How to Feel *Just* Enough
Countertransference, overwhelm and empathic overload in an emotional world
Hello Loves! I must have a lot of work I don’t want to do because I find myself writing a lot of Substacks this week!
This past Tuesday I took another daylong training in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy with my fave teachers at the Polaris Insight Center. The focus of this one was countertransference, a fancy psychotherapy word that just means “feelings I have about my clients.”
Clergy peeps and others, I learned SO MUCH that was directly applicable to pastoral ministry. If transference is how our church members feel about (and project their emotions and reactions displaced from other parts of their lives onto) us, countertransference is all of our own stuff that bubbles up in response to them.
Here are a couple nuggets I synthesized from from my learning that may be helpful:
~Freud brought countertransference into the lexicon as a BAD thing and something to be avoided. Clinicians (and clergy by association) were for a long time expected to be blank walls, dispassionate robots, “above it all.” I’d add that this expectation has led a lot of us clergy to take more shit than we need to. We might think we are being a non-anxious presence in the face of bullying, criticism, other kinds of acting-out, but really we are just burying our own feelings.
~Our own feelings in response to the people we are engaging with are something to be curious about and explore, not stuff into our shadow where they can do more harm to ourselves and the people in our care (think: passive-aggression toward “difficult” members, ignoring feelings until we become ticking time bombs and explode on the source or someone even less deserving, or letting our feelings leak out through really unhealthy coping strategies such as substance misuse or sexual acting-out, etc).
We are going to have feelings in ministry. How can we honor them? Work through them? See how they can actually be resolved, or better yet: worked in to enhance the “therapeutic alliance” between caregiver and cared-for?
Here are some forms that countertransference can take, so you recognize it:
Attraction (sexual or otherwise, idealizing love)
Revulsion (impatience, suspicion, disgust, anger and withdrawal, boredom, disappointment, condescension and pity, fear, pathologizing and demonizing)
Overidentification with the suffering of people in our care (sounds like a virtue, but it’s not)
You may not even know you have these feelings, but your body does. Your body will give you cues when you see people, think about them, communicate with them, work with them.
If you’re anything like me (Enneagram 3 with a 2 wing here!) you might find that one of the pathological forms countertransference takes in your pastoral relationships is being overly invested in “helping people get better.” And when they don’t get better (according to your lights) you either feel like a failure or – different but just as bad – blame them (which is the last thing they need).
The antidote to these dead ends is to cultivate curiosity and a deep ability to just be WITH a suffering someone without becoming overly ego-invested or giving up healthy internal boundaries.
Here’s where we get into a really juicy topic that’s probably live for most of you right now whether you’re in ministry or not: compassion fatigue, or what my teachers call “empathic overload.”
Elon Musk on his ketamine-fuelled descent from polite society has become fond of saying that ‘extreme empathy is leading to civilizational suicide’. I wholeheartedly disagree with him…sort of. Musk is a d-bag who is basically advocating for not giving a shit about other people. But at the other end of the spectrum is an overweening empathy that becomes paralyzing.
After my training this week I remembered the excellent article Adam Grant wrote after October 7 about empathic distress–hurting for others without being able to help. Empathic distress causes us to numb out, shut down and fail to do anything helpful at all because it’s All Just Too Much. This is a form of pathological countertransference, where we identify as the Helpers who fail to produce a good outcome for the Helpees.
My teacher Harvey says when we’re sitting with a patient/participant/parishioner and find ourselves in a challenging moment, our job is to:
“Look deeply, open widely, stay curious.”
This advice applies to not just when we are sitting with a suffering person, but feeling overwhelmed at the enormity of all the suffering in the world.
What we’re aiming for is not empathic overload, but EMPATHIC RESONANCE. (Gosh I love that phrase). How do we allow ourselves to ✨ FEEL✨ in ways that mitigate distress instead of amplifying it? How do we feel in proper amounts, so that we’re engaged and attuned but not overwhelmed or shutting down?
What empathic resonance feels like: it’s not sucking the poison out of someone then dying yourself as a result. It’s not a game of hot potato, where someone has to be left holding something that burns (my husband and I call this “marital osmosis,” when one of us complains about something until they feel better but the other spouse feels worse).
Also, empathic resonance is not a feelings competition. Sometimes when carers take ON feelings it becomes a way of taking OVER feelings. Anyone have a parent or sibling or friend who in the guise of “feeling for you” actually escalates the drama and leaves you taking care of them instead? That. And don’t do it yourself! It’s fun to be the drama queen but not helpful to you or anyone.
Empathic resonance is more like a taffy pull. Two (or more) people holding something sticky and hot, working it back and forth, playfully, until it’s lighter, smoother, more resilient. Something that becomes sweet and yielding. Something that can ultimately be set down eventually.
Can we work with emotion, particularly suffering and grief, in this way? Play with it, change the viscosity of it, make it easier to work with–together? And we remember we don’t work alone in this pushing & pulling. There is a third with us: the Holy Spirit, injecting more light and air into the taffy as we work.
Photo of a 50s-era taffy pull in Peabody, MA
Clergyfolk, or really anybody in a caring profession, are at our best when we are semi-permeable membranes. How can we stay warmly connected and be fully human and present, but not take in so much that we are gutted by grief and left empty shells?
Empathic resonance starts and ends with knowing our limits (before we have overshot them). It means not worrying about “helping” or outcomes so much as just building our capacity to be with, feel with, move with.
Here’s a quote from my training, from Pema Chodron, one of the greats:
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
~And here’s Adam Grant again~
Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it. In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.
Although they’re often used interchangeably, empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.” Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”
This is reason number 5,792 why I am SO DAMN EXCITED to be working in the world of psychedelic-assisted therapy. There’s something about the work itself that is all about empathic resonance. For the most part, we are not “doing” much on a medicine journey: sitting quietly in a room together with powerful music and a psychedelic adjunct, feeling deeply.
It’s exhausting work, but not depleting work. I leave at the end of a session feeling more alive & awake, as if I’ve had a really good workout, one that left my muscles sore but also made me stronger.
I understand (most of the time…still working on my shadow and the enneagram 3 that is always with me!) that my role is not to fix, advise or help in these sessions. It’s to be present. Humble. Attentive. Playful and serious by turns. It’s a dance, and involves a certain amount of learned choreography but also a whole lot of ecstatic improvisation.
It’s FUN, honestly – even sitting with people who are disclosing various forms of trauma, abuse, suicidality, the worst of the worst. And by FUN I mean: it is conversely uplifting, a sudden updraft of the Spirit that lifts us all as participants find their way to unburden safely with caring others (or not! They don’t have to verbally share anything at all with me to “pull the taffy.” Silence works too, their own inner healing intelligence in action). Rather than being weighed down by vicarious/secondary trauma, I find myself oddly lifted much of the time.
The more I practice in this realm, the more it changes my posture in all the realms in which I work, care & move: at home, at church, with strangers in the world.
Not that I don’t still from time to time crash to the bottom of the empty well of compassion, screaming up for someone to let down a rope. I’ve had a couple such weeks lately. So I’m trying to take my own advice:
First: attending to countertransference, my own feelings about the person or situation, and asking myself, “am I too ego-invested in the outcome, and in my own capacity to help?”
Second: pulling at the messy taffy of their/my/our feelings. Making it playful. Asking myself (per Elizabeth Oldfield’s advice) “what else is true?” Looking deeply, opening widely, staying curious.
Third: filling my own well during downtimes. The other evening I went on a night hike in the redwood forest above Oakland with some friends. It was not just a hike, but a mini-pilgrimage done with intention: invocation, prayer, quiet conversation about what was present, with no desultory chitchat.
At one point, we spread out along the trail for a solo walk in the darkest part of the forest. I was fully alone with the trees, the duff, the stream, and the creatures. I was scared, but not panicky.
I focused on my breath, deepening it, slowing it down. I could hear a little traffic from down the hills, sense the city there. I felt such relief to be so far from the suffering below, the great teeming need. It occurred to me that the trees didn’t need anything from me–except for me not to destroy them and their habitat. And (anthropomorphizing here), the trees felt glad that I was there. I leaned against a redwood, and it felt warm, sturdy, soothing. I could feel my central nervous system rebooting.
Three hours at night in the woods, with just a few humans, filled my well back up. Allowed me to come down the mountain to the human-filled world of feelings refreshed and ready, with a restored sense of proportion: both my (increased) capacity to be with feelings and my (very real) limitations in serving the totality of the suffering of this world.
And now, restored, it’s time to turn back to my little to-do list: putting together an active shooter training for my church tomorrow, and refreshing my memory about every form of child abuse and several other kinds of abuse in my biennial mandatory reporter training. Yay! All in the service of harm prevention and healing from suffering, in my own lane.
God be with you there! Wishing you more taffy and restorative redwoods today, whatever those look like for you.
Christlove,
Molly
:)