Clients who come to therapy to prove it won’t work

Some years ago, in supervision, when presenting my work with a client I found challenging – someone for whom even an accurate word-by-word mirroring of what they had said, was met with a rebuttal, refusal or complaint that I hadn’t quite got it right – I was taken aback when my supervisor said, ‘Sometimes, clients come to therapy not because they want it to work, but because they want to prove it won’t work.’ So, every attempt to attune to, empathise with, or soothe is rejected – perhaps because to be seen as vulnerable evokes such intolerable shame that the instant unconscious defence must be rageful dismissal.

In this type of encounter, the therapist is set up in the client’s mind not as a potentially reparative, caring attachment figure, but rather as someone who can’t or won’t understand. A stand in for the failed parent who, in childhood, it wasn’t safe to rage at because, like it or not, and whatever the neglect, abuse or injury the caregiver perpetuated, they depended on them for their very survival. So, now, in the contained environment of a therapeutic relationship, the opportunity arises for all the disappointment, hostility, hate, rage, envy, hurt etc to find a space.

This is grist for the mill for therapists, should we have the stamina and non-defensiveness to sustain the attack, survive the negative transference, and work through with the client their unmet development needs, in the service hopefully of providing some healing. But, coming back to my supervisor’s point, as difficult as I found it at the time to comprehend (and to an extent I still do find it hard), some clients, even though they might attest otherwise, set us up to fail.

Perhaps even – dare I say it – want to destroy and kill us off. So, while, when the therapy ends, often abruptly and without time for discussion, when the client is left with the same painful wound they arrived with, they will at least have the grim satisfaction, just as they learned as a child, that they’re better off remaining self-reliant than risking once again being dependent on someone who might let them down. Even if that someone might just have the care, empathy and understanding they so long for, but can’t risk allowing it in.

One way of killing off and destroying a therapist is to render them subject to a professional conduct complaint. I’m not for a moment suggesting that every complaint brought by a client against a therapist results from the kind of scenario above – and I hold it as essential for the upholding of professional standards and ethics in our profession that we must have robust complaints procedures in place – but these need to provide protection not just for clients, who may indeed have been subject to unethical, even abusive practice, but for therapists too, who – by the very nature of our work – are engaged in intimate relationships with complex clients for whom we become transferential objects in a myriad of tricky, and for the most part, unconscious ways, which render us vulnerable in our work and prey to hostility and attack.

This is an edited extract from an editorial first published in Private Practice, June 2025, published by BACP©