When We are Misguided Into Empathy

When I first started doing touch-based table work: fascial stretch therapy and nervous system support work after the movement sessions I offered at my former fitness studio, I noticed that my energy after a session depended on who I’d been working with. Some days I left with a residue that wasn’t mine: a mood, a nagging feeling in my gut, a nebulous somatic state that had nothing to do with what had happened in my own day nor anything I was going through in my own life. I was using my well-trained attunement skills to sense my clients’ breathing, fascial holding patterns and behaviour, the places where their nervous systems had gotten stuck in a loop or even frozen. I was taught to breathe with my clients, to sync up to their bodies so that I could be a better regulator and to be able to attune. But I was also sensing beyond their physiological state into something in the dark, beyond the five senses, in what I’d later come to know as countertransference, or co-transference: an attunement to the psychoid level, the somatic unconscious underneath what a client was even aware of in themselves. I could feel what they themselves were dissociating from too.

I had become a receptacle, a container with them because I was already good at this, unusually good given how I grew up. But I didn’t yet have a way to hold what I was sensing without absorbing it because I didn’t have the training. That was the real beginning of my work with trauma and the body that I came across in practice: an edge and a challenge I was dealing with every day, in my own nervous system and those of people who were suffering deeply while coming in to feel stronger and more mobile. This was before nervous system language and training was ‘a thing’ yet. In clinical literature, this is referred to as somatic countertransference, an analyst’s or therapist’s body registering material the client hasn’t consciously metabolized, and it’s better documented than most trainings explore.