Season 2 Ep 10: Client Relationships in the Trenches: The Role of Self-Validated Intimacy
In the last episode with Dr. K Hixson, I said that our field is defined by the wish fulfillment fantasy of the parentified child. The parentified child wants nothing more than to get it right, manage the relationship, and have the parental figure be healed and available to you.
If you are a therapist and you think that you were not, in some way, a parentified child, you’re probably wrong or in denial, or you’re one of the very, very few exceptions to this trend.
I stand by what I said that grown up, parentified children make up the bulk of this field, which means that knowing someone is a therapist means knowing something pretty significant about a dynamic that shaped them.
But when we name it, there can be a sense of residual shame that comes up.
Today, I’m digging into where that shame comes from, why so many parentified children end up in this field, and how the drives of the parentified child help and hinder us in this work.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
How being a therapist can actually be an impediment to personal healing
The fine line between interpersonal hypervigilance and interpersonal hyperattunement
How this work can reinforce patterns of relational perfectionism and imbalanced caretaking roles so common to parentified children
How using immediacy with our clients can actually help us heal these patterns and tendencies
The difference between self-validated intimacy and other-validated intimacy and how it applies to immediacy and self-disclosure
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About Riva
Riva Stoudt is a therapist based in Portland, Oregon. When she's not working with patients, she likes to talk about all the things a therapist isn't "supposed" to talk about.
