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Aggression is as important to the quality of one’s therapeutic work and career as love and empathy.

To know and integrate one’s own aggressive drives is to create the conditions for patients to do the same.

In the case of burnout, when good intentions do not inspire or sustain, aggression offers a powerful engine.

"Events of mutual aggression are unavoidable in the course of a life lived together, but, by the same token, the possibility of their clarification and resolution carries with it the possibility of further strengthening and deepening the relationship." (Kernberg, 2012, p. 288)

"Events of mutual aggression are unavoidable in the course of a life lived together, but, by the same token, the possibility of their clarification and resolution carries with it the possibility of further strengthening and deepening the relationship." (Kernberg, 2012, p. 288)

Aggression Isn't the Enemy in Therapy

There is a difference between “kind” and “nice.”

Therapists often resist their own aggression or insist on “niceness.” Yet doing so can actually impede patients’ awareness and expression of their own angry, dissatisfied feelings toward the therapist, which can thwart the integration of aggression into its healthy forms of realistic anger and assertiveness.

Instead, suppression of the therapist's aggression can drive a turn against the self, which some patients are apt to do in the form of shame and self-loathing as well as self-destructive behaviors. Thus, the illusion of a safe and constructive therapeutic relationship is preserved even as the harmful patterns for the patient are reinforced.

Stigmatizing therapist aggression insidiously fuels patients’ shame and defensiveness around their own feelings and impulses, making them harder to access and metabolize as part of themselves and their inner world. When any of us cannot access fundamental and emotion-laden parts of........

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