Discussing your relationship with your therapist is an essential part of therapy
Many online therapy-on-demand services explicitly tout the ability to switch therapists as a perk. If you hit a bump in the road, feel uncomfortable for any reason, or get mad at your therapist, including as a sign that you are growing, you are encouraged to abandon ship rather than work through these issues together. This extracts virtually all the value from the process of therapy.
What’s lost in the promises of convenience, comfort, and effectiveness in online therapy platforms, some of which are powered by AI rather than actual human therapists, is the actual point of therapy: your relationship with your therapist. Though flawed as all theorists are, Freud understood something fundamental about people—that our experience of the world is, in large part, a function of early childhood relationships. We develop our sense of self, internalize information about others, and learn how to be a human through our relationships. In a process like therapy that’s meant to help you learn about yourself and your life, talking about your relationship with your therapist is more than just a nice thing to do; it’s an essential part of therapy.
This includes getting angry at your therapist and talking about it
Your therapist will inevitably disappoint and irritate you in all kinds of ways. Rupture and repair are a crucial part of any healthy relationship. Getting angry at your therapist (maybe so angry that you consider leaving treatment) and talking about it creates an opportunity for the two of you to work through conflict together.
The process of a relationship feeling stressed and injured and subsequently mending it together is a tremendous opportunity for intimacy. Therapy lets you learn how to do this with someone skilled in this exact activity. While a very real relationship, your relationship with your therapist is also a place to practice being in a relationship with another person. That 45- or 50-minute block is a time when the only goal is to better understand your experience and development as a person. This hopefully allows for enough safety for you to take risks by talking about things that normally feel too scary or high-stakes to explicitly name outside of the office like anger.
Working through your anger at your therapist is also an opportunity to better understand your own relationship with anger
Therapy is a place to bring all of your feelings and reactions with the purpose of fully feeling them, learning about them, and integrating them into your sense of self. We can sometimes go to extreme lengths to avoid conflict. People, especially women, are taught to be polite and palatable. When someone asks, “How are you?”, most of us wouldn’t dream of answering that question honestly. There are different reasons for this including a belief that people are put off by negative feelings, that you would harm or offend someone by expressing anger, frustration, or sorrow, or that expressing those feelings toward another person would result in punishment or rejection. Your relationship with your therapist is exactly the place to look deeply at these fears and assumptions—and a great place to start is anger.
Many struggle with their relationship with anger, thinking it too much, not enough, or expressed in the “wrong” ways and linking it to shame, fear, and loss. People can deny or suppress their anger, often unsuccessfully, which can lead to eruptions, extreme reactions, or passive aggression. We all have a lot of ideas and beliefs about our own and others’ anger. Using your relationship with your therapist to test those assumptions gives you a chance to better understand your relationship with anger and experiment with different ways of engaging with it.
For instance, if someone grew up with a father who related to himself as a victim when his kid got mad at him, there is a good chance that kid grew up with some amount of fear that their anger is dangerous to others. If that now-grown person can look at this in therapy—by getting mad, expressing that to their therapist, and seeing that their therapist is still okay, they have an opportunity to challenge that internalized message.
Can your therapist hang with your anger?
Telling your therapist that you’re mad at them is also a test to see if your therapist is any good at their job. Your therapist should be able to hang with your anger without being frightened, punitive, or withholding (all reactions folks can get from others in their lives). Save smashing things in the office or screaming in a therapist’s face, a good therapist can take in, be curious about, and help you explore nearly any expression of anger you come in with.
One of the benefits of therapy is you get to be messy, unfinished, imperfect, and reactive. Whatever you’ve got, you should be able to bring that into therapy however that comes to you. There is value in looking at all expressions of anger, even including the absence of anger if things happen that seem potentially angering like a therapist going on vacation during a particularly difficult moment in the treatment without the patient feeling anger.
If it seems like your therapist isn’t able to handle the intensity or content of your conversations, that’s potentially a red flag that comes with an invitation to address THAT with your therapist. If you’re not able to have a productive conversation because it feels like your therapist is struggling, this is when you may need to move on and find someone else who can be more helpful to you.
