Inspired by my conversation in the last episode with Dr. Andrea Celenza, today I want to talk about tolerating paradoxes and about love in the context of therapy.

In our conversation and in her book, Sexual Boundary Violations, Dr. Celenza discusses the concept of the “multiple irreducible levels of reality in the therapeutic relationship.” 

None of those multiple realities is more or less real than the others and it’s essential that we, as clinicians, maintain our awareness of them. Yes, it’s hard. These multiple realities evoke a whole range of relationships and power structures that often contradict each other. Of course it’s hard. 

But when we try to collapse these realities, that’s where we get into trouble. I want to unpack what that means for us in our therapist-client relationships, and how it requires us to hold and tolerate those multiple realities.