Emotional or Gender Baggage?

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Working with separation is like a budget airline - we can’t afford to take any baggage with us!

In the UK separation and divorce are now mainstream. There is a strong chance that you as a practitioner have either experienced it yourself, as a child or an adult, or have a close relative or friend who has. It is also one of the experiences where emotions like anger, grief and a sense of betrayal run the deepest and longest. There is a high emotional charge around this subject, sometimes dividing people along gender battle lines.

Separation involves things that matter to us all very deeply:

• The breakdown of trust and communication with someone we have loved
• Our relationship with our children and our parents
• Our identity and rights as mothers and fathers, men and women

It therefore requires a lot of self-awareness and effort from parents, and also from ourselves as practitioners, to be objective and child-centred. We don’t have to be saints, but it is particularly important that we acknowledge the strength of our own experiences and put them to one side in this work. That can help us understand where family members are coming from too. If not, we may transfer them inappropriately to a family that we are dealing with. This will result at least in a poor service, and at worst in damaging consequences for children and other family members. 

Baggage transfer

The term ‘transference’ (client to therapist) coined by Freud in 1912, and ‘counter-transference’ (therapist to client) are useful terms for any setting. They refer to the way that we transfer or superimpose the emotions from a previous experience (in childhood or later), onto another, unconnected experience. It is useful to remember this when checking in our own baggage, but also to discuss it with clients going through separation conflict, who need to notice theirs.

A Wikpedia entry puts it in everyday language: “It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children (cross-generational entanglements). For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.”

Mistrust and over-compliance sum up the two extremes of a spectrum, from hostility to over-identification, that might fog our view of a separated family member. Many fantastic practitioners get into a specific area of work because of a personal experience. Identifying with people and empathising can give us the passion and insight to do good work – but it can also blind us to the real nature of a particular situation.

We may romanticise and over protect someone who is:

• ‘Like us’
• Is the same gender
• Is going through something we have gone through
• Has an adversary that represents for us someone who has made us suffer
• Is ‘child’ to our ‘parent’

We may feel hostile towards someone who:

• Represents ‘the other’:
• Is a different gender
• Represents for us someone who has made us suffer
• Represents an opportunity to win a battle we lost in the past
• Represents a difficult ‘parent’ to our ‘child’

What can we do if alarm bells are ringing and we feel an emotional charge that is hard to control, our baggage is in the way and we are transferring our experiences inappropriately?

• Share it with a colleague or line manager (preferably unlike you!) and ask for their view
• Ask for someone else to work with this client or family, then:
• Consider arranging independent counselling style supervision of your work issues from someone outside your agency (normal in therapeutic work)
• Consider counselling on the roots of these emotional dynamics, or access services through your personnel structure

So allow extra time for baggage check-in.
Have a nice flight!