The Podcast

While people might think that therapists have it all together, we don’t. We experience challenges. We reach impasses and become stuck, get tangled up in enactments, and find ourselves obstructing our own way in the therapy room. This is where relational psychoanalytic supervision comes in.

The Three Associating PodcastTM offers the listener a peek behind the closed doors of therapists working within a relational psychoanalytic model. Join Rachael and Andrew as they explore with their supervisor Gill how their own hidden feelings and motivations influence the therapeutic process and affect their patients. 

Relational psychoanalytic supervision focuses on how things outside the awareness of the therapist enter the consulting room. It is a form of supervision that requires the supervisor to hold in mind both the patient and the supervisee; to focus on both participants in the therapeutic couple and how they co-construct their relationship.

Relational psychoanalytic supervision treats the therapeutic relationship as an exemplar of how the patient may relate to others outside of the room and uses this relationship as a window into the patient’s intrapsychic dynamics. It is a form of supervision that requires a great deal of courage on behalf of the supervisees, as their blind spots come to light, and that demands skill on behalf of the supervisor to create a supervisory experience that is safe and illuminating. 

In each episode, a relational dilemma arising in the context of work with a fictitious patient is explored. While reasons of confidentiality and privacy mean that none of the patients we discuss are real, the relational dynamics are. While in supervision we work with one expression of the dynamic, the dynamics themselves apply broadly to ourselves and others.

The Episodes

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SEASON FOUR

Episode 2: Too Good for the ‘Hood

In this episode it becomes clear that Andrew and his patient Manuela are unconsciously co-constructing a dynamic in which Manuela is under pressure to be cultured and cool in order to maintain Andrew’s admiration, while Andrew is under pressure to take up a lesser position. As the supervision unfolds, Andrew becomes aware of how his envy is at the heart of this dynamic and how he is projecting certain longings onto Manuela. He becomes aware this leads to both an underplaying of Manuela’s limits and vulnerabilities and the overplaying of his own and keeps her stuck in a relational impasse. In the session, Andrew moves to a more balanced perception of Manuela’s plight and a greater recognition of his own contribution to her relational dynamic.

Episode 1: The Therapist’s Revenge: Trading Porn for Prayer Cards

Rachael comes to realise that feeling provoked by the patient’s apparent self-centredness in enactments that occur in the waiting room and in the session has led to a wish to be provocative in return. She first enjoys then tussles with revenge fantasies. By talking through these fantasies and owning their pleasure, she recognises their meaning, and this opens up multiple perspectives.

SEASON THREE

Episode 8: XOXO Gossip Girl; Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

In this episode, Rachael encounters a worthy adversary in the elegant and charismatic Iris. Beguiled by Iris charm and colourful stories Rachael can’t help feeling seduced.  However she also feels manipulated and is  irritated with herself and Iris.  Nevertheless she still feels the pull to captivation in the session. In the end, Rachael realises that the most worthy adversary that she has is herself and in freeing herself contemplates helping Iris to be both her charismatic and her vulnerable self.

Episode 7: Sex Talk

In this episode, Andrew struggles to disrupt his patient’s rigid self-control, ever mindful of a psychotic potential that could be unleashed given the patient’s history of experiencing a psychotic episode. Andrew experiences both the seductions of a meeting of minds and the potential tyranny of his patient’s mind that fears the body, its appetites, and affects.

Episode 6: An Education on Trauma: The Obliteration of Thinking and Feeling

In this episode, Rachael is provoked by a disrupted patient. Power struggles and challenges emerge in the room as Rachael struggles to think and not enact in the face of the patient’s enactments.  Technical questions of courageous speech versus disruptive challenges are engaged as Rachael shows great integrity and courage in taking in the challenges of supervision to come to an expanded understanding of trauma.

Episode 5: SHUSH! When Talking Is The Problem and Not The Cure

In this episode, Andrew is frustratingly blocked by his patient’s difficulty in listening and by her incessant talking, both of which reveal parts of her self and mask others. Ironically, Andrew himself has to surrender into listening rather than talking and into only having recognised small snippets of his thoughts, if any at all. He becomes aware of the deprivation under his patient’s excess and how this fuels the discrepancy between her subjective reality and his experience of her.

Episode 4: Dine In or Take Away Therapy

In this episode, we encounter Rachael’s struggle with an avoidant patient who is fearful of closeness. Rachael is conflicted between her desire for the patient to make progress and to stay present to the work and to ‘dine in’, and her awareness that, for his desire to move forward to emerge, she needs to take a step back and let him continue with ‘take away’ for a while longer.

Episode 3: Dank Memes, TikTok, and Unprocessed Grief

In this episode, Andrew finds himself challenging his patient’s perception of him as an internet dinosaur, too old to be familiar with youth culture. In engaging this challenge, Andrew finds both a way to connect with his patient, but also a way to collude to avoid an underlying grief which needs to be addressed.

Episode 2: The Dangers of Addiction: Help Me, Help You

In this episode, Rachael struggles with exasperation and grief as she writes a court report for a patient who has relapsed. To be both truthful and helpful is no mean feat, and nor is accepting the limits of her responsibility while still grappling with how to move the therapy forward.

Episode 1: Neurodiversity: Lost In Translation

In this episode, Andrew , Gill, and Rachael explore the hot topic of neurodiversity. We conclude that whatever the political and ideological controversies, our main focus needs to be on the person in the room.

SEASON TWO

Episode 8: When The ‘Not Me’ Is Actually Not Me

Misrecognition and the projection of others are a perennial problem, but perhaps more so for those who are queer identified. But whoever is at the receiving end of mistaken identity, the effects are very unpleasant as Gill, Andrew , and Rachael come to know first hand in this episode.

Episode 7: Decent Or Indecent Exposure

In this episode, Gill, Rachael, and Andrew grapple with feelings of exposure as Rachael becomes aware that her private and professional lives have collided, but the exact nature of this is unknown.

Episode 6: The Therapist’s Destructive Fantasy

Rachael, Gill, and Andrew work together to understand how the presence of subtle power dynamics, unconsciously enacted in the therapeutic relationship, are signalled by the therapist’s destructive fantasy.

Episode 5: “Help! I’m A Borderline Nightmare And I Need Reining In”

In this episode, Gill, Andrew, and Rachael are confronted with how intense feelings can muddy the waters and produce confusion about which feelings belong to the therapist and which to the patient.

Episode 4: Protection And Its Perils

In this episode, Rachael, Andrew, and Gill, discuss the proverbial notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions as Rachael’s wish to protect the patient reveals hidden difficulties.

Episode 3: The Sexiness Of The Self-Help Guru

Andrew, Rachael, and Gill, tussle together over ethical and therapeutic issues as they wonder where self help ends and where helping oneself to what belongs to the other begins.

Episode 2: Trauma And Magic Powers

Rachael, Gill, and Andrew struggle hard to resist the all-too-human desire for magical solutions to truly awful problems.

Episode 1: Game Of Cards

In the first episode of season two, Gill, Andrew and Rachael plunge into the pleasures and perils of toxic masculinity and the allure of trading intimacy and authenticity for the exercise of power.

SEASON ONE

Episode 1: Naming Without Shaming

Gill, Rachael, and Andrew explore the common problem of feeling conflicted between a wish to be accepting and the desire to be confronting of offensive stances and statements. They come to recognise how understanding one’s own unconscious biases contributes to the solution.

Episode 2: When Our Best Is Not Good Enough

Gill, Andrew, and Rachael come to understand how an unconscious bias towards over-identifying with a person’s trauma story inadvertently deprives the person of agency and disallows a more nuanced perception of the person.

Episode 3: When An Explosion Is Detonated In Session

Gill, Andrew, and Rachael discover how unconscious disapproval can be communicated with ill effect and provoke bullying and verbal intimidation in return, resulting in overwhelm, dissociation, and an inability to think.

Episode 4: Twinning Isn’t Always Winning

Gill, Rachael, and Andrew uncover some unexpected disadvantages of friendliness, delving into how affability can cover up an unconscious fear of difference and otherness and also mask a desire to be mirrored back positively to oneself.

Episode 5: Therapist As Sex Object

Gill, Rachael, and Andrew dive into the heady brew of sex and aggression, showing how these issues can be unconsciously provoked and can then easily lead to shame and overwhelm.

Episode 6: Fairweather Friend: The Honeymoon Is Over

Gill, Andrew, and Rachael encounter the common problem of when we are drawn in by charisma, fail to set firm boundaries and then experience guilt and anxiety about hurting the other person when we feel our boundaries have been transgressed.

Episode 7: When The Patient Demands Special Treatment

Gill, Andrew, and Rachael wrestle with the thorny issues of rivalry and competition. They show how, ironically, being caught in rivalry can lead one to give away one’s authority, as the focus comes to be placed on competing rather than on occupying one’s own personal power.

Episode 8: Feeling Drowsy When The Connection Is Lousy

In this last episode of season 1, Gill, Rachael, and Andrew grapple with the challenges of staying awake when it seems that the other person is exaggerating wildly or, even worse, is somewhat out of touch with reality. Faced with the seemingly impossible task of finding a constructive way to express one’s thoughts to the person, it is easy to unconsciously zone out instead.

The Therapists

Prof Gill Straker is a therapist, supervisor, teacher, and mentor, both in private practice and in psychotherapy institutes. She is familiar with diverse psychoanalytic approaches, including relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Lacanian and Winnicottian sensibilities.  She has more than 30 years of experience in the field, is the co-author of two books, Faces in the Revolution, and The Talking Cure, and is the author of numerous international publications on diverse topics including: continuous traumatic stress, whiteness and race, integrating African and Western healing practices, integrating cognitive and psychodynamic thinking, gender and sexuality, and engaging Lacan. Her collegial and friendship networks span many diverse countries with an enriching and deepening effect.

Rachael Burton is a psychologist and supervisor with 15 years experience in the field as both an individual and group therapist. She completed a Master of Research in Psychology, which comprised a thesis exploring the concept and influence of gender. She enjoys connecting with others and engaging in the development of psychoanalytic thinking and creative pursuits. She is drawn to psychoanalysis and the relational approach. She finds these give shape and meaning to experiences in life, and offer a deeper understanding and connection with self, others and the world at large.

Dr Andrew Geeves is a therapist, supervisor, teacher and researcher working across private practice, hospital and tertiary education settings. His path to engaging with relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy began with an introduction to classical psychoanalytic theory during his undergraduate years. It has since involved completing a PhD exploring the experience of music performance for professional musicians and becoming registered as a clinical psychologist. He continues to seek connection with relational psychoanalytic peers, supervisors and thinkers around the world. He is a candidate of the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at NYU.

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