Have you ever left a session carrying your client’s feelings home with you? Or noticed you’d gone a little flat and careful with the client who needs you most?

They’re the same two pulls our clients bring to us: towards merging, and towards distance. Murray Bowen called the capacity underneath both Differentiation of Self: being able to feel strongly and still think clearly, and being close to someone and still being yourself. In the therapy room, it’s ours as much as theirs.

The same two pulls, in the therapy room

When I’m pulled towards merging, I can find myself working harder than my client, rescuing, softening the challenge, or taking their mood on as mine. When I’m pulled towards distance, I can go technical, start explaining, or wait the feeling out rather than meet it.

Neither is a failure. Both are information. The work is noticing the pull early, in my body, before it becomes what I do.

Where I start in supervision

In supervision, this is often where I start. Rather than “what did the client do?”, I ask “where did you feel the pull, and which way?” A supervisee who can name the pull can choose what to do with it.

I think of this as a developmental sequence. The supervisee learns to recognise these patterns in clients, and to work with them, through their own experience of them first.

  1. Noticing the pull in themselves. In the session, in their body: a tightening, a wish to fix, a sudden tiredness, an urge to explain. Most of us notice the pull only after we have acted on it. The skill is noticing it earlier.
  2. Knowing which way they lean. Most of us have a familiar direction, and particular clients who bring it out. A supervisee who knows they tend to rescue can catch it sooner, and can be curious about the client who makes them want to keep their distance.
  3. Telling now from then. Does this pull belong to this client, today? Or is it older and familiar, something the supervisee has felt in their own family or relationships? Often it is both, and the work is separating the two enough to think.
  4. Using it as information about the client. Once the supervisee’s own part is clearer, the pull can become a hypothesis about the client. Being drawn into rescuing may say something about how this client brings people close. Feeling shut out may say something about how they keep people away. It stays a hypothesis, offered tentatively, and checked against what else we know.
  5. Staying close and staying themselves. This is what the client is learning too. A therapist who can stay warm and still hold their own position, in the room, shows the client what Differentiation looks like rather than describing it.

A supervisee who has met their own pull, and found they can stay with it, recognises the client’s pull from the inside. That is very different from recognising it from a textbook.

Questions I might ask

  • Where in your body did you notice it first?
  • Which way were you pulled: towards them, or away?
  • Is that familiar? Who else pulls you that way?
  • If the pull were telling you something about this client, what might it be?
  • What would staying close, and staying yourself, look like in your next session?

Supervisors have pulls too

Supervisors have their pulls too: towards rescuing a struggling supervisee, or towards a safe, procedural distance. Rescuing can look like supportive supervision and leave the supervisee less able to find their own way. Procedural distance can look like rigour and leave the supervisee alone with the hardest material.

The same practice applies. When I notice my pull as a supervisor, it often tells me something about the supervisee’s pull with their client. And how I handle mine is part of what I am teaching.

A practice between sessions

Let your shoulders drop a little, make your out-breath longer than your in-breath, then ask yourself which way you’re being pulled, and whether it belongs to now, or to then.

I’ve made a free worksheet on this for clients, Staying Yourself When You’re Close to Someone. It has six steps for the moment you feel the pull, and you may find it useful in your own work too: for yourself before or after a session, or with clients who lose themselves or keep their distance.

I’ve written about the client side of this, with what the research shows and my own practice figures, in Do you lose yourself in relationships, or keep people at arm’s length?

Which way do you get pulled, and with which clients?

A note on the evidence

This is clinical and supervisory practice, not a tested model. The research on Differentiation of Self is mostly single-snapshot studies, largely of people who are not in therapy, and I am not aware of studies that test this way of using it in supervision. PsycheVita is evidence-informed and not yet evidence-based.

References

  • Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
  • Calatrava, M., Martins, M. V., Schweer-Collins, M., Duch-Ceballos, C. and Rodríguez-González, M. (2022). Differentiation of self: A scoping review of Bowen Family Systems Theory’s core construct. Clinical Psychology Review, 91, 102101. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102101

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