The Comparative Script System – Part 6
At that point, Alice understood why she felt anxiety: she had perceived the symbiotic hook the client offered her and was afraid of it. Therefore, she had behaved in a way that both distanced the client and yet took responsibility. When the client had used the word “Doctor,” Alice had been triggered into a sort of medical model of therapy in which the “doctor” asks all about the problem and then prescribes the tablets! She had resonated with the urgency of the client’s need, and in the supervision, she allowed herself to discover her empathy for her client’s internal experience and its meaning.
With the help of the supervisor, Alice identified the steps she might take to help her client. Just before the end of the supervision, the competent supervisor wanted to add something else:
Sofia: And, of course, there is also a left part in your circle.
Alice: Oh yes (laughing a little ruefully), I have had some realizations. I think there is a parallel with someone that I know very, very well! I need to talk to him. And it might be a good idea to talk with my therapist about it too!
Alice clearly had an insight; her “there and then” was not discussed during the supervision, but, at the same time, it was not discounted. Very probably the supervision had some therapeutic effect on her, even if this was not the goal of the session and was not pursued. The boundary between what is a matter for supervision and what is therapy was reaffirmed.
Case Three: Levels of Complexity. Clients bring their earliest relational patterns into the consulting room, an inextricable part of their sense of self. This sense of self-with-other is conveyed to the therapist wordlessly in the transference as an impression or feeling and received countertransferentially in the form of a feeling, mood, or image. This situation can also be understood within the model.
For example, a supervisee, Isa, drew the two circles and looked at them glumly. In her last supervision, she had described how her client, Kanda, had fulfilled his script of being isolated and excluded. She had recognized how strongly he had pulled her into low expectations of him and how she had nearly failed to challenge his passive behavior as she enacted her slightly bored inner feeling. Following supervision, she had changed that passivity, and Kanda was now beginning to take charge of his life. Why, then, was she feeling so weary and flat? Something else was going on. She described her inner experience: empty, dull, and feelingless. She tried to describe what happened in the therapy room, but she found that she could not really remember. The supervisor invited the group to think and feel about that deadened relational space and invited Isa to imagine what sort of experience she and her client were creating in Section A. Could this have an echo of the earliest protocol?
