Episode 56: Reclaiming the Relational

Summary

Between Us: A Psychotherapy Podcast

Episode 56: Reclaiming the Relational

Date: August 6, 2025
Host: John Totten
Guest: Roy Barsness
Co-Producer: Mason Neely

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Overview

This episode of Between Us is a deep dive into the heart of relational psychotherapy, centering on the work and recent book of psychotherapist and supervisor Roy Barsness. Host John Totten and Barsness explore the evolution of relational theory, the importance of authentic presence and emotional openness in psychotherapy and supervision, and the radical, sometimes messy, co-creation at the center of meaningful therapeutic relationships. The conversation is infused with personal anecdotes, reflection on theoretical giants like Stephen Mitchell and Jessica Benjamin, and practical insights from Barsness’ new book, Psychodynamic Supervision Theory and Practices in a New Key. The focus is on reclaiming lost potentials—not retreating into the past, but using foundational relational theories to move the field forward.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Revisiting the Roots of Relational Psychoanalysis (05:00-08:00)

• John Totten reflects on his theoretical allegiance to Stephen Mitchell and relational theory, noting a current backlash in the field toward more rigid, boundary-focused perspectives.
• Totten frames the episode as a journey: “I’m interested in revisiting the past to help me move forward.” (06:24)
• Mitchell's idea of constructive disintegration: Regression isn't just returning to primitive states, but can be an expansion—reclaiming lost potentials rather than a retreat.

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The Emotional Realities of Therapy – Letting the Patient In (07:04-09:15)

• Roy Barsness discusses the deep emotional impact of having a patient share their positive therapeutic experience in public:
  • “I probably wanted to be by his side and participating with, and not being a listener, but being a participant with them and sorting it all out together... We’re not outsiders, we’re inside, we’re co-participants, we’re creating and recreating a patient’s story as it infects us and impacts us.” (07:18)
• Barsness emphasizes allowing the patient to penetrate the therapist’s emotional life as integral to effective relational therapy.

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Supervision in a New Key – The “Essential I” (09:13-17:04)

• Barsness describes the genesis of his new supervision model, built on therapists showing up authentically and affectively in supervision—not just “outside” the patient’s story:
  • “Where are you? Where’s your fucking essential I?” (10:09)
• Redefines traditional supervision:
  • The supervisee knows their patient best; supervision should help unlock that knowing, not impose the supervisor’s analysis.
  • Barsness discovered a shift when, instead of focusing on patient behavior alone, he asked: “When you’re sitting with this patient, what are you feeling?”
• Authentic affective engagement becomes central—even when it elicits anger, boredom, erotic feelings, or discomfort.

Notable quote:

“Patients need to know we can be pierced, that we can feel, react and engage in multiple and complex affective states, including the negative, frightful states that are aroused... Too much therapy is conducted in the constant presence of each other's absence.”
– Roy Barsness (15:05)

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Empathy vs. Authenticity (15:27-16:11)

• Barsness critiques contemporary, sanitized notions of empathy:
  • “No, patients want from us a real response… even when we make mistakes, ... if we’re willing to stay in the fray, that’s when the work gets alive.”

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Supervision as Co-Participation and Messiness (17:04-23:05)

• Barsness discusses the implications of embedded supervision—supervisors are in the process, sometimes getting caught in parallel processes or enactments.
• Example: A supervisor inadvertently acts out family roles from the patient’s history and is challenged in-session.
• The “third” (Jessica Benjamin): The co-created psychic space, the “in-between,” where transformational moments happen.
• Humility and radical openness are necessary; supervisors solicit honest feedback about their presence and impact.

Notable theoretical summary (on “the third”):

“The third is a position constituted through holding the tension of recognition between difference and sameness, taking the other to be a separate but equivalent center of initiative and consciousness, with whom nonetheless feelings and intentions can be shared.” (20:45, Benjamin via Totten)

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The MAMAL Model for Supervision (23:05-34:40)

Barsness unveils his supervision model, its key components forming the acronym MAMAL:

M: Muse

• The case is not an object to dissect but a muse for all present—everyone is impacted, and everyone’s reaction is considered.

A: Affect

• “What is the affective states that are getting stirred?”—the first question is always about emotion.

M: Metabolization

• Transforming the felt affect into meaning, exploring personal and developmental resonances, not just intellectual insight.

A: Articulation

• Bringing genuine, lived affect into the therapeutic moment. “Can you really find yourself bringing yourself into a genuine kind of meeting with your patient?” (34:18)

L: Learning

• “What have we learned today?”—for self, for theory, for practice.

Key insight: The model shifts focus from the patient as object to a co-created subjectivity within supervision and therapy.

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Example: Working with the “Annoying” Patient (35:08-41:03)

• Totten shares a clinical vignette about a patient who chronically disqualifies positive feedback.
• Totten’s spontaneous, “off-script” intervention (“She had to take a shit”) opens a playful, authentic space that shifts both his and the patient’s emotional stuckness.
• Barsness interprets this as metabolization in action—“something stuck here... it needed a laxative.”
• They discuss the importance of using mistakes or misreads as opportunities for joint meaning-making:
  • “I’m allowed to get you wrong, but then you have to help me figure out why I thought of that.”
  • “I get a read of you, but it’s only sort of a read. And the only way I can get a good read is if we read it together.” (41:16)

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Therapist Presence, Self-Disclosure, and Ethics (43:29-48:18; 54:43-56:30)

• Barsness distinguishes personal self-disclosure from relational disclosure:
  • “My whole work is about relational disclosure, not self disclosure... patients don’t really seem that interested in my personal self disclosure. And I’ve never seen it useful... what matters is how we show up, not what stories we tell.”
• The ethics of non-disclosure: Withholding is sometimes unethical if important relational dynamics remain unspoken, potentially harming the patient.
  • “I made my patient very ill by my refusal to [disclose]... I think that’s unethical and we should be talking more about that.” (56:05)

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Going “Home” and Belonging (48:41-54:40)

• As a coda, Mason Neely and John Totten reflect on revisiting literal and psychological “home,” drawing parallels to revisiting theoretical and professional roots in psychotherapy.
• The search for “our people” is ongoing, but true belonging may come from shared openness and creative searching rather than rigid identity or technical mastery.
• Radical openness is posed as the antidote to staid, technique-dominant training:
  • “We have to be radically open to ourselves and radically open to our patient... the idea of being non-judgmental is nonsense—we are judgmental people. So what do we do with that judgment?” (54:43)

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Notable Quotes & Key Moments

• On relational impact:

  “We’re not outsiders, we’re inside, we’re co-participants, we’re creating and recreating a patient’s story as it infects us and impacts us.”
  (07:35, Roy Barsness)

• On patient need:

  “They want to know they have an impact.”
  (15:24, John Totten paraphrased—Roy agrees)

• On the limits of expertise:

  “Quit being the expert... let that patient get inside of you as the supervisor.”
  (42:41, Roy Barsness)

• On mistakes and repair:

  “I’m allowed to get you wrong, but then you have to help me figure out why I thought of that.”
  (41:26, John Totten referencing Barsness’ teaching)

• On radical openness:

  “One of the problems we have in our trainings... is it’s so staid and technique dominant... I say this idea of being non-judgmental is nonsense... So what do we do with that judgment?”
  (54:43, Roy Barsness)

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Key Timestamps

• 05:00 Revisiting Stephen Mitchell and relational roots
• 07:04 Barsness on the emotional impact of a patient’s public compliments
• 09:13 Barsness introduces the “Essential I” and the centrality of therapist’s subjective presence
• 14:00-17:00 The paradigm shift: therapist affect, not just patient affect
• 20:00 Explaining “the third” (Jessica Benjamin) and co-created subjectivity
• 23:31-34:40 MAMAL supervision model explained
• 35:08-41:10 Clinical anecdote: working with stuckness and annoyance
• 43:12 Blurring the patient/supervisee distinction, the therapy-supervision parallel
• 54:43-56:30 Radical openness, the ethics of non-disclosure
• 56:30 Wrap up and mutual appreciation

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Summary Takeaways

• Relational therapy and supervision require radical openness, humility, and a willingness to be affected—to be “pierced” by the other.
• Supervision is not about expertise or objectivity, but messy, authentic, co-created meaning and presence.
• Therapists and supervisors must pay attention to their own affect—what the patient or supervisee stirs in them; metabolize these responses, and bring them genuinely into the dialogue.
• Mistakes, misreads, and ruptures are not failures but fertile ground for new understanding—if processed together.
• Returning to foundational theories isn't nostalgia, but a creative means to move forward and expand what's possible in therapy.

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This episode is essential listening for therapists, supervisors, and anyone interested in the relational depths and transformative potential of honest, emotionally alive psychotherapy.

Transcript

[Roy Barsness]

As I reflect upon why I said that, it's like there's something stuck here. All of a sudden I hear my saying something so crass, because I think it relates to stuckness and how annoying it is and how misperceived it might be.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Unknown Participant 1]

You're a government spook.

[Roy Barsness]

Yes.

[Unknown Participant 2]

I mean, no. I was before, but I'm not now. But that's all irrelevant, really. The idea of governments, nations, is public relations theory.

[Unknown Participant 1]

Don't. I don't want to hear about the theories in the beginning.

[Unknown Participant 2]

You know, it matters, of course. Did you. To hang on to, you know, a specific ideology to defend?

[Roy Barsness]

Right.

[Unknown Participant 2]

I mean, taming unchecked aggression, that was my personal favorite. Other guys like live free or die, but, you know, you get the idea. But that's all bullshit, and I know that now. That's all bullshit. You do it because you're trained to do it. You were encouraged to do it. And ultimately, you know, you get to like it.

[Unknown Participant 1]

You're a psychopath.

[Unknown Participant 2]

I mean, everybody's doing it. It's like the natural order. I mean, the States do it. Look, I bottomed out here. I've lost my taste for it completely. That's why I came back and I.

[John Totten]

Wanted to see you.

[Unknown Participant 2]

You know, I wanted to start over.

[Unknown Participant 1]

Oh, so I'm part of your romantic new beginning, right? How come you never learned that it was wrong, that there are certain things you do not do, you do not do in a civilized society?

[Unknown Participant 2]

What civilizations are we talking about?

[Unknown Participant 1]

Oh, shut up, man. Shut up.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

I'm John Totten and this is between us.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Hi, Roy.

[Roy Barsness]

Hi.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I do want to start off with a question that might be out of left field.

[Roy Barsness]

That might be what?

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Out of left field.

[Roy Barsness]

Okay, fine.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And I don't want you to talk about your client.

[Roy Barsness]

Oh.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

But I want you to talk about you.

[John Totten]

Uh huh.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Because I'm wondering if I can ask. You had a really unique experience, I think. I'm wondering if I can ask you what it was like for you to see me interview one of your patients. Yeah, what about the compliments? He's up there talking about how powerful his experience in this room was.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

Well, here, let's do this. Why don't you ask and see what happens to my mind? And you can always throw it away.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Okay.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

As we traverse some of our most expansive topics we've ever discussed, what makes the person into a person, how the unconscious works, the possibility that everything on the outside of us is on the inside, and that there is no border, I find that I am being pulled in two directions, not ideologically, but to move my own practice into the future, I need to revisit some of my roots. In many of my conversations this season, the name Stephen Mitchell is consistently brought up. Stephen Mitchell was an influential psychoanalyst in the 80s and 90s who, along with Jay Greenberg, wrote Object Relations in psychoanalytic theory in 1983, thus kicking off a movement in the field that would organize a psychoanalytic model of treatment around relationships instead of biological drives. His thinking wasn't only influenced by Freudian analysis and British object relations, but it also brought in the interpersonal schools of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, along with the self psychology of Heinz Kohut and many other influential theorists. Many of our guests throughout this show's history are not only descendant from, but even collaborative in the movement's beginnings, and it's my strongest theoretical allegiance. But in these times, when we seem as a culture, more settled on boundaries and black and white narratives, on simple answers, and in a field where hardliners seemed to be backlashing at the expansive view presented by relational theory, I felt like revisiting Mitchell's book Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis came off my bookshelf. How is it that going back in time to revisit old theories can also be a part of my progress? In so much of my own theory developed in front of you on this show, you hear me pathologize the need to make something that was once not so great great again. We recently discussed the melancholic position of refusing to let go of the past. Well, instead of going back in the past to live there, I'm interested in revisiting the past to help me move forward. Our guest today, in his new book, cites Mitchell on regression writing. Stephen Mitchell, in Hope and Dread, challenges us to think of regression beyond a return to more primitive states. He suggests that to consider the regressed self as the core of the self is too simplistic. The self is far more complicated than that. Is it only the regressed, underdeveloped self that will get at the heart of the matter with our patients? Or does it also involve their tenacity, recognizing what they have overcome? Mitchell asks us to consider regression as constructive disintegration, where the contours of the self become less guarded, where regression is not a return as much as it is a reclaiming of lost potentials, not a retreat but an expansion. We're hoping to build something expansive after our last episode with Jay Baker, a patient of therapy who discussed his treatment with his therapist, Roy Barsness, a previous guest on this show while Roy was in the audience. Nonetheless, I also wanted to revisit with Roy. Roy was the first professor of mine in graduate school who taught me about the work of Mitchell and his colleagues. Roy also has a new book out published by Rutledge, called Psychodynamic Supervision Theory and Practices In a new key, since he was last on our show, he has begun working with the Contemporary Psychodynamic Institute. So it was a good time for us to have our first return of a featured guest for the first time since seeing him in our audience last fall. This spring, I went to his office and I talked to Roy Barsness.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

What was it like for you to watch me talk to one of your patients up there? Especially while he's paying you all these compliments and talking about in a room full of people how powerful his experience with you was?

[Roy Barsness]

Yes, it was very emotional because I think as relational therapists, as therapists in general, we get very engaged with our patient's story and our patients lives. And I feel very deeply about him and from what he went through and from what he and I have experienced together in the process of his history. And one of the things that I've written in my first book and now in the second one is how important it is that we allow the patient to penetrate our own soul, our own heart, our own emotional life. And so that experience was very emotional. My heart was tugged by him reporting out me, reporting out us. And I would say I probably wanted to be by his side and participating with, and not being a listener, but being a participant with them and sorting it all out together. I think that tells you a little bit about what I'm about and what I believe relational psychoanalysis to be is that we're not outsiders, we're inside, we're co participants, we're creating and recreating a patient's story as it infects us and impacts us. And he certainly impacted me. And the only way I could be of any help to him is if I let that infection live out in our relationship together. So it was a very emotional time to be with him in that way.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I saw you in the back and it was emotional up front as well. And you know, there were. I mean, it was powerful. You got a standing ovation.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

After sharing his story.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

It's interesting. I also chose to be in the back because I didn't want to be in his way.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Of course.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I think it's a good segue to talk about this new project and this new book of yours. Because I'll be honest, when I go into a book about supervision, I maybe am expecting it to be a little dry and a little boring, to be honest. I say that because it wasn't. And you know, maybe the title should have given me a hint because the title's musical. Right. Like Supervision in a New Key is something I understand immediately. As a musician, I got more of you than I was expecting, although I should have expected.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I feel like I was getting to know you again through reading it.

[Roy Barsness]

Mm.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Which is meta.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Because it very much relates to your model of supervision.

[John Totten]

Yes.

[Roy Barsness]

And therapy how. Yeah, well, then that's the other thing.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I was going to say it's about supervision, but it's about therapy. But it's about relationship and it's kind of about life, right?

[John Totten]

Yes. Yes.

[Roy Barsness]

The title might be too limiting. I'm actually very pleased with this book because I do believe that it outlines for anyone how to practice from a relational perspective and that there is a particular model that I've developed over the years for supervision. But that model is equally applied to how we practice as clinicians. And so I really am encouraging non supervisors to pick up the book and read it and if they do supervise or not. Yeah, I really am pleased with how it turned out. The first piece is on chapter four. I talk about the Essential I. And you know, one of the things that has come out in research, the 30 year research that APA did for what is the primary agent of change in psychotherapy? And it's the relationship between the patient and the therapist. I'd say if that is the case, why the hell are our training programs having a primary focus on the development of the therapist? When I began the new institute that I founded, I gathered former teaching assistants of mine and did an intensive training to develop our supervision program. And one of the things that I've always noticed in supervision is the absence of the therapist's presence. We've been taught to stay outside of the patient story instead of being embedded in it. The reason the chapter got called the Essential I. The more I worked with my trainers to become trainers in the program, I kept saying, where are you? Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? When they started picking it up like they were not there, they began to say, where's your fucking essential eye? And so that became the title of the book. And there's two really important things. How this model came into being is I was doing supervision, and typical supervision is somebody will bring a case. And the idea is that the supervisor is the expert, and they're going to help that supervisee understand their patient better. And from their level of knowledge, they will have the supervisee formulate present and then offer their opinion. Well, I always say this, first of all about patients. The patient knows themselves best. They just don't know that they know it. So they hire us to help them know what they already know. I say the same thing about supervision. I don't know that patient at all. I have no relationship with that patient. I have no right to actually supervise that patient. And so I say the supervisee knows their patient best. They just don't know what they know. And so I want to help them find out what they already know, but are maybe defending against it. And so one of the things that happened is I would be doing traditional supervision. And then one day it dawned on me, why don't I ask this supervisee, when you're sitting with this patient, what are you feeling? And oh my God, all sorts of new things emerged. They either had feelings of hatred or boredom or eroticism or all sorts of emotions. And I said, oh, my God, that's a whole new paradigm. And the patient has a right to know that. And the supervisee would go, there's no way in hell I'm going to say anything about these affective states of mind to the patient. And my argument was, but wait a minute. You never had those feelings until you sat with that patient. You need to pay attention to your body, to your emotion, to these affective states elicited by the patient, because it's trying to tell you something. The patient is saying, I'm. I'm locating you somewhere in such a way that you will be able to know me. And so our emotionally embodied affective states is what is key to this model. In fact, I want to tell you, I have a friend who. She's a character. And I'll read out of here. I just love this story about her. She's a character. And she was seeing this therapist. She was convinced that her therapist hated her. She says, I know this woman doesn't like me. She'd go there and. And she'd say, you know, I know you don't like me. And the therapist said, oh, no, everything's cool. I like you. And she sensed that the therapist was actually feigning kindness and being a good, unconditional, positive regard therapist. But as the emotional. As the emotional tensions heightened, I write, finally, in desperation, my friend said to the therapist, you know, there are two people in this room, and you're not one of them. She then terminated her work with her and knowing my friend as I do, she would be quite the challenge. But in reporting her experience, she said there was no there there. Patients need to know we can be pierced, that we can feel, react and engage in the multiple and complex affective states, including the negative, frightful states that are aroused. And to be authentically and honestly talk about these states that are aroused in us. Too much therapy is conducted in the constant presence of each other's absence.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Can I say it the way I'm hearing it and see if I'm understanding it clearly?

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

They want to know they have an impact.

[Roy Barsness]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And so it would be maddening not to feel an impact on your therapist.

[Roy Barsness]

Absolutely. I have an essay in this book on empathy versus authenticity and I think Kohut's idea of empathy has been lost. I'm working with empathy as the way we think about it now, which is kind of a fake, a pseudo kindness, and that we'll always agree and say things nicely and sort them all out so the patient can receive it, etc. No, patients want from us a real response and to be able to work with us even when we make mistakes, even if we say it wrong, but if we're willing to stay in the fray, that's when the work gets alive.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Something you said earlier brought up a thought in me as someone who supervises because I have a reflection on why it might feel like I need to provide this wisdom from on high. Like a generous interpretation to myself is that the internalized capitalism, the unconscious need to provide something for the fee. Because I've had supervision sessions where it felt like we were in a zone and we were just riffing off of each other and coming up with this collaborative well of insight. And I've left those sessions feeling, damn, that was. We were in the zone together. But like I want, I'm self conscious about the fact that maybe they feel like they were giving me just as much as I was giving them.

[Roy Barsness]

Well, and so it should be. I agree. So. Because actually one of the things I. I have, I think there's seven and I can go through them if you want, but I will actually. But yeah, the. One of the fundamental differences in this model is that the supervisor is embedded in the process. They are not an objective listener. And as a result of that, it gets, like you just described, it gets really messy. So last week I was in a large group doing supervision. The case being presented was paralleling my own personal life. And wouldn't you know, it I got lost in that and became rather counter transference dominance, basically sort of dominating and pushing the case in sort of a direction of me trying to work something out in my own life.

[John Totten]

Right, right.

[Roy Barsness]

And one of my colleagues, one of the trainers actually caught it and said, wait a minute, Roy. When we had a break, she your power there seems like power dynamics going on here. And I go, damn it, you're right. I'm trying to work something out here that is parallel to the patient, to the story being told. And just this morning in supervision, we had another totally total enactment where the supervisor was totally embedded in the process, such that she was acting like the patient's history, like she was literally becoming the mother and the father as a supervisor with the person presenting. When you're no longer trying to stay outside the realm, you get into the zone that you just talked about and it's messier. But what happens then when we catch ourselves? And this is the beauty, I think, of psychotherapy, even using Benjamin's third. I think the third is some place where we're caught in some sort of muck and all of a sudden we go, wait a minute, what the hell? That's where the transformative moment is, where someone goes, oh, now I get it, now I feel it. And that's the beauty of being an embedded participant supervisor, in contrast to pretending you're the objective one.

[John Totten]

Right? Yeah.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

What does Roy mean when he talks about the third? It's an important idea for us to discuss, as later this season I'll sit down with Jessica Benjamin, whose ideas we've discussed quite a bit in the last two seasons and whose work is closely associated with the concept in his book Roy. When two separate subjects interact, the thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations co created between the two become a subject within itself. Two separate subjectivities produce a third entity beyond their own individual subjectivities. The third entity subject is akin to Buber's notion of the in between contemporary psychoanalysis, use of field theory and Winnicott's conceptions of potential space. This in between space generated by two subjects is the space of psychic energy and of therapeutic process. For Benjamin III is an effort to create a psychic space within which to think together about ways to in which the patient and analyst are similar and different. She refers to the rhythmic third as merged in sync, oneness. The differentiating third refers to twoness or the capacity to hold the other in their uniqueness, the capacity to hold the tension of differentness. It is the ability to hold a position from more than one perspective and then he quotes Jessica Benjamin. The third is a position constituted through holding the tension of recognition between difference and sameness, taking the other to be a separate but equivalent center of initiative and consciousness, with whom nonetheless feelings and intentions can be shared.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Her work factors heavily into your intersubjective theory about supervision. And what we're talking about essentially is.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

The breakdown of this binary.

[Roy Barsness]

Yes, absolutely.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Almost like there's a doer of supervision and a done to supervision.

[Roy Barsness]

Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

That a more intersubjective view of it is that it is a flow of transference, countertransference, not, you know, a back and forth of individual components.

[Roy Barsness]

That's right. And what it takes, we have to really discipline ourselves to actually do towards humility and towards an openness, a radical openness to having feedback. So this morning actually the idea isn't about to be evaluated. So I encourage myself and my, my trainers to say, how did you experience me today in our consultation? And like one person said, well, you seem really distracted, but I think you were because of this. And I said, wait a minute, why did you have to do the excuse? What did you feel about the distraction?

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

They were protecting you.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And then we got into more of the row, if you will. But the idea wasn't to evaluate that that was wrong or right. It's like, what now does this have to do with the case? And it really enriches then because it fully had to do with the case because we get emotionally caught up in it. And so the supervisor has to be willing to go not to receive feedback for evaluation, but to feedback about how did I get caught up in this case, how is this case impacting me and how am I now presenting that into the supervisory system?

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Let's talk about the components of this theory. They have an acronym. And when I think of, again, similar to how I set you up, when I think of an acronym, I think boring. And then when I get into what the acronym is actually standing for, it's quite almost like mystical. As a creative person, I found really helpful. Talk to me about the five points of your supervision.

[Roy Barsness]

Yeah, Project Love to do that. Here's what's new in a new key. When I supervise someone, the patient is not the focus. I don't supervise the patient, I do not know this patient. The second thing, the person presenting is not the focus. In other words, I'm not going to go after. When we're in group supervision, the person presenting is actually presenting a muse that everyone takes that patient on as though it's their own. And so, you know, how easy it is for us all to be the expert of somebody else's profession or their patient. And that's disallowed. Like, how did this patient get inside of you? How did they penetrate your affective states? How do you imagine you'd metabolize that and articulate that and that sort of thing? And then the third thing is, as I said a moment ago, the supervisor is fully embedded. And that's a very unusual. That's not how we think of supervision. That supervisor is generally seen as the objective outside there. Another big thing I don't think we paid enough attention to. We talk about affect, talk about affect in psychoanalysis and in many therapies, but we often talk about the affect of the patient. In this model and in my work, it's always the affect of the therapist that is first and foremost. And I was talking with someone the other day who's interested in entering the program. He's been in different models, and I don't know a lot about emotionally focused therapy, but he had gone through that training and he said, you know, what's important is that we're trying to locate the emotion in the patient. And I said, if you were to be supervised by me or come through this program, I'm more interested in the emotion that gets elicited in you by your patient. And he said, wow, that's a whole new. Never thought about that. That's all new to me. And two things, the affect that I'm feeling, I didn't feel until I sat with you. So I'm saying that that's the patient trying to locate me. And yeah, and the second thing is, we are thinkers. We let our head dominate us. We always feel before we think, think always. It always comes first. And so I was really heavily influenced years ago by Erwin Singer and his word viscera. And for some reason, when I read that word, it just hit me, like in the gut, like it's intended to. And he said, we must follow our viscera when we're with our patients. And dammit, if we would pay attention to our intuition and to the affectation state that we get hit in the gut with, we're going to be a lot more useful to our patient. And then of course, our mind is always going to want to think about it. But I always, always teach as well that when you get thinking and lose your affect, then you become a formulator, not a metabolizer, and you are also lost your patient. Of course we're going to talk, of course we're going to think. But we have to think through our gut, not through our head. The next one is metabolization instead of formation. That metabolization is the chemical reaction. So we're staying in our body as we're walking through. How do we imagine this patient? And one of the things, you know, in my core Competency book, core competencies are a really nice way to sort of think about. So what, what was it like for this child to even be thought of? What was it like for them to have been in utero? What was going on in that patient's history, that life, that mother? And then how did that develop over time? And what was it like for that early relational world to form and inform this patient today? And all the way up till how they're in my office today and all the things that have fallen apart and how now it's being recreated with me and I'm co creating it with, with them. And how is it manifesting and how are we going to talk about it? Is that whole concept of metabolization that I'm now a part of that chemistry, if you will, not just thinking of it academically, philosophically or analytically even. And one of the things about this piece that I've said to people, because every therapeutic relationship is unique, it's idiosyncratic, how you might find, formulate or metabolize is going to be different than anybody else, same as me. So one person said to me, says, but I always think in edible terms. I go, fine. But then you have to ask yourself, how is it manifesting itself here? How is it feeling? How are you experiencing it and how is it co creating itself here? And how are you going to talk about it? And then the last thing that I think is fairly new and I have a essay in this book on it, I don't even know if relational psychoanalysis has actually moved into complex dialogues. I think we're still interpreters. When I read case studies from relational analysts and all the way back, we're still kind of telling, we're still talking to. And so I've written an essay, it's called From Interpretation into Complex Dialogue. And then also in my first book we talked about courageous speech discipline, spontaneity. And I do believe that psychotherapy is a bland, often discussion. And what does it really mean to show up authentically, genuinely and open to debate, to working out the collisions, the collusions? My own humility, my own participation, my own participation in the enactment. And how do I create a language that is not distant, but very present in the here and now, so those are the things that are. Are, I think, very new to a supervision idea.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And that. That's the framework for talking about muse.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

So Mamal. And I hate acronyms myself. I'm going, oh my God, here we go. I can't do this. I can't do it. But I've gotten so used to it.

[Mason Neely]

I now like it.

[Roy Barsness]

Sure. So, but the first one is muse. So, like I said, is that when somebody is presenting a case, we're not paying attention to the patient as a case to be supervised, but to everybody that's in that room listening to that case. That case simply becomes the muse for everybody.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

About the concept of treating the case as a museum. Roy writes in his new book, the muse in Literature and Film is the main character and source of inspiration and sets the stage for the story. The protagonist moves the story forward, usually in a struggle, either against someone or something, or in response to an existential conflict within themselves. As the reader of the novel or viewers of the film get into the story and play with it, they have reactions, thoughts and feelings for and against the primary actor or muse. Though our traditional supervision models tend to think that a supervisor may know best what to do with a patient, the truth is the best a supervisor can do is enlarge the therapist's mind about their patient. Therefore, the supervisor and the group members offer their experience of how the patient's mind narrative, as told by the therapist, infects them by having creative collaborators who allow themselves to participate and imagine the presenter's patient as though it were their own and do not tell the therapist what to do or assume their knowledge of the patient exceeds that of the presenter. This non authoritarian, radically open and curious approach offers the therapist multiple possibilities in working with the patient.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

It feels very related to Buber in that, and I know that he's influential.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

On this book and on you.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

But when I think about what the thou is of a group project. Yes, it's the joined purpose.

[Roy Barsness]

There you go. That's really good. A lot of supervision. The patient becomes an it. Right, Right. I should have included that in the book. I will on its reprint. How does that sound? We want to turn that patient into a thou. Into how when the person is presenting, the other listeners are going so that they're patient. And how am I as I'm hearing this story? What kind of affective states are getting stirred in me? And then what happens when we begin to talk about it as a group? What the person who presented gets is not something about the patient or even about what they did or didn't do, what they get is multiple minds about their patient.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Roy Barsness]

A stands for affect. So what is the affective states that are getting stirred? And so always the first question is, so what does this patient stir in you? What's going on? M is metabolization. So again, as these affective states are being stirred in you, what kinds of thoughts are happening? And this is where you know from this standpoint, a psycholytic mind comes into place. And a relational psychoanalytic mind, but also just psychoanalysis in general. It's the early object relations, developmental stages, early peer groups, families, traumas, arrest, developmental arrests, all those kinds of things. What formed this person?

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

The next one is a articulation. Trying to bring our mind and our affects into the therapeutic moment. Really hard. It's so fascinating. I was just presenting the seminar last weekend and so I was doing this experiential supervision model. And so it's again interesting to watch people have really strong affective experiences that come up when they hear the case. And then I say, well, how about you form your articulation? How might you bring this to the patient? Oh my God, everything turns so nice and sand sweet and all that sort of thing. I go, I wouldn't be able to recognize what you just told me you were feeling and thinking about this patient and what you just said. Yeah, the practice of articulation is just uncanny. How crazy difficult it is. And so that's another very important part of trying to practice. Not the right words or anything like that, but can you really find yourself bringing yourself into a genuine kind of meeting with your patient?

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And then the L stands for learning. So what have we learned today? Yeah, what are the theoretical ideas or what have you learned about yourself? Or what have you learned about your patients? So that's what the MAMAL stands for.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Can I float like a case out there and see how it might apply to some of these ideas?

[Roy Barsness]

We'll see what happens.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I mean, really, this patient is an amalgamation of several of my patients. You know, as I was reading your book, I was thinking. And this also applies to another thinker who is influential for you and me as well, and our mutual friend Cara Moroda, and about affect in particular. And I was really thinking about the.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Patients who annoy us. I told Roy about a patient who annoyed me, but not from being unlikable. He annoyed me in that I liked him and he didn't like himself.

[John Totten]

Okay. Yep.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

His self loathing comments became a tick like response to me. If something good happened, he Would immediately contradict it. And if there was any evidence that. That people in his life liked him, and there was plenty, he would disqualify all the evidence. So here was a very likable person.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

With a very unlikable trait.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

And that trait is that he continually disqualified positive information about himself. And I didn't really know what to do about that. The patient had been dating this woman, and things were going remarkably well. He found it hard to believe, but she seemed to really like him. And then there was one date where she suddenly became less talkative and a bit moody, and then eventually asked if she could go home early. There were assurances that they would get back together soon and surely they did continue dating. But he found the one instance to be evidence that she was maybe disingenuous and that she actually didn't like him at all.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

This is very out of character, Roy. But I said she had to take a shit. And he was shocked, but it was like. It was coming out of my, like, dude, just think about it outside of this tick or this, you know, pattern. He was like, what do you mean? I was like, it seems like she had to take a shit and she went home. And he was like, why would you say that? And I was like, why would you say that she didn't like you and then suddenly got excited about you in your absence? And he said, because all the signs were there. And I said, all the signs were.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

There that she had to take a shit.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And suddenly we're in this, like, playful debate, and I'm saying these very crass things that I wouldn't normally say, but I feel less annoyed with him than I had before.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

The first thing is when. When I hear you say that, it's like, what happened to you? I would say, there is you. You quit cutting yourself off. And so I would look at that as your annoyance with him. He's cutting something off in himself. And. And what you. So I would say in metabolizing is this came out of you. Came out of you, if you will. Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Good. Good connection.

[Roy Barsness]

And because something was stuck.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

It needed a laxative. Something needed to. To break through.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And that would be the next part of work for me is like, as I reflect upon why I said that, it's like, there's something stuck here. And all of a sudden I hear my saying something so crass because I think it relates to stuckness and this and how much annoying it is and how misperceived it might be.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Roy Barsness]

And how. What's the word? Stuff.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And he.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

And he's stuck too, right?

[Roy Barsness]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

We're both.

[Roy Barsness]

You both got stuck and you needed to go to the bathroom, right? Yeah. And. And so that's really. And that's. That's exactly what I'm talking about. And. And I think what I'm also adding to that is. And how do the two of us then reflect upon that? Like, why did that come out, if you will, in that way? And I'm thinking of a patient. When you brought that up, I had a patient come to my mind right.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Away where Roy told me about an example of his own annoyance in treatment. He told me about a patient who had a nervous laugh throughout a whole.

[Roy Barsness]

Session, session after session. And I thought, how do I talk about this? How do I talk about this annoyance and how in the way it is. Then one day it came to me, I said, you know, I need to talk with you about something. And that is, there is this giggle that is always present in our sessions. Something's going on here.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

The patient informed Roy of a recent incident. After a date, there was a moment of intimacy. And after the moment of intimacy, the patient had started to nervously laugh.

[Roy Barsness]

Whenever I get close to intimacy, whenever I get close to you, I get so nervous and so anxious, I gotta giggle it away. So we were able to see by my paying attention to my affective experience and staying with it and finding some confidence, like you did, to say, I gotta say something about this because it's in the space between us, right? And we've got to find out if it has any meaning. The other piece, I could have been way off. Who knows? It doesn't really matter. What matters is there's something that has to be talked about about. And so often in therapy we put up with right rather than let the patient talk with us about it.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Even if it's off or wrong, like talking about it and you know, yeah, it's not a mistake.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

This point is important. I was in fact wrong about my patient's new girlfriend. I know because he later informed me he knew I was wrong because they went out one night and they talked about the night in question.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I was happy to hear it.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

I knew that my theory might be wrong, but that the important part was that we were talking about it outside this script where all positive feedbacks had to be disqualified in favor of negative messages about himself.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I believe that because we talked about.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

It in such a weird and off script way, he was able to do something healthy himself off script.

[Roy Barsness]

Years ago. Feiner wrote an article that I've always loved. Reads and misreads.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

That's what therapy is. I get a read of you, but it's only sort of a read. And the only way I can get a good read is if we read it together.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I use something that you taught me. I say I'm allowed to get you wrong, but then you have to help me figure out why I thought of that.

[John Totten]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

And that seems to work.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

Yes. We employ the patient to help us understand our impressions. I remember being in supervision with an amazing man who had a brilliant poetic mind who could give interpretations that would make you weep. But I always felt like something's missing. And what I realized what was missing was him and that the patient in him didn't have a relationship. And what he brought was the truth, if you will. All I know is I have an approximation to the truth of a patient and it comes from the patient and their impact on me. And now we need to talk about it together to find out something about it.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

It's a really good book, Roy.

[Roy Barsness]

Thank you.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

I did not think I needed to.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Think about my supervision skills until I read it. Sometimes there's ideas that are good and that they remind you of something you used to know that you need to be reminded of. And then sometimes there's good ideas as in there. It's new. You know, this book is full of both.

[Roy Barsness]

Here's what I hope you would take away as a supervisor. Quit being the expert.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And let when your patient, or when your supervisee presents the case, let that patient get inside of you as the supervisor.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And I noticed you keep slipping because it is a therapy skill as well. It's hard not to call the supervisee the patient. But that's kind of a feature and not a bug, right?

[John Totten]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

This is also how we should be practicing.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

In fact, that's a good point too. Like when a patient comes to see me, to put it into that thou idea is that. That we muse about at them, they become amused for us and for themselves. About. Let's think about this.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

How is it affecting you? And how am I affecting you? What's it like to be in my presence?

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

In his book Psychodynamic Supervision Theory and Practices in a new key, in a chapter on the essential I, Roy tells a story of trainees in his certificate program. He found when he was training them that they would play down their own experience of their patients.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

He says this was particularly true if.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

They were aggressively or erotically Aroused in those highly affective moments, the therapist would dissociate and defer the experience to a countertransference problem rather than consider. Consider the possibility that the experience they may be having is a possible means of the patient trying to make contact. I am sure this has to do with the long tradition we have in the field of negating countertransference experiences. Rather than using countertransference as a portal or a possible signal that our felt experiences are unique to this particular relationship, he says, I brought to their attention the unfortunate erasure of the therapist's felt experiences as a means of understanding the other. I drew their attention to Christopher Bolas's statement that in order to find the patient, we must look for them within ourselves, inferring that we must feel the patient within our own bodies. I told Roy that the Christopher Bolas quote in that passage found its way into another article I was reading by our guest in our next episode, Tony Bass. He himself a gifted finder of himself and his patients.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

That's shaping up to be a theme.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

For us.

[Roy Barsness]

I love Bass's article who's Unconscious Is it Anyway? It's a very powerful article.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And one time when he and I were. We co presented at APA with Karen Morota and we were going to talk on the phone and all of a sudden we were just on the phone, the it didn't even ring and we both go, that's.

[John Totten]

Oh.

[Roy Barsness]

And so I said, well, whose unconscious is this anyway? So. Yeah, no, his first.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

And I think that's again about psychotherapy and supervision, is that we are working with two minds. This is what two person psychology is all about. Not just one mind evaluating the other. And this idea that we know the mind of another is kind of dangerous, frankly. But when we put two minds together to sort something out, one who is very well trained, obviously, and we think as psychologists who in a different way than anybody else. So that's why we do what we do. But it takes one mind to influence another.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And I like to say to my patients, you have a different training than I do and I have a different training than you do. It's true about our supervisees as well. I mean, oftentimes ends up being one who's older and wiser, but one who's younger and more passionate. My supervisees will take on things that I don't feel like I have the energy for and, and sometimes they make me jealous, you know, sometimes I would say, you know, I should try that again. You know, you're doing things you're bringing something different to the table than I am.

[John Totten]

Yeah, yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

In this book, I think I've done a really nice job on pointing out my view of self disclosure and different types of self disclosure. I think there's therapists initiated self disclosure, patient initiated self disclosure, and public self disclosure. And I have to say for myself, personal self disclosure, I don't know if just my life is so boring or whatever, but my patients don't really seem that interested in my personal self disclosure. And I've never seen it useful. And I think the reason is even socially when, if somebody discloses something personally, it's like, yeah, but it's still not me. This is still my story. And then with patient initiated, generally our patients don't ask things that can't be answered frankly. And if they. If we are uncomfortable, we talk about it. It's not. Not a big deal. And then we just have to deal, of course, with. Now with all the ways that people have access to us, we have to talk about it.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Roy Barsness]

So I've tried to distinguish all of those because we talk about things. That's it. And we try not to overload our patients with our own disclosures. I just don't think they're necessary or useful. Yeah, I'll probably use one tomorrow now.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

That I said that. But usually there's always an exception to these rules.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Roy Barsness]

But usually. And I do believe that the relational model is a relationally disclosing model. So my whole work is about relational disclosure, not self disclosure. Right.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

I'm checking in with my co producer, Mason Neely, to talk about revisiting our roots, getting back to basics, and the expansive possibilities when we check for lost potential.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Hey, Mason.

[Mason Neely]

Hey, John.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Let's talk about Roy.

[Mason Neely]

Let's. My muse for the week.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

I think for me, what was really exciting about that concept is it gave voice to the way that I supervise and the way I work with students, but also the way I tend to work with clients. So as a supervisor, I dispatch with a lot of formality in terms of I just try and be me. I don't try and adopt the supervisory mass, but I'm trying to make as alive an encounter as possible. And he gave voice to something that I think I was like, oh, shit. That's what I'm trying to do. But he said it much more eloquently. This idea that we cannot know the truth of our supervisees or our students clients. How the fuck could we? How can they know the truth of their clients?

[John Totten]

Right.

[Mason Neely]

What they can know is Just the encounter and the experience and their capacity to be present and available and curious and engaged in that process. What the muse is to me is to be part of that acting, folding process. Are we open to the outside becoming inside? Are there things that happen? Are the feelings or sensations or things that are exciting? There's something about the more expansive this gets to me, the more exciting it becomes and the more possibilities they are. When it's more incorporating of difference again, whether we're delimiting what is the self, what is the unconscious, what are its limits, and also what are the limits to what one person can understand and recognize in another. I think that's denying the complexity of people and the possibility of them engaging with one another.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Did you want to tell me about going home?

[Mason Neely]

Going home, I mean, it is. And this is where I. I had a little Michel Foucault or little friend spin on my shoulder. Both of us in our lives have taken pretty clear steps to move geographically, to sort of distinguish ourselves in terms of how we think about the world. Kind of live different lives at different times. You know, certainly speaking for myself, and I know this is true of you as well, like having to kind of reinvent myself a number of times, which I've absolutely enjoyed. But there is a part of me that feels kind of liberated, not being from anywhere. And again, what great privilege that I get to say, oh, I. I just get to blend in all the time. I'm a 6 foot 2, university educated, white, English speaking, straight, right, married, homeowning man. Like, let's not get it twisted. I. I have the great benefit of.

[John Totten]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mason Neely]

It is because of that I get to go.

[Roy Barsness]

I.

[Mason Neely]

No one owns me. Which is like, all right, you're. Yes, let's not get it twisted. Of course I have not been. I am like everyone else. I am living under all sorts of ideologies. You know, they have been folded into me for better or for worse. And some I'm conscious of and some I'm not. But I feel a great sense of liberation, of kind of not having a team, you know?

[John Totten]

Yeah, right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Me too.

[Mason Neely]

Being someone who is from the American south, but like had nothing to do with that culture. I do think there's something that for me, and it was. You ask about me going home. I found. Do I want to say jarring? Sure, maybe a bit jarring. I had not been there in a long time.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Your kid's first time, right?

[Mason Neely]

I think I'll be. When she was, when she was a baby. She has no real memory of It. And she kept coming up and going, is that woman Australian? And I would go, I know she has a southern accent.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

I just don't know that much about Yalls people.

[Mason Neely]

There was a lot of that.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

There was a lot of that.

[Roy Barsness]

Like, so where is Wales? Where is that? Where y' all live?

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Do y' all people eat oatmeal?

[Mason Neely]

It was bordering on that. And that was just people being sweet and trying to engage.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

But it definitely was to go back and to be like. It wasn't so much that I felt other returning. It was more like, oh, I was never really a part of this. Particularly the sort of, like, cultural epicenter where you and I would have grown up. Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Stroke, Georgia. This very remarkable intersection of kind of elite Calvinist Christianity and elite socioeconomic conditions, like incredible wealth. But also people practicing a faith which prizes the fact that they are elect, that they are special. And there is something irrevocable about their specialness, that they have been touched forever. People were incredibly generous. But I realized, oh, man, I've never fit in here. I was always an interloper, and I'm okay with that. I don't have any bitterness about that.

[John Totten]

Right.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

It just brings me back to who are our people? And, you know, in the course of this season, we take a little bit of a home turn to talk more about relational theory. Like people like Roy and Tony. It is such a comforting feeling of, like, these are the people who understand the human mind and human relationships the way I understand them.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Mason Neely]

How do you know that they see it the way you see it?

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

It's a search.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Like a search for understanding of how relationships work and how the human mind works.

[Mason Neely]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

And maybe like a looseness to that search.

[Mason Neely]

We are so hung up on trying to define and delineate difference that we forget what's far more important. I think in relationship is not so much different, but directionality. Like, can we just sort of be searching either in the same way towards one another? Can we be trying to figure out ourselves in trying to figure out you and trying to figure out me? Can we be trying to figure out the world together?

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Here, here.

[Roy Barsness]

Radical openness. One of the problems that we have in our trainings, which I think is a big problem in psychotherapy therapy, is it's so staid and technique dominant. And so we. But we do talk. You have to be radically open to your patient. And I say you. We have to be radically open to ourselves and radically open to our patient often compromises our honesty and our authenticity. I say this Idea of being non judgmental is nonsense, that we are judgmental people. So what do we do with that judgment? And how are we radically open to how this patient is affecting us? And what do I do about my countertransference issue? All those kinds of things. And so I write an essay on radical openness as well. And we also talk about affect regulation. And I'm thinking, I don't think I've ever been regulated, but what does it mean to be integrated? And I think our work is about that. The nice thing about this book too, is I give several addendums about how to kind of do this model. I guess I also introduce an idea that I don't think has been talked about enough, and that is the ethics of non disclosure. I think that it's a dilemma that therapists are holding way too much back and that that's dangerous, frankly.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Yeah, I've had it bite me.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

Well, as you. As you interviewed me with my core competency book, again, that whole thing was I made. Made my patient very ill by my refusal to. And even as I talked about my friend, that therapist was making her ill because my friend knew something about her therapist that the therapist refused to recognize. I think that's unethical and we should be talking more about that.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Roy, thank you so much.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

Hey, you're our first repeat.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

Yes.

[Roy Barsness]

Well, thank you.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

That's an honor.

[Roy Barsness]

Well, you've been. I love you, John. And you've been very honoring to me in my work ever since we met.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

So I love you too. You're a huge influence on me.

[John Totten]

Yeah. And.

[Interviewer (John Totten)]

I love that we get to be colleagues.

[Roy Barsness]

Yeah, I do, too.

[John Totten]

Yeah.

[Roy Barsness]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Narrator/Producer (John Totten)]

This has been between us. Our thanks to our guest today, Roy Barsness. Between Us is produced by myself, John Totten, and Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl. Find Between Us wherever you find podcasts and subscribe. And if you like the show, leave a review. And until next time, take care.