Is This About the Client or About Me? Countertransference in EMDR

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There is a moment in EMDR reprocessing when the therapist feels a pull to act. The client falls quiet, or circles the same painful association, or says something that lands somewhere in the therapist’s own history, and an impulse rises: to reassure, to explain, to offer an interweave, to change direction, or sometimes to hold back when movement is what the moment actually calls for. The trained response is to stay out of the way and trust the client’s processing, and much of the time that is right. But staying out of the way is not the same as being absent, and the impulse itself is worth pausing on, because it may be carrying information about the client, or it may be carrying something about the therapist. The question that separates the two is not a comfortable one, and it is among the most useful a clinician can ask in the middle of a session: is this about the client, or is this about me?

The therapist is in the room too

EMDR can encourage a particular fiction, that the clinician is a neutral facilitator of a neurobiological process, present mainly to administer bilateral stimulation and otherwise keep quiet. The eight-phase structure and the proper emphasis on staying out of the way can make it easy to overlook the intersubjective reality that every other psychotherapy takes for granted (Shapiro, 2018). The therapeutic relationship is active throughout reprocessing, and the therapist’s conscious and unconscious responses are part of the field in which the client’s material moves (Piedfort-Marin, 2018). Countertransference, in this framing, is not a lapse to be corrected but information to be read. Dworkin’s account of the relational imperative in EMDR makes the same point from another angle: the relationship is not the backdrop to the protocol but one of the conditions that determines whether the protocol works (Dworkin, 2005).

How your own parts show up in Phase 4

It helps to think about this in terms of parts, because the therapist has them too. A part that wants to rescue will reach for reassurance the moment a client’s distress rises. A part that wants to teach will explain the AIP model when the client needs only to keep going. A part made anxious by silence will fill it with a question. A part that finds a particular kind of pain hard to witness will steer the work away from it, while a part invested in being effective will push toward processing before the client is ready. None of these parts is malicious, and each has a protective logic, but when they are driving, the intervention that follows serves the therapist’s system rather than the client’s (Schwartz, 2021). This is the discipline behind a question worth asking before any interweave: is this offered for the client’s benefit, or for my own comfort? A related one, useful when the impulse is to start or to delay processing, is to ask what you are telling yourself it will mean if you begin, or if you do not.

The nervous system you bring

Some of what the therapist brings into the room is not cognitive at all. A clinician whose own nervous system tips toward activation or shutdown during a hard moment is no longer offering the client a regulated other to borrow stability from, and the client’s processing can stall for reasons that have nothing to do with their memory network and everything to do with the state of the person sitting across from them (Dana, 2018). This is why a therapist’s capacity to notice their own breath, posture, and arousal in real time is not a soft skill but a clinical one. The client is, in a meaningful sense, tracking the therapist’s regulation whether or not either party names it.

When countertransference is the block

Occasionally the therapist’s own material is not merely shaping the work but stopping it. A client’s content can touch something the clinician has not fully processed, and the resulting countertransference can block the client’s adaptive processing directly (Piedfort-Marin, 2018). The useful move in that situation is not to press harder with a cleverer question but to recognize where the block actually sits. Piedfort-Marin describes a countertransference-based interweave, in which the therapist takes responsibility for the interference and adjusts, which can release processing that had stalled. This is the same logic that governs interweave selection generally, that the intervention has to meet the real block rather than the assumed one, extended to the harder case in which the block is the clinician’s own.

Staying Self-led

The practices that keep a therapist Self-led rather than part-led are unglamorous and mostly involve slowing down. Before offering an interweave, it is worth letting the client go with whatever is present for a set or two, both because processing often resumes on its own and because the pause creates room to notice one’s own impulse before acting on it. The two reflective questions, is this about the client or about me, and what am I telling myself it will mean if I start or hold off, are most useful when asked silently and honestly in the moment rather than in retrospect. Beyond the session, the therapist’s own parts are difficult to see alone, which is the plain reason consultation and personal therapy remain part of mature practice rather than remedial ones. A pattern that is invisible from inside a case is often obvious to a consultant hearing it described.

Before you speak, ask yourself 1 Is this about the client, or about me? 2 What am I telling myself it means if I start, or hold off? Two questions worth asking silently, in the moment, before offering any intervention.

None of this asks the clinician to become the center of the work. It asks the opposite, that the therapist know their own parts well enough to keep them from quietly taking the wheel, so that the client’s process, and not the therapist’s, is the one being followed.

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