Three Associating is a podcast that offers the listener a peek behind the closed doors of therapists working within a relational psychoanalytic model. Join Rachael and Andrew as they explore with their supervisor Gill how their own hidden feelings and motivations influence the therapeutic process and affect their patients. In each episode, a relational dilemma arising in the context of work with a fictitious patient is explored. While reasons of confidentiality and privacy mean that none of the patients we discuss are real, the relational dynamics are. www.threeassociating.com
Episode 8: XOXO Gossip Girl; Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
In this episode, Rachael encounters a worthy adversary in the elegant and charismatic Iris. Beguiled by Iris charm and colourful stories Rachael can’t help feeling seduced. However she also feels manipulated and is irritated with herself and Iris. Nevertheless she still feels the pull to captivation in the session. In the end, Rachael realises that the most worthy adversary that she has is herself and in freeing herself contemplates helping Iris to be both her charismatic and her vulnerable self.
12/5/2023 • 29 minutes, 40 seconds
Episode 7: Sex Talk
In this episode, Andrew struggles to disrupt his patient's rigid self-control, ever mindful of a psychotic potential that could be unleashed given the patient's history of experiencing a psychotic episode. Andrew experiences both the seductions of a meeting of minds and the potential tyranny of his patient's mind that fears the body, its appetites, and affects.
11/6/2023 • 27 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode 6: An Education on Trauma: The Obliteration of Thinking and Feeling
In this episode, Rachael is provoked by a disrupted patient. Power struggles and challenges emerge in the room as Rachael struggles to think and not enact in the face of the patient's enactments. Technical questions of courageous speech versus disruptive challenges are engaged as Rachael shows great integrity and courage in taking in the challenges of supervision to come to an expanded understanding of trauma.
10/2/2023 • 26 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode 5: SHUSH! When Talking Is The Problem and Not The Cure
In this episode, Andy is frustratingly blocked by his patient's difficulty in listening and by her incessant talking, both of which reveal parts of her self and mask others. Ironically, Andy himself has to surrender into listening rather than talking and into only having recognised small snippets of his thoughts, if any at all. He becomes aware of the deprivation under his patient's excess and how this fuels the discrepancy between her subjective reality and his experience of her.
9/3/2023 • 28 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode 4: Dine In or Take Away Therapy
In this episode, we encounter Rachael's struggle with an avoidant patient who is fearful of closeness. Rachael is conflicted between her desire for the patient to make progress and to stay present to the work and to 'dine in', and her awareness that, for his desire to move forward to emerge, she needs to take a step back and let him continue with 'take away' for a while longer.
5/22/2023 • 28 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode 3: Dank Memes, TikTok, and Unprocessed Grief
In this episode, Andrew finds himself challenging his patient's perception of him as an internet dinosaur, too old to be familiar with youth culture. In engaging this challenge, Andrew finds both a way to connect with his patient, but also a way to collude to avoid an underlying grief which needs to be addressed.
5/1/2023 • 30 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode 2: The Dangers of Addiction: Help Me, Help You
In this episode, Rachael struggles with exasperation and grief as she writes a court report for a patient who has relapsed. To be both truthful and helpful is no mean feat, and nor is accepting the limits of her responsibility while still grappling with how to move the therapy forward.
4/10/2023 • 27 minutes, 19 seconds
Episode 1: Neurodiversity: Lost in Translation
In this episode, Andrew, Gill, and Rachael explore the hot topic of neurodiversity. We conclude that whatever the political and ideological controversies, our main focus needs to be on the person in the room.
