Conflict in the therapy room  

by MARY SPRING

Looking back along a life’s journey, you come to see how each of the central phases of your life began at a decisive threshold where you left one way of being and entered another.  

(John O’Donohue, 2007)  

The purpose of this essay is to describe and subsequently reflect on an experience of conflict. I wish to firstly consider both an understanding of conflict and my relationship with this reality. I will then illustrate a personal encounter with discord. I will subsequently review the incident through the prism of the core existential theme of relatedness and consider how different theories and perspectives might inform an understanding of this conflict and offer potential responses and pathways to reconciliation.  

What is conflict?  

Weixel-Dixon (2017: 11) observes that conflict is always personal and challenges the individual’s invariably subjective and incomplete world-view. Capturing its very essence, she iterates that “in the most violent contest or in the more discrete disagreement, one side wants something the other side will not give” (2017: 11). Attesting to the impact of friction on the whole person, Mayer (2000, Loc.125) states that conflict “may be viewed as occurring along cognitive (perception), emotional (feeling), and behavioral (actions) dimensions”. It is not then necessarily surprising that emotions and memories are evoked in me as I reflect on my ambiguous relationship with conflict. On the one hand, I have feared and felt decidedly uncomfortable in my body when confronted with discord. I grew up in a conformist country hugely shaped by a Roman Catholic ethos where, as in many faith systems, forgiveness is valorised (Farhadian and Emmons, 2009: 61). Obedience to the traditional religious, cultural and behavioural mores were expected. In the family setting, the little girl in me learned early in life to be watchful of parental looks, to be vigilant of mood shifts, and to retreat from brewing conflict lest my words and needs disturbed what already was disturbed. Ironically, conflict, real and barbaric, in the northern part of the island between two warring traditions, and arguably mirroring the transgenerational holding of familiar views (MacGinty, Muldoon & Ferguson, 2007: 9), was the constant political landscape of the late 60s and 70s of my childhood. On the other hand, the adult in me today recognises the richness in encouraging an exploration of one’s relationship and experiences of conflict. The awakening existentially-minded therapist in me appreciates that one is “always becoming which means potentially in crisis” (May, 1983: 50) and begins to understand discord as an inevitable condition of being-in-the-world-with-others; here the therapeutic emphasis becomes not its “alteration, reduction or removal” (Spinelli, 2015: 93) but instead an exploration of the conflict and the worldview that determines the friction.  

An experience of conflict  

The example I describe comes from my time as a trainee therapist and captures the dynamic within the therapeutic matrix when conflict is encountered between client and therapist.  

It was the closing few minutes of the last session before Christmas and I remember feeling decidedly unimpressed, indeed put out with the psychotherapist who answered my ‘Happy Christmas’ by directing a seasonal response not towards me but towards her now financially-enhanced handbag. In a deeper place however, I felt hurt, dismissed and very small. The look or le regard was exclusionary and diminishing. The ensuing three-week holiday period encouraged me, in the words of Frost, to “keep the wall before us as we go” (2002: 27-28); at different times I fantasised two ill-serving scenarios: one where I would be strong, articulate, domineering and dismissive, in effect, rendering the therapist an ‘it’; another, where I would continue to be walled in by old and readily accessed pattern of protective withdrawal, in effect, rendering myself “as an unfree object for others” (Cox, 2020: 42). We subsequently met in mid-January. Mirroring Glasl’s first stage of Conflict Escalation (Jordan 2000), my stance had become quite hardened and entrenched, encouraged by the familiar need to stay safe and say nothing. Yet also nestling within me was a desire to do something very alien to me, and that was to state how I had felt and continued to feel following our last session. Responding to what was then an unconsidered but living existential pulse that “the human being is a meaning-making agent from birth” (Adams, 2019: 96), I plumped for the latter response. In that moment, penetrating “behind the polite superficialities and defences which we habitually armour ourselves” (Yankelovich, 1999: 14-15) and eclipsing the incessant chorus of the they-self, I felt shaky yet emboldened in expressing my emotional reactions. The gift and the learning were both found in this action and in the unexpected response. The therapist, embodying “the present other to the client” (Spinelli, 2015: 110), and open to the un-knowing “which presents itself in the current and on-going encounter” (Spinelli, 2015: 12), did something quite professional but also something profoundly humble – offering no defence, and offering no bandaging apology, she acknowledged that she had been rude towards me in the closing moments of the pre-Christmas session. And, looking straight at me, she said, ‘Let’s talk about it and see can we sort it out’. The look or le regard this time became something different – not exclusionary and diminishing, as previously experienced, but a meaningful exchange between two “fellow travelers” (Yalom, 2009: 6). The response, the royal ‘we’ hinting at a joint investigation, was unfamiliar to me as was the terrain of meeting head-on both the fragmentation of relationship and the possibility of reconciliation. Instead, and as affirmed in Oliveira, Sousa and Pirea (2012: 297), my subjective experience of being-in-the-world was validated in the ensuing co-operative exploration. Furthermore, early life wounds that yearned to be witnessed, reflected upon and knitted into my understanding simultaneously began to be unearthed, such an enquiry, as prompted by Georganda (1993), confirming that we want, above all, “to know the truth about ourselves and our life”. In this rich therapeutic movement, not necessarily in one session, the conflict was understood and resolved. I felt seen; I felt heard; I felt known - by the therapist and by myself. My relationship with conflict had moved. As for the act of experiencing and bestowing forgiveness, deftly captured by Ducommun-Nagy as an action “that sets us on the path to autonomy because it allows us to remain connected with others and allows us to ascertain our existence as autonomous selves” (2009: 53), how could I but not allow for another person’s humanity which simply reflected my own ability to get it wrong? 

 Considerations on the existential theme of relatedness  

Heidegger’s seminal principle, of being-in-the-world, as summarised by Iacovou and Weixel-Dixon (2015: 17), proposes that each human existence or Dasein is “situated within the world, involved in a meaningful context consisting of people, ideas, places, objects and events – inter-connected and inter-dependent”. On reflection then and, if understood through an existential lens, the fracture that had occurred between the therapist and myself was a subjective, situational, relational and temporal experience. My outdated response to the therapeutic schism would, if activated, have merely re-cemented the old, sedimented ways of being and numbed the reality of “one’s existential situation” (Yalom, 1980: 359). My updated response was answering the call of conscience, “the call to ourselves” (Tillich, 2014: 136), which is only discovered “through committed and coherent action and connection, or not at all” (Howard, 2000: 329). Reminded by Massey (2009: 87) that reconciliation is grounded in the mutual investment of the participants in the relationship and emerges from the attentiveness to “mending the small ruptures that inevitably occur as two or more persons navigate their way forward”, the listened-to heart of the client that was me, responded to the reality of disharmony and to the potential for the emergence of a new dialogical way of being in relationship. And intriguingly, power, always a presence in conflict (Mayer, 2009: 151), and always a presence in the therapeutic relationship, began to be experienced as something personal and accessible within me, not a negative or feared encroachment by the other.  

If, as Heidegger asserts, that “the world is always already the one that I share with others” (Heidegger, 2010: 115-116), to then exercise one’s freedom, one’s “unfounded, free, spontaneous consciousness” (Philips, 1986: 167), is not always easy. Freedom is always embedded, sometimes deeply encrusted, within a situation. It implies responsibility and authorship, each choice excluding other possibilities (Georganda, 2016: 266), each non-choice arguably a failure to act and respond. So, in a strange way, death and emergence, which arguably percolate in myriad forms through every therapeutic session, accompanied my response to this experience. What began to die in me was the reliance on the old fear-filled amygdala and on the well-honed avoidant worldview of self and of relatedness - all familiar to the long compliant and enmeshed daughter. Contrastingly, what tentatively began to arise from within me was a different meaning of being and of being-in-the-world, one which was more relational, less they-driven and less they-defined as embodied, for example, in the early Sartrean characters of Roquentin and Anny in Nausea (Satre, 1938). The emerging me crucially began to authenticate lived experience, curiosity, exploration and human connection in its endless hues.  

Disharmony is not always resolved and, as noted by Hamber (2007: 115), forgiveness and reconciliation have often come to represent the “paradise lost” of warring perspectives, the world surely testifying to such a truth. I was however supported by the therapist in interpreting, re-interpreting and making meaning of thrown circumstances that had determined my understanding of conflict and relationship. Echoing the challenging movement which always necessitates being-in-the-world-with-others, yet paradoxically also existentially apart and isolated, I was encouraged to observe and consider that conflict is an inevitable human dimension, “a powerful source of communication” (Weixel-Dixon, 2017: 14), which “gives us the energy to overcome our powerful inclinations towards passivity” (Mayer, 2009:19). In this dynamic and interactive movement of three living tenses, I was prompted to withstand the impulse to run towards the familiarity of das Man, urged instead to run towards life, including the encounters with conflict, and grow deeper into my own skin, my own self becoming the determiner or author of present and future potentialities, possibilities and the accompanying responsibilities.  

Concluding thoughts  

As this essay draws to its close, I’m reminded of Michelangelo’s statue The Awakening Slave. It speaks stirringly to me and mirrors Sartre’s primary tenet that “man first exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards” (Sartre, 1973: 28). To have resisted my being-in-situation would have been an expression of bad faith. I didn’t, instead assuming and affirming my freedom and, in doing so, wearing my freedom clothes. Were there to be further conflicts and boundary situations (let’s call them ‘scraps’!) to encounter in the therapeutic relationship? Of course there were - the therapist twiddling with her rings during another session and once failing to show up for an appointment being other stand-out frontier movements. Over time however the dialectical engagement in the “therapeutic processes of unpacking, challenging, interpreting and educating” (Cooper, 2012: 68) has enabled me to consider my sometimes Sisyphean encounters with relationship and its companion ‘conflict’. Such  skirmishes and, crucially, the observed attitude of ‘let’s talk about it and see can we sort it out’ have provided huge learning for me as a therapist in relationship and as a human being in relationship. And what were and continue to be the biggest learnings? Perhaps, the simple yet profound truth that the therapeutic relationship is at the very core of the therapeutic encounter. One is changed by this encounter. What else? Perhaps too that conflict is an existential condition and one need not be afraid of conflict in relationship. One can learn, with “heroic intensity” (van Deurzen, 2012: 10), to welcome discord on the life-long Ithaca journey home to the ever-becoming, enabling self.  

Mary Spring is an accredited psychotherapist with IACP. She has a private practice in Galway city and is a tutor/lecturer with ICPPD.  

References  

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IAHIP 2022 - INSIDE OUT 96 - Spring 2022