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Emma shares about complex trauma, deprivation, and dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID). Educational, supportive, and inspiring, System Speak documents the best and worst of life through insights, conversations, and collaborations. An archive curated for dignity for all.
Over:
Speaker 2:Welcome to the System Speak a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:This is my practice. This is the presentation I am giving for ISSTD, the twenty twenty sixth Annual Conference. It is Transference and Countertransference in a Liberation Framework. And to understand what we're talking about, I'm going to give some history because I always do. Talking about transference and countertransference is required for clinicians.
Speaker 1:It's also foundational to psychoanalytic concepts, which is foundational for psychodynamic treatment. These shape how we understand projection and repetition and relational patterns, unconscious communication. And it's also been shaped within historical context that I believe are marked by colonial, patriarchal, and medicalized power structures. That is why we need a liberation framework which asks us to retain our clinical depth while interrogating their embedded hierarchies. So just to be on the same page, what are we talking about when we talk about transference?
Speaker 1:Transference occurs when a client is unconsciously redirecting feelings, thoughts, and desires about significant people in their past onto the therapist. So for example, a client who felt abandoned by a caregiver may fear that their therapist will abandon them as well. Countertransference works the other way, where the countertransference is the therapist's emotional reaction to the client, which may be influenced by the therapist's own experiences and unconscious processes. So, for example, a therapist who experienced rejection in their own relationships may over identify with a client's fear of rejection. So, transference is referring to expectations and relational meanings that were shaped by earlier relationships, and that surfaces in therapy, and countertransference is the clinician's emotional, somatic, cognitive, relational responses within treatment.
Speaker 1:So, one thing that comes up a lot with complex trauma when we're working with developmental trauma or child sexual abuse includes erotic transference, which refers specifically to clients developing romantic or sexual feelings towards the therapist that arises from unmet attachment needs, past relational wounds, or the intensity of the therapeutic alliance. These feelings arise from attachment needs and relational longing rather than reciprocal romantic intent. The feelings are not about the therapist as a person, but about the therapist as a symbol of safety, attunement, and care within that context of childhood sexual abuse where ultimately those younger parts of self have been, sexualized. And so the confusing of care and grooming even, which we will talk about later. These feelings are clinically meaningful, not something the client chooses or intends, and it's the therapist's responsibility to maintain firm and compassionate boundaries, but does not mean that the client is bad for experiencing these things.
Speaker 1:It's very normal and tells us about what clients have been through and endured already. Any enactment, encouragement, or reciprocation is an ethical violation, however, and the focus should remain on understanding the meaning of the feelings within the client's history, attachment patterns, and relational template. Erotic transference is not just unmet attachment needs. It's an emotional experience that can be enacted in the therapeutic relationship. The therapist's boundaries and supervision are essential.
Speaker 1:Counotransference erotically refers to the therapist's emotional, physiological, relational reactant reactions to the client as shaped by the therapist's own history, vulnerabilities, attachment patterns, or unconscious material. This is normal and inevitable, but becomes risky when it's not recognized, and unmanaged reactions can create blurred boundaries over involvement, avoidance, rescuing, irritation, or inappropriate self disclosure. Awareness and supervision help the therapist stay grounded, objective, and attuned. An ethical practice requires therapists to notice their reactions, reflect on their origins, and ensure they never act out counter transference in ways that harm or confuse the client. The nuances of all of this we'll get into, but the ethical imperative is maintaining boundaries, not encouraging or reciprocating, and seeking supervision if boundaries feel strained.
Speaker 1:Any sexual behavior advances or reciprocal sexualization by the therapist is a boundary violation and grounds for termination or referral. For traumatic which is a different kind of transference, clients with complex trauma may relate to the therapist through survival states activated by past abuse or neglect. The present relationship may be colored by fear, mistrust, or longing. Not all transference in complex trauma is exclusively trauma driven. Attachment and relational scripts also play a role.
Speaker 1:The present relationship becomes filtered through old survival states. Clients may expect danger, rejection, punishment, abandonment, or control, regardless of the therapist's actual behavior. This can appear as fear, distrust, compliance, anger, testing, or withdrawing. The therapist must remain steady, non defensive, and boundaried to avoid reenacting past harm. Ethical practice requires the therapist to recognize that these reactions are trauma driven, not personal, and to respond with attunement and stability, providing a reparative relational experience rather than repeating the original trauma.
Speaker 1:Traumatic countertransference refers to the therapist's emotional, somatic, or relational reactions that arise when a client's trauma history, especially relational or chronic trauma, activates the therapist's own resolved wounds, fears, or vulnerabilities. The therapist may feel overwhelmed, flooded, protective, avoidant, defensive, or emotionally shut down. These reactions can distort perception of the client and increase the risk of reenacting traumatic dynamics, like rescuing, controlling, withdrawing, or subtly blaming. Without awareness, the therapist may misinterpret the client's survival responses as personal rather than trauma driven. Ethical care requires the therapist to notice dysregulation, seek consultation or supervision, and maintain clear boundaries, ensuring that the client's trauma does not pull the therapist into reenactment or over identification.
Speaker 1:In clients with complex trauma or dissociative disorders, transference reactions may involve intense fear, idealization, or distrust shaped by those early attachment ruptures and betrayals. These may be enacted by different parts or self states rather than a unitary self. Important in therapy, this phenomenon is normal and expected, recognizing and managing transference and countertransference is critical for effective therapy and maintaining professional boundaries. In complex trauma, relational dynamics such as transference are often survival based responses rooted in early relational trauma and may be enacted by dissociated self states or even within and between those self states. So when we look at the differences between erotic transference and traumatic transference, with erotic transference, like we talked about the romantic or sexualized feelings being directed towards the therapist, with traumatic transference, it's fear based or survival based expectations being directed towards the therapist.
Speaker 1:The organizing affect with erotic transference is longing or attachment, hunger, idealization. With traumatic transference, that organizing affect is fear or mistrust, terror, compliance, or anger. Developmental roots with erotic transference are the unmet attachment needs, deprivation of attuned care, and early relational longing. The developmental roots with traumatic transference is chronic coercion, betrayal, abuse, captivity, or institutional harm. The primary function of erotic transference is the attempt to secure closeness, safety, and validation, while the primary function of traumatic transference is attempt to prevent danger, abandonment, domination, or harm.
Speaker 1:I feel like this is a really important piece to understand because when we talk about trauma and deprivation with complex trauma, we are talking about the harm that happened and the good that was missing, and that is reflected in function here. So again, really normalizing that it makes sense that this happens. So traumatic transference is that expectation that harm is going to happen again, and erotic transference actually has to do with deprivation more than anything. The relational template activated with erotic transference is the idealized rescuer or perfectly attuned other, and with traumatic transference, the relational template activated as perpetrator or abandoning figure controlling authority or unsafe caregiver. The experience for the therapist with erotic transference is experiencing the therapist as being seen or the client being seen by them as uniquely special or idea, emotionally or romantically significant.
Speaker 1:With traumatic transference, seeing the therapist as dangerous, rejecting, powering, or overpowering or unsafe. With erotic transference, the risk in treatment is boundary crossings, over gratification, reenactment of dependency. And the risk in treatment with traumatic transference is the reenactment of coercion, withdrawal, control, retaliation, or rescue dynamics. The counter transference risk with erotic transference is over identification, rescuing, subtle encouragement, or discomfort leading to distancing. And the countertransference risk with traumatic transference is defensiveness, control, avoidance, rescuing, or reenacting.
Speaker 1:So the clinical task with erotic transference is to maintain firm, compassionate boundaries and explore the meaning of the longing, tending to the actual wound and memory time. And the clinical task for traumatic transference is maintaining steadiness, differentiating the past from the present and preventing reenactment, which requires the, differentiation between now time and memory time and the geographical boundaries of what is me and what is you. So just so that we have the same language, those are the kinds of things we're required to talk about every year, we're supposed to know and be paying attention to. Things really specific to Complex Trauma and Dissociation. And also, to move through this, we need to understand the history because just saying transference and counter transference, first of all, I feel like at this point has such a watered down meaning and understanding and is repeated so much in ways that are not getting at the root.
Speaker 1:The more disconnected we get therapy from actual theory and with Liberation Framework we move so far beyond what is understood as transference and countertransference that we really need to look at how we got to where we are now to be able to broaden our understanding and deepen our understanding. So you all know how I am and we're going to go through the history of this. If we go all the way back to Freud, that first understanding of transference being articulated as the phenomenon in which feelings, expectations, fantasies, and relational patterns were originally associated with early caregivers being displaced onto the analyst. Freud observed that patients did not merely recall past relationships, they relived them in the therapeutic encounter, often with compelling emotional immediacy. Part of what's tricksy with memory time invading now time is that it feels like memory time is happening right now.
Speaker 1:He described transference as the repetition of prototypes from childhood, revived and reenacted with the analysts serving as substitute object. In his 1912 paper, The Dynamics of Transference, Freud argued that transference emerges inevitably because the analytic situation activates unresolved relational conflicts. He initially conceptualized transference as a form of resistance. Rather than remembering traumatic or conflictual material, the patient repeats it in action. So again, instead of just saying all the words about what I'm experiencing, we act it out, not just to show the therapist, but also to show ourselves.
Speaker 1:This repetition both conceals and reveals unconscious wishes and defenses. Transference was therefore not simply an obstacle. It became the primary medium through which unconscious material could surface and be made conscious. Freud further elaborated this in remembering repeated and working Through in 1914, where he described how patients are unable to remember the repressed material directly. Instead, they repeat it within the analytic relationship transform through interpretation and work through past conflicts in the here and now context.
Speaker 1:The analytic task involves recognizing this repetition, interpreting it, and gradually helping the patient work through the distortions that arise from infantile conflicts and wishes. The aim was not to gratify the transference nor to retaliate against it, but to analyze it so the patient could differentiate past from present. So it's part of why it's so hard to tell the difference between now time and memory time, which is why it's always a clue to us that memory time is surfacing even if we still have a foot in now time. But if we can't see that memory time is happening, then we will reenact it in now time because we don't understand there's a difference or we're not aware that there's a difference. So central to Freud's formulation was the position of the analyst as relatively neutral, abstinent, and opaque.
Speaker 1:The analyst was to function as a blank screen onto which the patient's projections could be cast. Personal disclosure and overt emotional responsiveness were minimized in order to preserve the analytic frame and prevent contamination by the analyst's own unresolved conflicts. The analyst's subjectivity was considered a potential source of distortion that required disciplined self analysis. This was the client on the couch and the analyst behind them or beside them or off to the side were literally not interfering with the process at all, sometimes not even speaking, sometimes or a few barely asking questions, really just letting it flow out and see what comes of that. The early framing established several enduring assumptions that transference is inevitable and structurally necessary within treatment.
Speaker 1:It represents a distortion of present reality shaped by unconscious infantile wishes and interpretation by a trained and neutral analyst is the primary mechanism do to we that do it transference within in a relational and sociocultural context. For countertransference, Freud initially viewed countertransference as the analyst's unconscious interference. So this is why for psychoanalysts, going through their own psychoanalysts was a requirement because we had to do our own work so we didn't interfere with their process. And for decades since, more than a hundred years now, that's still been a requirement in many programs that therapists get their own therapy before they're doing any therapy. That is becoming less and less required, which is a bit of a concern.
Speaker 1:A bit of a concern may be an understatement. So then we have frenzy. Frenzy was significantly departed from classical analytic orthodoxy by questioning the strict neutrality and abstinence that characterized early Freudian technique. While Freud emphasized the analyst as a relatively opaque and interpretive authority, Frenzy became increasingly concerned that the excessive distance, emotional withholding, and rigid adherence to neutrality could replicate the very relational traumas that patients had endured. There are so many of us with lived experience that can vouch for this, that have experienced this, that if we are having therapy or even other ships that are too distant or too cold or too unresponsive, it's so activating because it is so mirroring the wound rather than tending to the wound.
Speaker 1:He argued the technique itself could become reenactment in therapy when the analyst postured mirrored earlier responses of emotional unavailability or domination. So what is happening, he's saying, is that therapists being distant from their clients is actually mirroring the wound rather than attuning to the client and their experience of distance and unresponsiveness from care, from deprivation. So Frenzy's mutuality, his clinical work with severely traumatized patients, particularly those with histories of abuse and neglect, led him to the foreground about the impact of trauma in shaping relational expectations. He recognized that many patients were not simply struggling with repressed wishes. They were organizing their psychic lives around overwhelming experiences of betrayal, coercion, and misattunement.
Speaker 1:In this context, a cold or interpretively distant analyst could inadvertently re traumatize the patient by confirming their expectations that powerful others will dismiss, disbelieve, or emotionally abandon them. In his clinical diary, Frenzy described the phenomenon of identification with the aggressor and the fragmentation of the self under traumatic conditions. He observed that the traumatized individuals may comply, dissociate, or adapt in order to survive within asymmetrical power relationships. He also began to examine participation in these dynamics. Rather than viewing the analyst as outside the field, he emphasized that the analyst's emotional responses and relational stance directly shaped the therapeutic environment.
Speaker 1:He introduced the concept of mutuality, suggesting that healing requires authentic responsiveness rather than rigid neutrality. He experimented with what he called relaxation and neocatharsis techniques, attempting to create a relational atmosphere characterized by safety, warmth, and genuine engagement. While some of his technical experiments were controversial, his broader contribution was recognition that the analyst's emotional presence matters. The therapist's empathy, attunement, and capacity to acknowledge error are central to repair. So he's saying that the distance and aloofness of Freud's style was causing fresh trauma and dismissing old trauma in folks who had developmental or relational trauma, complex trauma, because of that mirroring the wound itself rather than attuning to the person hurting from the wound, and said that instead, he was really the first that said, No, we need attunement with the person and the relationship needs to be safe enough for us to be able to tend to the wounds that are there.
Speaker 1:Importantly, he began to see counter transference not only as interference but also as information. So Freud thought countertransference was only interference, and so basically, like, in that more rigid historical view with Freud, the transference was the client being bad and interfering with the therapeutic process, and countertransference was the therapist being bad and interfering with the process. But frenzy is saying no. It's just information. When transference happens, when countertransference happens, it's just information.
Speaker 1:No one's doing anything wrong. Not tending to it, not addressing it can be a kind of neglect that leads to problems, and then things could go sideways or be raw or, like, cause add harm or or cause problems. But the the information surfacing is exactly what therapy is supposed to do. The analyst's responsiveness and relational stance can be therapeutic in itself. The analyst's emotional reactions may reflect induced states, projective processes, or reenactments of traumatic relational templates.
Speaker 1:But he's also saying we can't tend to those things if they don't surface. So just letting the client be there without actually tending to what needs to surface, we could maybe keep them in now time but we're not tending to why they came into our offices. So rather than suppressing these responses, he encouraged reflective awareness of them as part of the analytic data. This shift laid the groundwork for later relational and intersubjective theories in which countertransference becomes a primary instrument of understanding rather than a contamination to be eliminated. His work therefore marks a crucial transition in the history of transference and countertransference.
Speaker 1:He moves psychoanalysts toward recognition of trauma, relational asymmetry, and the ethical responsibility analyst within a power laden encounter. His attention to re traumatization, mutual recognition, and emotional responsiveness opened the conceptual space for later trauma informed and liberation oriented critiques of neutrality and authority within psychotherapy. His mutuality agreed for a more responsive, less distant analytical stance where mutual affect and emotional availability could facilitate healing. So the core shift was moving away from that strict analytic neutrality, being more emotionally present. The risk is an over correction into collapse of boundaries, and so the task is authentic responsiveness, but within the structure of the therapeutic framework.
Speaker 1:He also changed the view of trauma, where trauma is organized around relational asymmetry and coercion, and that the clinical meeting is that techniques that include distance or reenact that can reenact domination over, so a doing to the client, a power over the client, and that recreating emotional distance. So our task is to attend to power in the analytic stance. We have to know that there's always power happening in the room because we are in a position of care for our clients. Mutuality, his formulation was that healing requires genuine relational engagement. This is why for healing relational wounds, we cannot only use left brain techniques, We cannot only use CBT or skill based things.
Speaker 1:We have to have relational engagement. That relational engagement needs to include the whole person, whether they're a system or not. And that relational engagement happens inside and outside the session because the person exists inside and outside the session. That clinical meaning the therapist participates in that whole relational field, the risk is too much self disclosure. So really those limits, we talk about the boundaries of that as being that the client is never responsible for the clinician.
Speaker 1:So like even in my case where so much is public because of books or podcasts or whatever, I don't have to share things that are not already public or even if I did, I share them in a way where it is attuning with the client, it is not about making the client responsible for me. And so I do that a lot by always prefacing with, I will take this back to my therapist, your grand therapist, and we have this running joke about their grand therapist because always, always in any kind of disclosure, I have to make sure that they know that they are not responsible for me. I'm responsible for me and caring for them, and part of being responsible for myself is having people who care for me. And so that clinical task is that kind of reflective participation. With countertransference, his formulation was that it wasn't just interference, it was information, and those feelings may reflect induced states.
Speaker 1:And if we only acted out without reflection or relational aspects, then that becomes reenactment. So our task then is to use feelings as data. For the dimension of identifying with the aggressor, traumatized patients comply, dissociate, or internalize perpetrator roles. These survival adaptions are relational and the risk for clinicians is mislabeling this compliance or acting out as resistance. If someone is being resistant to treatment, it means the wrong treatment is being applied.
Speaker 1:And in my tribe, we would say the wrong medicine is being applied. So it's important as a clinical task that we recognize adaptive survival logic, even trance logic, and understand what is going on and the meaning and the relationship that is happening. The ethical emphasis then is that the analyst must avoid re traumatizing through rigidity, distance, or coldness, and that the techniques we use carry power with them. So the clinical risk is that technical coldness becomes a reenactment. So our clinical task is to offer warmth but with accountability where our clients are not responsible for us.
Speaker 1:It is natural and fine for clients to care about us. We cannot put them in a position of being responsible for us. So then we have Hyman's view as instrument, and this was a woman actually, which I want to point out, who wrote this paper in 1950 on countertransference, and really was a turning point in psychoanalytic theory. In contrast to Freud's early view that countertransference represented the analyst's unresolved conflicts intruding into treatment, she proposed that the countertransference is inevitable and potentially indispensable. It is accurate information to surface.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there are things we experience with our client that it's actually accurate feedback that the rest of the world around them is also experiencing and it's appropriate to share that with them. She also argued that the analyst's emotional responses are not merely personal disturbances to be eliminated, but essential instruments for understanding the patient's unconscious communication. Her view as instrument, she suggested that the patient's transference evokes corresponding feelings in the analyst. These responses are not random they are shaped within the relational field created by the patient's internal object world. So, when I teach about this, one of the things I talk about is how sometimes we can feel what a client is experiencing before they're able to say it does not mean it's okay to make assumptions, and it's not okay to interrupt their development by saying it for them.
Speaker 1:But sometimes we experience it before words come because that's what happens for them neurologically. So when we are super attuned with someone, it is a valid and healthy thing to notice that whether you're talking about it out loud or not. In this sense, countertransference becomes a form of reception. The analyst's effective experience can provide direct access to aspects of the patient's psychic reality that may not yet be symbolized or verbally expressed. The therapist's body and emotions become sites of clinical information.
Speaker 1:This shift reframed the analytic relationship as fundamentally bidirectional. The analyst is no longer positioned outside the interaction as a neutral interpreter observing distortions. Instead, the analyst is implicated within the relational process. And really, I would give her credit for being one of the reasons why we move from psychoanalyst to psychodynamic. Because it that I mean, that's where the dynamic comes from.
Speaker 1:It's transferring between us, between me and my therapist, between me and my clients, between us and any of our ships. It's dynamic. It's not a static thing that's always the same. It's always trying to express itself because we're mammals. Emotional reactions arise in response to the patient's projections, dissociated states, and relational templates.
Speaker 1:The task is not to eliminate these things, not even dissociative states. The task is we've known this since 1950 in research, y'all. This task is not to eliminate these reactions, but to recognize, metabolize, and use them thoughtfully in service and understanding. Even when we're talking about dissociation, what we want as a goal is the whole brain, the whole body, the whole system awareness of it, access to it, and being able to intentionally be aware and access or utilize as needed. We don't need to make it go away.
Speaker 1:It's very useful and has served a purpose and in many contexts can continue to serve a purpose. As therapy proceeds, that might change shape of what that looks like and what a system looks like or how a system is organized because we start to organize around safety instead of being organized around trauma or around deprivation or both. Right? And so that starts to shift and heal, but we don't need to make anything go away. She emphasized that disciplined self reflection remains crucial.
Speaker 1:Countertransference requires differentiation between the analyst's personal history and feelings induced within the analytic relationship. However, the presence of the analyst's subjectivity is no longer conceptualized as contamination. It's also a vehicle for empathy and insight. So we're finally getting to empathy in 1950. This reconceptualization expanded psychoanalysis beyond one person psychology toward a more interactive and relational model.
Speaker 1:Her contribution also carries important implications for trauma work. When patients communicate through enactment, dissociation, or projective processes, the therapist's emotional and somatic responses may reveal unspoken terror, shame, or aggression. Countertransference can therefore function as a diagnostic compass within complex relational systems. So the way we talk about this is that this is mapping. We get information about what is happening through what surfaces, through what's expressed dynamically in the relationship, and that's mapping for us how people were treated when they were little, how people talked to them, what people said to them even, how they were treated, all these things we see that show up relationally.
Speaker 1:By legitimizing the analyst's internal experience as clinically meaningful, Heinen laid the groundwork for later developments in object relations, relational psychoanalysts, and trauma informed approaches that treat the therapeutic field as co constructed. So this is the beginning of the doing with. Her intervention really reshaped psychoanalytic technique and countertransference was no longer something to overcome. It became an instrument for listening, understanding, and participating responsibly in the analytic encounter. And I would add to that, ultimately becomes the thing where the therapist can even say to the client, I'm experiencing this in my body, or I have this vision in my mind, or this is what I'm experiencing or feeling or sensing.
Speaker 1:What does that mean to you? And letting them have that additional support and attunement, but still verbalizing for themselves rather than us making assumptions through our own experience filters. So, frenzy with neutrality can replicate abandonment, emotional withholding mirrors neglect, mutuality acknowledges asymmetry, and the analyst subjectively shapes treatment. Hyman countertransference is inevitable and meaningful, emotional responses are evoked within the relational field, the analyst is not outside the interaction, and reflection transforms reaction into understanding. This matters in trauma work because Firenze taught us that technique can re traumatize, relational presence repairs and restores, power must be recognized not denied, and ethical responsibility includes self reflection.
Speaker 1:And Hyman added that therapist affect may contain unspoken traumatic communication, trauma is transmitted interpersonally not just narrated, and therapist participation must be acknowledged and regulated with ethical containment preventing reenactment. So then we have Rackers Identifications. He further refined the concept of countertransference by offering a more differentiated differentiated model of how the analyst's emotional responses function within the analytic relationship. In Transference and Countertransference, he articulated a systemic understanding of countertransference as participation in the patient's internal object world. He proposed that the analyst's emotional experience may reflect distinct forms of identification activated by the patient's unconscious communications.
Speaker 1:He distinguished between concordant and complementary countertransference. Concordant countertransference refers to the analyst's identification with the patient's self experience. In this mode, the therapist feels something akin to what the patient feels. The analyst may experience sadness, fear, longing, or shame that resonates with the patient's internal state. This alignment can enhance empathetic understanding and deepen attunement to dissociated or unarticulated affect.
Speaker 1:Complementary countertransference involves identification with the internalized objects rather than the self, so the therapist may begin to feel or behave in ways that correspond to figures from the patient's relational history. They might experience impulses to criticize, rescue, control, withdraw, or dominate in ways that echo the patient's early caregivers. These reactions are not simply personal failings, they represent enactments of the patient's internal relational templates within the analytic dyad. So this is a lot of when re traumatization happens in therapy if this is not tended to. It's not bad for it surfacing.
Speaker 1:I could even say, Oh, I really feel this impulse to just critically attack this right now or to withdraw because it's hard or to like like, putting words to it, but talking about it of, oh, yeah. And then, like, the person saying, oh yeah, no, that's totally how my mom or this babysitter or that teacher or whatever talked to me or whatever the memory time piece is, that's tending to it. No one's bad for it surfacing. Noticing that is an accurate experience for the clinician to feel those things surface. And also we tend to that and be like, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:That's what it was like when you were four, or that was what it was like your whole life. But when they become that, then that's dangerous in therapy. And conversely, when we bring that up or set boundaries around it, like I will not treat you the same way, then it can really be a developmental breakthrough for clients, which can cause two different responses. One, a huge breakthrough in progress in therapy because they experience the same thing again, except that the trauma is not happening. So they experience, not a restoration of what was, but you get to experience the good that was missing of this surface and it was not weaponized against me.
Speaker 1:And also, some clients will be so lost in memory time if we're not tending to that or people have the right to choose. Right? And so if they decline to also stay in now time, if they are so drowning in memory time and one of these moments comes up, it's also when people quit therapy because they're not ready or afraid of, for all kinds of reasons, the developmental breakthrough that's possible. Because anytime we have a developmental breakthrough, we also have to deal with the grief of deprivation. So trauma work is always identity work and grief work together.
Speaker 1:And it's brutal. So this is a really tender time in therapy and can go sideways either way. So with concordant countertransference, the therapist identifies with the client's self experience and with complementary they identify with the internalized object. So the internal experience with concordant is I feel what you feel, and with complementary, it's I feel pulled into that role. With emotional tone, concordant is that empathetic resonance, and complementary is that role based pull.
Speaker 1:And the source of activation is the client's affective state with concordant and the client's relational template with complementary. With concordant, the therapist needs to be alongside the client, and with complementary, they are positioned as someone from the client's past. And again, so that we're not blaming or shaming clients, this is when people can quit therapy because it will feel like abandonment, feel like, in memory time, will feel like abandonment if a clinician refuses to step into that role. So, if we get that it's an intersection of projective identification, clinician is bad, you're going to treat me bad like everyone else has treated me, and when the clinician refuses and it interacts with traumatic transference or complimentary countertransference of I'm not going to step into that role, then it feels like abandonment because the client didn't do the thing that the bad parents or the bad caregiver. And so in that time, it can feel like abandonment, and a system can perceive that as verification that the therapist was bad even when the therapist was actually helping.
Speaker 1:And so it can be very disorienting and part of why it's so important we keep one foot in now time. Clinical value with concordant is that it deepens empathy and attunement. With complementary, it reveals unconscious relational patterns. So the reflective questions for the therapist with concordant is, am I feeling with the client, not to the client or for the client? And complimentary is, am I being invited into a role and what is that role?
Speaker 1:If I refuse to step into the role, that can be potentially a therapeutic breakthrough for the client, but only if they receive it and stay in now time. It can feel like abandonment because we're not hurting them when they expect us to hurt them. That's when the enactment and retaliation can come in of clients thinking we're doing the bad thing when we actually did the good thing. So the clinical task with concordant countertransference is regulating and naming the shared affect, and with complementary countertransference, we recognize the role and choose not to enact it. So Rathor's formulation then deepened understanding of projected processes.
Speaker 1:Rather than conceptualizing projection as a one way distortion cast on to a neutral analyst, he described a dynamic interpersonal exchange. The patient unconsciously communicates internal object relations and the analyst receives, participates in, and must reflect upon these identifications. Countertransference thus becomes a map of the patient's relational world being re being enacted in real time. And remember that enacting in real time is just that surfacing. There's nothing wrong with an enactment.
Speaker 1:That's just information. Tending to that information is what prevents reenactment, whether that's in the therapeutic setting or in any of our ships. He emphasized that the analyst task is neither to suppress these reactions nor to act them out unreflectively. The work involves recognizing which identification is occurring, differentiating it from personal history, and using this awareness to interpret the relational pattern. This requires emotional tolerance, self analysis, and ethical restraint.
Speaker 1:The therapist must survive powerful complementary pulls without retaliating or colluding. No matter what happens, we cannot retaliate or collude with that complementary pull. So, if I have other shifts where in my personal life I am having to stand up for myself or learn this or practice that or say that, I take that to my therapist. I learn those skills, I respond accordingly. But when it is a client, and even if it is a previous client or even if the client has fired me, they are still in that story of enactment or reenactment.
Speaker 1:So even then, while I can stand up for myself or have to respond to whatever I have to respond to, even then, ethically, I cannot retaliate or collude with that. I cannot agree with no matter how bad someone's behavior is. I cannot agree with them being bad. That's the colluding. That's part of the abuse that's being reenacted.
Speaker 1:So they may prove how bad they are through their very terrible behavior, but I cannot collude with that. And I also cannot retaliate. So it's part of a risk of being a clinician. And also, I cannot retaliate or collude because that is not healing, whether they are my client still or not. And that becomes an important piece of differentiating between enactment and work we're a these distinctions are especially relevant in trauma dissociation.
Speaker 1:In work with individuals who have endured coercion, neglect, or abuse, complementary countertransference may evoke powerful roles within traumatic reenactments. The therapist may feel pulled into positions of persecutor, rescuing, or abandoning other. So really it goes all the way back to that drama triangle, and we just, we have to stay out of the drama triangle to have healthy shifts, whether it's in therapy or outside of therapy. Concordant countertransference may involve contact with profound helplessness or fragmentation. By naming these dynamics, Racker provided clinicians with a framework for understanding how unconscious relational templates become enacted within therapy.
Speaker 1:His contribution expanded the relational depth of psychoanalysts and strengthened the clinical utility of countertransference as structured information rather than undifferentiated reaction. So then we have Winnicott. Winnicott in 1949 wrote the paper or published the paper Hate in the Countertransference and he made a pivotal contribution by explicitly acknowledging that therapists may genuinely experience feelings of hate toward their patients. But rather than treating such reactions as purely pathological or shameful, he was arguing that these emotions are real, expected, and clinically significant, especially in work with severely disturbed or traumatized individuals. So when we're talking about concordant and complementary transference, as part of that traumatic transference, those of us who have parents who literally hated us, or that was part of the deprivation or infanticidal attachment, then it makes sense that even hate is going to surface.
Speaker 1:Now does that mean our therapists actually hate us? No. That's not what we're saying. And also, when hate surfaces because of childhood trauma, then when that gets experienced as part of countertransference, clearly that's something we need to both acknowledge and tend to, and not doing so would add not just trauma but deprivation to our clients. He observed that certain patients, particularly those with early environmental failures, evoke intense emotional reactions in the therapist.
Speaker 1:That may include boredom, resentment, fear, or even hatred. So remembering that these feelings do not automatically indicate analytic failure and remembering those feelings aren't even always ours. Right? Like, I'm not actually bored in session with my folks. I don't actually resent the folks I work with.
Speaker 1:I'm not actually irritated by them. And also when that surfaces, if my parent was constantly irritated that I am in the way or that I am a problem or that I exist or that I am not my sibling, whatever, then it makes sense that those feelings would sometimes surface in sessions or even in other shifts because that was already my experience. So when I share experience in another ship relationally, that feeling is going to surface because it already happened to me. So part of addressing it is tending to that and talking about that and differentiating. It's a way to untangle now time and memory time.
Speaker 1:So we often reflect the patient's developmental history. When early caregivers are overwhelmed, retaliatory, or neglectful, or inconsistent, the child internalized these relational realities. So it's like a postcard from memory time of this is how I was experienced and if we think that's the mirror and act that out, we can cause real harm to our clients. We have to recognize that that comes from memory time and tend to them like the humans that they are. In treatment, therapists may find themselves emotionally positioned within those same dynamics.
Speaker 1:When it caught differentiated between acknowledging hate and acting it out, noticing what surfaces is healthy, fine, good, helpful. Acting out hate does not help anybody in any ship. The therapist's task is to recognize these authentic emotional responses without discharging them destructively. This requires maturity, reflection, and containment. The clinician must be able to hold the patient's aggression, dependency, and testing without retaliating or without withdrawing.
Speaker 1:Winnicott describes this as a therapist's capacity to survive attack. Survival means remaining present, consistent, and non retaliatory in the face of projected hostility or enacted rage. So I cannot take it personally, no matter what someone says or does or acts out, I cannot take it personally. It is revealing to me how they were treated as a child and it is information about how they were treated as a child. If I am their therapist and if I am, working with them in session, then I can respond to and tend to those wounds and we can heal that.
Speaker 1:If they have fired me, if they are not in now time, if they are, quitting therapy and one of those we quit therapy right before we have developmental breakthroughs, always when we most want to quit therapy. So when that happens, unfortunately there's nothing I can do about it, but I can not make it worse. This capacity to survive forms the foundations of what Winecot called the holding environment. The holding environment is both literal and psychological. It refers to the relational atmosphere in which the patient's regression, aggression, and vulnerability can be expressed without catastrophic consequences.
Speaker 1:There are so many times I have said in therapy, or clients have said to me in therapy, if you knew this about me, or if you heard this, or if I let that one out, or if I told you this part, you wouldn't care anymore. You wouldn't still love me. You wouldn't still let me come to session. You wouldn't still listen to me. Like, fill in the blanks.
Speaker 1:However we express that, this is what it's talking about. That holding environment, not holding like physically holding, but the containment of the office itself or the containment of telehealth or sessions or the therapeutic relationship should be safe enough that no matter what surfaces, we still ethically care about our people without punishing them for what they express. So that is really hard if someone has lived experience. It is really hard for anyone. It is really hard for if we're not taking care of ourselves.
Speaker 1:But this is the difference between when there is actual re traumatization from therapists who are not tending to the things and when, there's acting out getting projected onto the therapist because they were treated badly as a child. For individuals whose early environments fail to provide safety and attunement, the therapist's reliability becomes reparative. The patient tests whether the therapist will collapse, retaliate, or abandon. The therapist's steady presence offers a new relational experience. Winnicott also affirmed that the therapist's authenticity matters.
Speaker 1:Emotional neutrality that denies genuine feeling can be experienced as false or mechanical. At the same time, unfiltered expression of hate would recreate trauma. The clinical stance involves recognizing one's feelings as a part of the relational field, metabolizing them internally and using them thoughtfully in service of the patient's development. In trauma and dissociation work, Winnicott's insights are especially salient. Dissociative clients may evoke powerful complementary countertransference as persecutory or attacking parts engage the therapist.
Speaker 1:Child states may evoke protectiveness while defensive states may evoke frustration or fear. The therapist's ability to remain reflective and stable while acknowledging these internal reactions becomes central to maintaining safety. Winnicott's naming of hate normalized the emotional complexity of this work and reinforced the ethical responsibility of the therapist to manage their subjectivity without disowning it the client. By legitimizing difficult emotional responses and situating them within developmental and relational theory, Winnicott advanced a more humane and realistic understanding of countertransference. His work underscores that authentic emotional experience, when contained and reflected upon, can deepen therapeutic holding rather than threaten it.
Speaker 1:So, with Wimikot's formulation, therapists may genuinely feel hate towards patients. That hate is coming from memory time from their caregivers, not the actual therapist. Developmentally, the clients may be severely deprived or traumatized and that evokes primitive responses because of developmental experiences. The hate is not pathology, it is induced by relational history and arises within the holding relationship, the therapist in that power dimension holds authority and must manage it and acknowledge difficult feelings privately and in supervision along with the client in conversation directly with the client as it's safe to do so. That clinical meaning has emotional responses that are real and expected.
Speaker 1:The therapist is placed into those early relational dynamics that reflects the impact of the patient's early environment. So the therapist must remain present despite internal reactions and acting on hate reenacts domination. So part of shifting developmentally out of that drama triangle can be moving from victim to persecutor and be experienced as a client raging against us. But what they're actually raging against is childhood trauma and deprivation, which they should feel rage about. So we cannot take that personally or retaliate against it because it is a developmental process and often very young, even if it's coming out in adult dynamics or adult words.
Speaker 1:So the therapist must remain present despite the internal reaction and have authenticity without adding to the harm. We cannot deny it or act it out. We cannot retaliate or withdraw. The shame will lead to repression, so it doesn't help them. If we collapse neutrality into hostility, we cannot punish them for it or try to control them through coldness.
Speaker 1:And also disowning the feelings to become mechanical will lower the relational experience for the client, and so still does not help. So our task clinically is to recognize what is happening without discharging our emotional response from taking it personally. Our clinical task is to survive the attack from the patient, to contain and metabolize it, to steady the holding environment, to exercise power with restraint, to reflect, regulate, and repair as needed and as they are ready. So the next piece of history was the development of object relations and specifically finally naming this dynamic as projective identification. So object relations theory significantly transformed understanding of transference and counter transference by reframing them as dynamic co created relational processes rather than unilateral distortions.
Speaker 1:Melanie Klein, again a woman seeing the doing with instead of doing for doing to, introduced the concept of projective identification to describe a primitive defense process in which unwanted feared or split off parts of the self are not only projected onto another person but also interpersonally enacted in ways that influence the recipient's experience. For Klein, projective identification emerges early in development within the infant's relationship to primary caregivers. When intolerable feelings such as rage, envy, terror, or dependency cannot be integrated, they are expelled into the object. The object is then experienced as containing these disowned qualities. She suggested this is not just fantasy.
Speaker 1:The recipient may feel pressured, shaped, or subtly induced to embody the projected role. The relational field then becomes organized around these projections. So the persecutory parts project shame or aggression, and the therapist will feel critical or harsh. The helpless child state projects terror and the therapist will feel overwhelmed or protective. A detached state projects emptiness and the therapist feels bored or disengaged and the loyal to abuser states projects minimization, and the therapist feels the dismissive impulse.
Speaker 1:Guilford Bion expanded this theory by introducing the concept of containment. He proposed that the infant projects overwhelming emotional states into the caregiver who then receives, metabolizes, and transforms them into tolerable meaning. But when we don't have a caregiver who is attuned or doing that for us, the child cannot reinterject processed experience, so the fragmentation intensifies. So what he's saying is developmentally as infants and toddlers, when we have big feelings or big needs that really aren't too big or too much, it's just that we don't have skills yet because we're not yet adults, when we experience that, we pass that to our caregivers so that they can combine it for us or integrate it for us and then hand it back to us in a contained, smaller, already integrated and combined kind of package that our brains can process. So part of a specific kind of deprivation is when we have caregivers who don't do that, then not only is no one taking that from us, but no one is giving us back the processed experience.
Speaker 1:And so we are left literally with a developmental deprivation, not knowing how to do this. So in therapy, the patient will similarly project unprocessed affect onto the analyst, and the therapist's capacity to contain and think about these experiences becomes central to treatment. So also when we have a therapist who's only thinking of themselves, I'm talking about bad therapy and re traumatization, when we have therapist that's only talking about them and how they feel and wanting to feel good and comfortable, then what happens is we have therapists who feel powerful when they do work to us but don't know how to do work for us, and so there is no doing with us, and retraumatization happens. So, with object relations, the core idea is that we internalize relational templates that shape perception and interaction. But with projective identification, those unwanted parts are projected onto another person and then enacted out.
Speaker 1:With object relations, the focus is that internal object world, but with projective identification, the interpersonal interpersonal transmission of disowned affect. So whoever else is whatever hurt me. The developmental origin for object relations is early caregiver relationships become internal working models. Projective and primitive defense processes emerging under overwhelming affect. So in therapy, the client organizes the therapist according to past relational templates with object relations.
Speaker 1:With projective identification, the client induces the therapist to feel or act out the projected states that no one ever helped them with when they were little. So the therapist experience of object relations is feeling positioned within a familiar relational pattern to help but with projective identification they are feeling pressured, shaped, or moved into a role that they don't actually want to reenact with the client because it will harm or deprive them. So then an example is that with object relations the therapist is experienced as an abandoning parent. So the clinical risk is misreading transference as a distortion and reveals organizing relational structures. So the therapist's task is to recognize that internal object world shaping perception.
Speaker 1:But with the example of projective identification, the therapist suddenly feels rejecting rejected or criticized without clear cause. And so is acting out induced feelings without reflection. There's no memory, there's no now time to reflect on memory time because memory time has invaded and is happening now. It provides live access to split off or dissociative experiences, and so the therapeutic task is to contain, metabolize, and return to experience in thinkable form. We cannot get the left brain balanced or the frontal cortex back online if we as clients quit therapy right before that developmental breakthrough.
Speaker 1:So within this framework, transference is no longer conceptualized primarily as distortion based on past wishes. It becomes enactment of internal object relations within the therapeutic dyad. The patient does not simply misperceive the therapist The patient unconsciously organizes the relational field in ways that recreate those early relational patterns. The therapist may find themselves feeling pressured into roles that correspond with these dynamics. Projective identification therefore deepened the understanding of countertransference as participatory.
Speaker 1:The therapist's emotional responses reflect induced states that correspond to the patient's split off or disavowed experiences. Rather than dismissing these responses as personal contamination, object relational theory invites careful reflection. The therapist asks, What aspect of the patient's internal world is being enacted here? What role am I being invited to occupy? What feeling is being communicated through this relational process?
Speaker 1:It's part of mapping. It becomes mapping. The shift from distortion to enactment marks a profound evolution in psychoanalytic thought. Therapy became understood as a relational system in which both participants contribute to the emerging field or the therapeutic relationship. Meaning arises through interaction, projection, containment, and interpretation.
Speaker 1:In trauma and dissociation work, this model is particularly relevant. Patients who have endured overwhelming relational violations may organize the therapeutic relationship around persecutory abandoning or engulfing object presentations. Therapists' awareness of projective identification supports recognition of these dynamics collapsing into them. By articulating this and containment, they move psychoanalysts toward a more relational developmental understanding of transference. This work laid crucial groundwork for later relational intersubjective and trauma informed theories that conceptualize therapy as a co constructed emotional field shaped by both internal and external realities.
Speaker 1:So just reviewing that with Concordon from Rackard, the client's self experience is what's identified or projected. The therapist feels this with the client and our task is to differentiate without fusing with it and the risk is that fusion. With complementary transference, the client's internalized object positions the therapist into a role, and our task is to recognize that pull and to prevent the reenactment. With projective identification, the affect that is intolerable gets pressured onto the therapist so that they would embody that projection and become that. So a therapist's task is to notice this state being induced in us, and our risk is acting it out without being aware.
Speaker 1:So it's really important that we, are aware of this. With containment, that raw and unprocessed affect gets transformed and returns its meaning metabolizing and symbolizing the retaliation shutdown or defensive interpretation. So that brings us to intersubjectivity and two person psychology. The emergence marked a decisive movement away from classical psychology towards what has been called two person psychology. In this paradigm, therapy is understood as a co constructed relational process rather than a situation in which a neutral analyst interprets the distortions of a patient.
Speaker 1:Both participants bring subjectivity, history, culture, and affect into the clinical encounter. Meaning arises within the relational field that they create together. Contemporary relational analysts argue that the therapist's subjectivity is irreducible. The analyst cannot step outside of their own perceptions, emotional responses, theoretical commitments, and social location. So every intervention is shaped by who the therapist is.
Speaker 1:So they're saying there's no neutrality, we can't step outside of it. So instead, to do it well and healthy and attuned, we have to just own it. For better and worse, we just have to own who we are and that becomes part of our authenticity. Instead of striving for invisibility, the therapist is invited to cultivate awareness of their participation in the relational process. So this shift was part of critiquing analytic neutrality.
Speaker 1:Renick proposed that neutrality as traditionally conceived is neither achievable nor necessarily desirable. He's like, not only can we not do that, nobody wants it. Every analytical stance reflects reflects implicit values, assumptions, choices, so rather than maintaining an illusion of objectivity, Renick argued for acknowledging the subjectivity and taking responsibility for it. The analyst's authority lies not in detachment, but in reflective use of their own participation. The two person psychology, transference and countertransference, are not separate phenomena that belong to distinct individuals.
Speaker 1:They are intertwined aspects of a shared relational system. So they say then that both client and therapist actually both experience transference and countertransference. Rather than transference being from the client and countertransference being from the clinician, both people experience both, which is why we say now with a liberation framework, like transference and countertransference aren't actually a thing. This is why they say that, because it's not separate from the distinct individuals. The expectations and projections interact with responses and interpretations.
Speaker 1:Enactments are understood as jointly produced events even when shaped asymmetrically by trauma or power differences. This model emphasizes dialogue, repair, and negotiation and meaning. So they're saying in any kind of rupture and any kind of ship where if both people are being healthy and doing their work and in it for now time and healing, and I say that because if we're not in it for healing, we won't be doing those things, but if we're both in it for that, then no matter what is happening in the ship or what surfaces in the relationship because of memory time, that it is possible to tend to it and that difficulties or enactments or ruptures happen because both of us having our things and that when it's healthy and when it's safe enough, we can tend to those things even if it's a difficult conversation or a bit of an untangling that it's possible to do that and to repair and negotiate. But if we're not in it in now time and not in it for healing, then we won't have access to the skills and now we know parts of the brain that are required to make that possible.
Speaker 1:So in two person psychology neutrality is replaced by reflective accountability and reflective accountability involves ongoing self examination of how one's identity, culture, and training and unconscious dynamics shape the therapeutic interaction, it requires transparency about the limits of one's perspective and openness to the client's experience of the therapist. The therapist remains ethically responsible for maintaining boundaries and safety and yet does so while acknowledging the relational influence rather than denying it. This inner subjective turn has significant implications for trauma and dissociation. Clients with histories of coercion, betrayal, or systemic harm often carry heightened sensitivity to power and authenticity. A therapist who claims neutrality while unconsciously exercising authority may replicate earlier dynamics of invalidation and misattunement.
Speaker 1:By contrast, a therapist who recognizes their subjectivity and invites collaborative meaning making can reduce reenactments and foster relational safety. So, two person psychology does not eliminate asymmetry. The therapist still holds professional authority and ethical responsibility. However, it reframes that authority as relational responsibility rather than detached expertise. Transference and countertransference are understood as mutually constituted phenomena within a dynamic interpersonal field.
Speaker 1:This opens the conceptual space for integrating sociocultural, political, and liberation oriented critiques into psychoanalytic thought. So the historical evolution of transference and countertransference reflects a broader theoretical shift within psychoanalysts from one person psychology to two person psychology. In classical theory, psychic life was conceptualized primarily as intrapsychic. The analyst observed, interpreted, and clarified distortions that arose from the patient's internal conflicts. Transference was understood as a repetition of infantile prototypes imposed upon relatively neutral analysts.
Speaker 1:The analytic situation was structured around uncovering the patient's unconscious through interpretation delivered from a position of technical neutrality. Over time, relational and intersubjective theorists challenged this. Stephen Mitchell described the movement toward two person psychology as a reorientation from drive theory and isolated psychic structures towards relational matrices. In this framework, human experiences is organized through patterns of interaction, not merely through instinctual conflict. The analytic process becomes co constructed.
Speaker 1:Transference and countertransference are understood as mutually influential processes within a dynamic interpersonal system. Lewis Aaron further elaborated that the therapeutic encounter involves a meeting of subjectivities. The analyst's emotional, culture, and historical positioning inevitably shapes perception and intervention. Rather than aiming to eliminate this, the clinician is called to recognize it and use it responsibly. Countertransference becomes not only a response to the patient's projections, but also an expression of their own relational history as it intersects with the client's.
Speaker 1:This systems theory extended this shift by emphasizing that experience arises within the fields of mutual influence. Stallaro and colleagues argued that psychological phenomena cannot be understood in isolation from relational context. Affect, memory, and meaning are constituted within systems of reciprocal regulation and recognition. Transference is therefore not solely a distortion of reality. It's an organizing principle emerging from prior relational worlds that become reenacted within a new relational field.
Speaker 1:As theory moved from intrapsychic mechanisms toward relational fields, broader contextual factors increasingly entered analytic thinking. Relational experience does not now occur in a vacuum. Social location, race, gender, class, and cultural narratives shape expectations of safety, authority, and recognition. Meaning emerges within an interpersonal matrix that is self embedded within historical and sociopolitical structures. The relational field includes both participants and the systems that have shaped them.
Speaker 1:This theoretical shift prepares the ground for liberation oriented critique. If meaning is co constructed and shaped by relational systems, then clinical neutrality can no longer be understood as outside power. The analytic relationship reflects asymmetries linked to professional authority and to broader structural hierarchies. A liberation framework extends two person psychology into a sociopolitical register. It asks how historical oppression, institutional betrayal, and cultural marginalization enter the relational field and shape transference and countertransference dynamics.
Speaker 1:Thus, the movement from intrapsychic to relational field does not discard psychoanalytic insights it expands them. Transference remains a repetition of prior relational patterns. Countertransference remains an essential source of information. Yet both are now situated within a living co creative field that includes history, developmental attachment, and social context. This expanded understanding creates the conceptual bridge between psychoanalytic lineage and liberation informed clinical practice.
Speaker 1:And then this slide I'm just leading up during the break. It's the one with the Taylor Swift eras just for fun, and it has just a summary of the different psychological eras that match the albums, and I'm just leaving that up during the break. This is a lot. Thank you for listening. This is when the break is.
Speaker 1:I'm going to take an actual break to let my kids up for just a minute, so I will be back in just a few minutes. If you have to go and can't stay because it's so epically long, that's not offensive. I am glad to see I am right on time for the break, so the first half is okay ish as far as length. So we'll see about the second part, but I will be back in a few minutes. Thanks guys!
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing and healing brings hope.