 We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is The Therapy Show, behind closed doors podcast with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Welcome to episode 97 of The Therapy Show behind closed doors with the wonderful Mr Bob Cook and myself Jackie Jones. And we're going to be talking about quite a big topic in this one. It's re-parenting what is it and how to use this process within the therapy room. What a marvelous topic and I think I said at the last podcast, well, I think I need several, several podcasts to discuss this one because it's quite a meaty subject. But you know, when you sort of, when we came on and introduced me and we get to say it's 97, I feel I want to count down to 100. Yes. But against the 98 and 99, which is a penultimate one, you know, I regret when it reached the 100th one, but let's get back to the subject. So it's a meaty subject. I mean, part of me thinks we should sort of start off with definitions of what re-parenting is. That is the title of the podcast, is it re-parenting? Yeah, re-parenting. What is it? Yeah. So I'll hand that definition over to you. For me, yeah, thanks for that, Bob. It is quite a meaty subject. For me, you know, the relationship between the client and the therapist, we've spoke about this a lot of times is adult to adult and I'm okay, you're okay. But I think there are certain times where we play a parenting role in that relationship and we can model, you know, an appropriate relationship to the clients before we let them free into the world if that makes sense. So if they've got attachment problems, you know, if the parent wasn't there for them a lot of the time, we can model consistency and an appropriate relationship with them that kind of shows them that it's safe and it's okay to have that relationship again. Very, very well put. And very true, by the way. I think I'd like to add a little bit and that is that I know both you and I work this way, but we both work in a developmental way. Yes, yeah. And so by definition, what you've just talked about there will always happen. Now, we may have contracts about it because you started off with, I've been talking about contracts and I really agree with you. So there's a focus where we're going and we might want to call it spot reparenting if you like or session will be parenting. Yeah. And there's a adult to adult contact about that process you just talked about. And, you know, that that's important to bear in mind. Now, if you take the research, and I think it's something like 95, I think of 95% is very high, that most clients when they come into the therapy room or when they decide to come to therapy, they want the therapist to fix it. Yeah. Or they want the therapist to solve it for them. So usually by definition, they're handing over that in inverted commas, parenting function in the therapeutic process. Yeah. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean the therapist will pick that up. But that's, I think usually, the unconscious desire, often stated, by the way, of the client when they first come through the door. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. They put that mentor, or that parent, or that or that father Christmas, who can fix everything onto the therapist from the moment they move through the door. Now, they might fight against that. However, I believe that's the desire that's there. Yeah. And to a certain extent, I suppose the situation puts them in that position anyway. If you think about even just logically the situation, we're in an environment that we're familiar with that we feel comfortable in. The first time a client comes, they don't know who's going to open the door to them. They've probably never been there before. So they're not going to feel in an okay position on that first session when they walk in really. They're going to feel vulnerable. They're going to feel not 100% confident. Yeah. And as I said, I think in a couple of podcasts back in time, they usually come from their younger self. Yeah. And if you're thinking developmentally, and you're thinking that the past affects the present, and you're thinking about what developmental needs or tasks weren't fulfilled at particular ages in the client's history, then the re-parenting contract or mentoring makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think I first started re-parenting when I was fostering, not really knowing at all any of the psychological impact of it, because I was fostering way before I started doing psychotherapy. But that's basically what I was doing with the looks after kids that came through. Absolutely. Practically, not just emotionally. A lot of the children would regress when they came and want to be re-parented. That's right. So I don't know the answers because I've never asked you before, actually. But on average, how long do your foster kids stay with you? Well, any time. The longest was nine years, and the shortest was respite for a weekend. That's not an average. No. There wasn't for us because we were passed for long-term and short-term and respite. So it just depended. I'm asking because usually when you contract with a person to do spot re-parenting or do aggressive psychotherapy where you might look at what tasks and deficits weren't met, it's termed in inverted commas long-term work. I can believe it, yeah. It was anywhere between a year to five or six years. And for people who cancels and therapists listening to us, it would be where with contracts where the therapist would step into the transference and play that parenting role, a healthy parenting role there. Yeah, yeah. I can remember the first time I took it to supervision because I knew that we were falling into that relationship, that I was falling into that parenting role and I felt uncomfortable doing that. It was in the early stages of, you know, my training and I felt a lot better when my supervisor said it's okay providing, you know, you know what you're doing and you come out the other side of it. It's okay to get into that transference if there's a therapeutic reason for doing it. And I believe it needs to be contracted for. Yeah. I think that was the thing. I don't think it was contracted. I think it just happened over the period of time. Yeah, yeah. That's very common, of course, is what you've just said there, that in the transference it's easily for the therapist to fall into the parental role of your mentoring role and it's very, very easy for the client to give it to the therapist. Yeah. Now, that's why I think in the contracting right at the beginning, I think needs to be an adult to adult contract where the two people specify, you know, what the outcome is. So there's an overall contract. I also think there may be sessional contracts. Yeah. Which will also help in this process and a lot of transfers anyway, it's going to be parent and child led if you're working in a developmental aggressive way. That's why I say contracts are so important. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think it's easier to do this when, you know, you're of a certain age as a therapist? And all psychologically, we can go into the parent and the child even if the therapist is younger than the client. Yeah. I hesitate if you do ask me this question some time ago, I think I might have a discussion about the grab a tassel, you know, you know, elder people and psychological ages. And I hesitated my response back to you because my daughter is 24, nearly, and her husband is, I know 30. They've started up a youth, I think I'll call it a youth club, but I think they're going to say it's more like youth culture. It's called revolutionary youth. And it meets sort of, I think, Mondays and Wednesdays. And it's led by the church, which is another subject. I know we could talk about a bigger parent, but anyway, but there's no doubt without my shadow of a doubt that in the youth club, the, the quite disturbed, a lot of them are quite disturbed for lots of various reasons, a lot of issues. They, that the, my daughter and husband play that mentoring. Yeah. Parental role. And they're 24, mine's the same. My daughter's 24. So in the relationship between the youth, anything from 13, 40, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, but most of the, I suppose, average 13, 40, 15, 16, the daughter and husband play that parenting role. Yeah. Definitely. Without a doubt. Whether you want to call that a re-parenting, I'm not so sure, but it actually happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it doesn't, it doesn't have to be somebody who's 40, 50, 60, 70, can happen a lot younger in that sort of process I've just talked about. Just, you know, sometimes my clients refer to me as the therapy mum. Yeah. See, there we are. The desire, you know, they actually say that out loud and the therapy mum. You see, you see, I think, I think clients basically, in the type of work we do, the long-term developmental work, they come to therapy for two major reasons, I think. One is to understand themselves better. And secondly, a desire for a different outcome. Yeah. And in that process, we'll transfer that parental role onto you. Now, in the last podcast, I was talking about the duty of therapist to take on the beacon of hope. Yeah. On the client delt of the dark side. In this podcast, I think, and hopefully as contractual, by the way, the therapist is taking on the beacon of the healthy parent. Yeah. And that's the key to it. The healthy parent is that we're modelling what a healthy relationship is and the ability to work through issues or the relationship or upset or change or anything and be okay at the other end of it, which often the client hasn't necessarily had. That's right. The different outcome. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Now, it's a very, you know, important and interesting subject we're talking about. And certainly, you know, because it's quite controversial, because the other side of this is the misuse of this process. In other words, that the therapist who may unconsciously, hopefully some consciously might move into a place where they infantilize the client. In other words, they don't allow the client to work through these developmental tasks we're talking about or these deficits and they don't allow the person to grow up if you like. Yeah. Yeah. You've got this sort of parent-child symbiosis going on far longer than it should. Yeah. And on the extreme side of all this, if you want to talk about real critics of this type of work, they might want to call this brainwashing. This infantilized symbiosis, the clients could be, that's the extreme way of looking at this. Yeah. And I think it's a dark side of TA that was guilty of this. But I'm not talking about that extreme side. I'd like to go to the middle where we do spot reparenting under contracts where we may step into transness in terms of the potential for a healthy parent and that we facilitate people to work through their developmental deficits, their developmental tasks and get a different outcome. Yeah. So how would you use this in the therapy room? Would you use this in an educative way in the therapy room or just through modelling it? Oh, well, it depends on the therapist. But I mean, certainly there's an educative part of this. That's definite in terms of looking at the developmental deficits or tasks that weren't met and maybe some of the toxicity, but you may certainly might be some educative sessions. That's true. It depends on the style of the therapist. On the other hand, if a therapist comes in and talks about sexual abuse, talks about physical abuse, talks about toxicity of their own parents, talks about trauma, post-traumatic trauma, flashbacks or goodness knows what, then we know that the internalised parents they were in their heads are pretty unhealthy. And we may step into the transition, using the word transplants again, and play a much more healthy parent. Now hopefully this is done in contract at the beginning, that's what I just said. And the client, like of course your therapy moment, you've just talked about that, they understand that the process, the process what I'm talking about is that you're going to be role-modelling, going to be through the techniques of regression, providing a different opportunity and potential to have a different outcome. It didn't have all those years ago. Yeah. I think through permissions, a lot of protection, but lots of validation. The client can work through those relational needs, they're perhaps so challenging all those years ago, and have a different outcome today, so that when they're in relationships today, where they are needed to function in a healthy way, the workplace or whatever it is in life, they have a different script in their head, and they're more likely to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah, because I think when the majority of time that I've used this in the therapy room has been around consistency and permission and validation and those sort of things like you were saying earlier on, that the client can get it wrong and it doesn't mean it's the end of the relationship. You're working through a healthy reconciliation somehow between the two of us, because sometimes the client will attempt to push the therapist away by, I don't know, just pushing the boundaries to see how reliable they're going to be in the situation, and maybe even if we say, I don't know, that you need to attend the sessions on time and they push the boundaries and they're constantly turning up late and then wanting to see us or things like that that were quite consistent in what we're saying. That's right, and we must remember that the end goal of this, which is hopefully contracted for, is that the person is able to function in a healthy relationship or in life in a way that isn't so challenging to them. That's why this is happening. And if we're going to work within a child in the younger self, almost by definition they will transfer hair and figure or mentor onto you. And that's the relationship that is set up for all the things I talked about earlier in this podcast. Yeah, absolutely, which again, you know, in the early days of being a therapist, it can be quite daunting sometimes. Very, very daunting. And it's a million miles away from CPT. Yes, yeah, absolutely. CPT is the favorite therapy under their chest, usually have to travel 16 sessions. And that might be very useful for people in terms of changing their thought patterns, being able to change their behaviors because their thought patterns have changed. And it's not the type of therapy we're talking about here. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, if you want to deal with your deep trauma, your deal, deep abuse, the tox, you know, deep issues coming from toxicity of parents or significant others, then I believe that we need to visit the past because the past affects the present. And then what happens, we find out that the traumatized younger self, or the abused younger self, or the emotionally repressed younger self needs permissions, needs validation from a, I'll put it inverted commas, a healthy parent, which perhaps they never had before. Yeah. So they can be different in life today. Yeah. That's a completely different type of therapy and usually takes what I call long-term therapy than what you would get on the NHS. Yeah, absolutely. It's much deeper, dealing with trauma, dealing with severe emotional neglect, dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. And it all works under the belief that the past affects the present. So you have to visit the past. And usually the dynamic that's set up is this younger self, parent dynamic, which we could call the name of this podcast, a reparenting process. Yeah. We're working towards the establishment of a healthy parenting system so that they can be different today. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like you say, I think you touched on it earlier on, there's a very delicate line to be drawn between, you know, modelling that healthy parenting relationship. And then that, I don't want to say abusing the situation, but do you know what I mean? Playing the one up in the therapy room? Well, I think it is abusing. It is abusing the situation. If you're going to play a, you know, a sort of expert, a sort of person that is maybe going to take advantage of the situation, you know, at the worst, you'll just repeat history for the person. Yeah. So it's something to really, really look out for. Yeah. It's something to be trained in. I did many, many years of training to enable me to work at these sorts of levels. And my health therapy way of thinking for this type of long time work is that the past affects the present. Yeah. The past. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Go back there to help them explore that. Hopefully take on a more healthy parenting, if you want to call it that way, so that they can be, so they can leave therapy in it with a more healthy way of functioning and dealing with relationships. Yeah. Often one of the questions I ask clients, you know, at some point, and I'm not sure at what point it comes up was, you know, how would you know that you've done a good job? You know, what would your parents do that you knew you'd done a good job or that you got something right and the same for the opposite? You know, how would you know that you got something wrong? What would your parents, you know, behave towards you? And that's quite insightful. And often it can be mirrored in the therapy room. Yeah, good questions to ask. You know, what did you get from a significant other or didn't get? Yeah. Yeah, good questions. Yeah, because it gives me an insight, because often you get a sense that the client's looking for recognition or validation or, you know, when you're talking, it's like they don't want to give you the wrong answer, even though there is no right or wrong answer in the therapy room. But it's, yeah, it's interesting. I love the work that we do and there is a certain amount of re-parenting that takes place in there, there has to be. You see, this is a long-term developmental work. Yeah. Now, for both of us who think this way that the past affects the present, you know, when we're working this type of client, they've usually been highly traumatized. They have a toxicity in a relationship with their significant others in their past. They may suffer from cumulative neglect and many shame-based histories. So we have to go and explore the past and look at what needs healing and hold out the potential of a more healthy way of being. And you want to call that re-parenting to be so. But the reason is, is that they can be different and have a more healthy relationship today. Yeah. Can that be misused by therapists? Certainly. Can people, can therapists make dreadful errors in this type of therapy? Yes. But if the therapist comes from when I'm okay, you're okay position, has had the training to be able to work in this regressive developmental way. Hopefully, the things that we're talking about here can be minimized. And the potential for effective therapy with people who've been so hurt and traumatized is great. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Let's sit on another point before we end this podcast. For the therapists that enter in this type of work, that have been trained in this type of work, you know, it's not for the faint-hearted. In other words, people who work with these types of clients who've had such difficult histories and who project onto you the hope of a different type of process than what they had all those years ago, can be very draining for the therapist. Yeah. And exhausting, by the way. So it's not for the faint-hearted because you're going to, you're going to hear a lot of traumatic processes. You're going to hear a lot of perhaps traumas and neglect or developmental deficits or whatever we want to call this. And I think therapists need to have a passion for doing this type of work. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's a heavy burden to carry at certain times, maybe. It's a lot of responsibility. Yeah. I would say don't do it if you're not prepared to hold that responsibility, if you're not prepared to get yourself well trained, if you're not prepared to have a good supervisor. Don't work in this way. Yeah. And again, you know, safeguarding ourselves, one of the things that we would talk quite early on was, you know, the ratio of these sort of clients, you know, like the 80-20 rule, that you can't have those sort of clients all the time. No. Not the way I've just been explaining it. Yeah. You're absolutely right. And on another level, it's a completely another level, you may do some mentoring and role-playing quite a lot with many clients. Yeah. Yeah. I might not go to those levels. They can be dealt with in a, you know, in a different way. Yes. Yeah. Maybe there's lots of therapy work, which includes us playing out the projection of a mentor, or a healthy significant other. Yeah. And lots of inner power in a child work, which doesn't mean we have to go to these great depths. I'm not saying with all clients we do that, but we may do what you want to call reparenting work in a different level, almost like osmosis or role-playing or mentoring to many of our clients. Yeah. Which I think, like I completely agree, and I think we do that a lot more regular with clients, the higher level work rather than the deeper work, let's say. It's like a continuum. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way of describing it. Yeah. Yeah. However, you and I, I know on the same page here, and many of my colleagues at the Institute and many of my colleagues who work with relationally all come from the process that the past affects the present. Yeah. We would be visiting the past, whether it's at a lighter place on the continuum or the heavier place, but the process is the past, past affects the present. And we often need to go into our more darker places to get to the lighter places. And I know there's a continuum in this as well. Yeah. But it's not like solution-focused therapy. It's not like CBT. It's not like, you know, that type of therapy, which is at a different level, even though I believe, this is a story altogether, I believe that clients still project, you know, a parent on these, on these people, whether they're in CBT, solution-focused therapist, but the therapist themselves, because they're not trained in the ways we're talking about, give the therapy to a different place. Yeah. I've never, I've never witnessed CBT, so I don't actually know what it would be like in the therapy room with somebody. I know a bit about it, but not, not that much. Yeah. Well, you know, there's a place and time for, yeah, absolutely. But if you are the type of therapy we're talking about and podcast is really about reparenting, then it's much more developmental, regressive work. And the thesis is the past affects the present. And you work in a long, much more long-term developmental way. Yeah. Yeah. And I like working developmentally. It fits well with me. He makes sense. And you know me, I like things to make sense, Bob. Don't we all? Yes. So what we're going to be talking about next time. Oh, next time, number 98, I think. Number 98, cultivating resilience in the therapy process. Oh. I like a bit of resilience. I think we could all do with some of that. I'm going to get some champagne in and put it in the fridge. Oh, put it in the fridge for a couple of weeks. For the next two or three weeks, because we're heading towards number 100. We are. We need to come up with a wonderful topic for 100, Bob. We've not got one for 100 yet. Well, it could be about the therapeutic process around aging. That'd be a good one. Whatever it is, whatever it is, it will be wonderful. We need to work on a really good title over the next couple of weeks for that one. But until next time, Bob, until episode 98. It could be something like the pitfalls and celebrations of our therapeutic careers or something. But anyway, whatever it is, we will find a juicy one, I'm sure. We'll work on it for the next two weeks, Bob. Until next time, have a good week. Yeah, and you. Bye-bye. You've been listening to The Therapy Show, behind closed doors podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to subscribe, and leave us a review. We'll be back next week, with another episode.