of leaving situations in his life did trouble him. His keen mind, though, always found the rationale.

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Challenging a client does not have to be confrontational in a damaging way. Abuses of the tool of confrontation have created a perception that therapists should be only supportive. Obviously therapists need to help create a sense of safety. However, keeping a client always in a state of safety and away from the dynamics of excitement and healthy risk-taking, shelters a person, maintaining the status quo of stuckness. It can actually support defenses that are causing the problems, reinforcing resistance to change. The challenge for the therapist, and the client, is to gauge the amount of safety needed to take the tentative first steps into dangerous, but necessary, material. A balance must exist of a sense of safety and the entry of frightening material associated with the deconstruction of personality traits and behaviors which are keeping the client from moving into a more functional and satisfying life. Therapists need to learn to engage in a way that is both supportive and challenging, a sometimes delicate task.

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After John had extricated himself from the unpleasant situation he decided that he would go on a trip. He thanked me for supporting him, telling me that I was no longer needed. I had expected this scenario, but nonetheless smarted from the coldness of the announcement. After several months of meeting together we had become close. I faced a critical challenge. To support him would not be really helpful to him. But to confront him would send him running. I took the middle approach. I told him I would miss him. He said the therapy had been helpful, but it was time to move on. I sat in silence. We were both awkward. I took a risk, repeating that I would miss him. John became anxious as I looked him in the eyes. He fidgeted and looked at the clock.

This is the time you always leave, I said. What if you stayed, I asked.

I saw John was very uncomfortable and that he had no tolerance for the feelings and sensations of the closeness. I asked him to breathe into his belly to support the increasing feeling, and to move with it instead of becoming frozen. The movement and breath helped. My challenge of his pattern, and the somatic support captured his interest. He agreed he should continue working in therapy.

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Ways we organize, protect, and express ourselves show in various patterns. These characteristics give us a sense of continuity and stability, of protection and safety. For example, holding the breath in a way can keep certain feelings at bay. Or taking certain roles in life, the good person, the caregiver, the rebel, are characteristics which work to give a sense of order, protection, and purpose. Holding the body in certain stances gives messages and binds feeling. Big-chested, stiff-necked postures can help keep enemies away and certain feelings at bay. Obsequious postures can appease the power-mad.

All of these patterns help protect, and give a sense of identity and order. They also limit us. They keep us from moving with ease. They keep other possibilities of feeling, interacting, and living impossible. They keep us from feeling our anxiety, but also from feeling our vulnerability in a humanly connecting way. And they keep us identified with our defenses as who we are. They keep the worldview from the past in the present. They keep us from knowing the essence of whom we really are beyond our conditioning. And they keep us from being alive in the moment, from seeing all the possibility of life in the now.

The first job of the therapist is to create a sense of safety and support. It is to validate and empathize. But if the therapist only validates the need for safety we risk empowering the defenses and neglecting the bigger picture. At times our job is to question the reality of the old beliefs, patterns, limiting postures. In doing this we become dangerous to the client. The art is to maintain the trust built in a strong alliance with our clients, and at the same time, when the time is right, to engage in deconstructing the walls that were crucial at some point in life, but which limit and cause pain in the present.

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As the therapy developed we explored John's pattern of leaving and avoiding commitment. He became aware of where he developed these patterns, and he found compassion for himself. He saw that it was easy to want superficial things and quick exciting adventures, but that his deeper longing was taboo. He believed deeply that he would never be able to love, that he was incapable of it. And he knew that to feel his vulnerability was very dangerous.

In this phase we worked for John to develop a tolerance for the feeling and sensation in his body. Also we used his body experience as a feedback reference, developing a skill of inquiry and interest. He resisted often, and I encouraged him to stay with his experience instead of his quick thinking skill. Slowly he understood the value of these skills.

And then he met Allison. He fell in love. He was able to feel his heart and stay present with her in a way he never had before. His thinking mind said to run, but his another voice said to stay. He was in new territory. And he became very frightened.

John's pattern was to create a change before a change could happen to him. He knew about taking charge and controlling. But he had now met his match. She wouldn't allow his shenanigans. And he was hooked on her. He found himself in a major dilemma.

John's parents had divorced when he was twelve, and his father had always been critical of him. He was ridiculed for any weakness and for wanting. He had spent his whole life avoiding his longing and vulnerability in relationship.

His thinking mind could no longer make sense of what was happening. He had to delve deeper into himself to find what he really wanted, what he really needed. He was in crisis. He was deeply longing for the connection with Allison, but was terrified of the possibility of rejection. He usually rejected before feeling this possibility. Though she wasn't ridiculing him as his dad did, he really believed that she would become contemptuous of his vulnerability.

John arrived in a session in a state of fluster. He asked what I would think if he ended the relationship with Allison. I wondered why he wanted my opinion. He said he trusted me. We discussed why he wanted to end it when it seemed that he was having everything he really wanted. All he could say was that it was too much. And he defensively blamed Allison for his state.

I could see he was in pain. I heard about the pain of his parent's divorce. I heard about his fears of rejection. I empathized, and worked to create comfort and support. I saw that he was terrified.

And I took the risk. I told him I thought it was in his best interest to stay. He became angry at me. He accused me of being like his father, a taskmaster. I relied on our built trust to encourage him to listen to his body experience. He resisted.

I asked him to feel in his heart. He said it was too painful. He worked with his breath to make room in his body for the sadness and anger. He moved around the room, flinging his arms and shoulders, fighting for space in his chest. He gulped for air. He had lost all sense of trust in what he knew. His system of safety and truth was disorganized.

John's heart was broken as a child, and he had vowed to never let it happen again. And though Allison wasn't leaving him, told him she wouldn't stay in the relationship if he kept threatening to leave, and if he wouldn't commit. His old patterns of coping weren't working. To be truly supportive of John, though, I had to encourage him to stay with the discomfort, to face his deepest fears. Fantasies of climbing mountains in Asia did not work any longer. He knew he wanted Allison. I told him this wanting was scarier than any mountain he could climb.

John realized that he had always been able to act in love, but not to receive. He realized that his deepest longing was to love and to fully receive another's love. Scary as it was, he knew to find integrity and wholeness, he had to invest his heart. He was reorganizing in a way more true to his authentic, essential self. He knew he had to step up to the precipice of love and not know what would happen.

At his wedding he said that his legs shook, his voice trembled, and tears rolled down his face, but he felt no shame. Instead the warmth of his heart came through his voice, and he was able to receive Allison as he had never imagined possible.

* * *

In the sessions, I had to get comfortable in tolerating John's discomfort. Though I was being supportive ultimately, in the moment I pushed him in a way that may have felt provocative and challenging. I had to be the ally to the part that deeply longed connection, and not to the one that wanted immediate safety. In this way I was both the enemy to the habitual and the friend to the part that wanted to change, to open to life. I was a friend to his deepest longings to trust himself and be intimate with others, a friend to the part that wanted to be fully and deeply alive and connected.

In process of being the friend and the foe therapists enter territory which challenges both client and therapist. Both have to give up the known for the excitement of deconstructing and reorganizing core beliefs and ways of experiencing and expressing life. In doing so, therapy can build a new sense of ego-strength. Clients learn to trust an emerging inner stability, skills of riding the waves of life instead of resisting them. John learned a new trust in himself and in life. Our engagement allowed him to develop in the way that he needed, to accept change, to experiment with life, and open to the joy of life emerging.

Thomas Pope, MFT, is the Director of the Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic and is in private practice in Santa Rosa. His trainings incorporate meditation practices and therapy processes that use the bodily experience as a vehicle for awareness and transformation.

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