LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE to Three Associating PodcastTM on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts:
SEASON FOUR
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.