For The Whole Therapist: Countertransference: How to Manage When Things Feel Too Close
Consider a therapist working with a client who shares a similar background of childhood trauma. The therapist begins to feel an overwhelming urge to protect the client, leading to over-involvement and difficulty maintaining professional boundaries. Or in another scenario, a therapist feels intense frustration towards a client who consistently resists therapeutic interventions. Or a therapist feeling discomfort or guilt related to their privilege compared to their client, these are experiences of countertransference in the client-therapist relationship. Countertransference, a concept introduced by Sigmund Freud, refers to the emotional reactions and projections a therapist experiences towards a client. While Freud contributed significantly to the development of psychoanalysis, his work has been critiqued for its patriarchal biases and lack of cultural sensitivity. Despite these flaws, his introduction of countertransference laid the groundwork for future exploration.
Rest Is Not a Reward: Reclaiming Relaxation as Resistance
We know what it feels like to keep going when there’s nothing left in the tank. To push through the headache, the shortness of breath, the dissociation. To keep producing, performing, holding it all together because slowing down feels like it could crack something open we don’t have time to face.
That’s not personal failure. That’s conditioning.
Decolonizing Mental Health: Indigenous Wisdom, Land, and Liberation
Mental health didn’t start with therapy. It didn’t start with Freud. It didn’t start with the DSM or CBT worksheets or mindfulness apps.
We always had ways of tending to the mind and body long before any insurance company decided what counted as a billable hour.
But here we are—trying to heal inside systems never built with us in mind. Systems that pathologize grief but ignore genocide. That diagnoses anxiety but says nothing about displacement…
When You’re the First One in Your Family to Go to Therapy
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being the first one in your family to sit on a therapist’s couch. It’s not just about explaining your feelings. It’s about translating an entire worldview. About breaking open ways of coping that generations before you needed just to survive.
Nobody talks about how heavy that is.
You’re not just going to therapy for yourself. You’re going for everyone who didn’t have the language.