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.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Three essential layers in the therapeutic relationship
How the relationship dynamics that arise out of transference and countertransference are both real and useful, even when they contradict each other
The paradoxical axes of power in the therapist-client relationship
How multiplicity and power bump up against each other and why we have to tolerate the tension
How collapsing the paradox of multiple realities in the dyad creates problems with intimacy–being either exploitative or superficial
Why too little intimacy in the therapist-client relationship is a significant problem
How love and grief show up in therapeutic relationships

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Being Human Is an Emotional Experience