The role of Identification in counseling

Identification. It is very common for a counselor to be tempted to identify with a client whose feelings touch a sympathetic chord. This differs from counter-transference in that the counselor is responding to something experienced by a client rather than something experienced by himself directly from the client.

For example a female married counselor who has children of her own may be given a pathetic story by a female client of the husband’s sadistic and sustained cruelty to their children. It may be that the counselor suffered from some such cruelty in her own childhood, and has been trying to give her own children a much better life than she received. Now the account of cruelty to the client’s children, and the client’s distress may well stir up very strong hostile feelings against the client’s husband before she even sees him, coupled with considerable emotional identification with the client. She may either feel averse to seeing the husband at all, or if she does see him she may have a strong desire to let him know what she thinks of him.

If such feelings are strong it might be wise for her to arrange for another counselor to see the husband, and if necessary the wife too, because strong identification with the client will only add to her hostility against her husband, while the counselor’s hostility would most likely spoil any chance of building rapport with the husband.
It is of course natural for such feelings to arise in the counselor under such conditions, but an important part of the inner resources of the counselor’s personality is that she should be able to withhold judgment, and assume that there will be some set of reasons for the husband’s cruelty. If she can control her feelings in some such manner as this and give full acceptance to the husband she may gain some idea of his feelings and his background, the uncritical assumptions and emotional needs behind his attitudes. Then, possibly in a joint session, the whole background conflict which contributed to the cruelty might come out in the only kind of atmosphere in which it could be constructively faced and dealt with.

Behind all such emotional reactions in any counselor there is a fundamental reality which sometimes needs to be recalled. We often allow ourselves to live in the unreal assumption that life should be always pleasant, and ignore the grim fact that suffering is a universal experience, an integral part of life as it has always been and as it will be as long as there is evil abroad in the world. Everyone who comes into any “helping” activity will come at some time to the realization so eloquently expressed by St. Paul, “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians, 6:12, R.S.V.) However they may regard it counselors need what St. Paul described as “the whole armor of God,” .the ability and strength to fight constructively against all unnecessary suffering, but to do so in such a manner as is most likely to overcome it “from the ground up,” by inner healing of the disturbed personalities who in their bewilderment or despair would go on inflicting it. Contact with human suffering drives anyone with any regard for human beings back onto their own philosophy or their own religion, and constitutes a searching test of its adequacy and a challenge to continued growth and personal development.

Identification can occur in many other ways than that which has been discussed, and it is inevitable that a counselor will find things in the unburdening of his clients which resonate with his own inner feelings and his earlier and more recent experiences. But counselors are trained, and gain considerable practice in the art of keeping themselves out of the picture, and concentrating in genuine caring fashion on the welfare of the client in the long term more than the short term view.

This involves some real self-acceptance on the part of the counselor, without which it is very difficult to accept anyone else in any genuine fashion. There is always room for improvement in every counselor’s inner resources of psychic strength and stamina, and counseling itself provides a very good opportunity for such improvement to happen as long as the counselor is honest with himself and open to a genuine search for help when he feels any need for it.

Tags: Counseling