Join me as I talk about how important the relationship between therapist and client is, and what factors go into making a good one.

Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.

Welcome to this episode – ‘The Therapeutic Relationship’

Today I’m going to talk about the importance of the therapeutic relationship – it’s so crucial and yet a lot of people, especially outside the therapy world, don’t really understand why it’s so powerful. And indeed it’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Why does sitting with someone for an hour or so every week, why does that have the ability to completely change your life. It doesn’t seem enough, does it? And it comes with a number of preconceptions. Before I started therapy, I had no idea what it was all about either. I guess I thought that it was a bit of a supportive chat, a bit motivational, a bit of ‘ra ra’ and maybe pointing out where you’re going wrong, giving you a bit of advice, and then, after a while, you would just be ‘fixed’. To be honest, a drugs cure seemed much more attractive. Because while I thought that I was mentally ill, because I thought that I would need a drug to fix me. Because after all, that’s our paradigm from physical health – if you’ve got bronchitis, you might need an antibiotic. If you’ve got cancer, you might need chemotherapy. So, I didn’t really understand how I could stop being ‘mentally ill’ without drugs.

But then I began to reframe it as trauma, not mental illness, but even so the whole therapy thing still didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I suppose I thought that if I just talked about what happened to me, that I’d feel better – I guess I had absorbed some Freudian concepts about repression, and so what I needed, I thought, was a catharsis, I wouldn’t have put it in those terms though. But I thought I just needed the abuse to stop being a secret. I certainly didn’t understand about processing and metabolising traumatic material or learning to feel safe in your body again (what’s technically called neuroception). I didn’t understand that it would be about retraining the brain, or anything like that. And I didn’t see that the therapeutic relationship would be central to it all.

Now, there’s a lot of talk around at the moment about therapy being delivered by AI, by artificial intelligence, and I’m often asked what I think about that. Now, I do think there are some aspects of the recovery journey that can be delivered electronically if you like – for example, the psychoeducational aspects. Because there are a lot of skills that we just need explaining to us, like learning a language. But even then, it’s much more real when that comes from another human being, when it’s rooted in real life, rather than being disembodied. I think left brain stuff of facts and information is so much more ‘learnable’ when it’s delivered in the context of the right brain relationship. So, delivering psychoeducation entirely by computer has its limits. And the really fundamental work of recovering from trauma comes, I believe, from this transformative relationship with another human being.

I think the simplest way of understanding it is that we have experienced a wound – what we might call relational trauma. It’s been perpetrated or caused by another human being. And so we need to have a reparative experience, an opposite experience, where instead of hurt and har