The Past in the Room

On Transference, Countertransference, and Meeting Something New

Have you ever noticed yourself reacting to someone with an intensity that did not quite match the situation? A boss who triggered something that felt too large for what they actually did. A partner whose tone of voice sent you somewhere old and familiar before you had time to think. A moment of being overlooked that landed with a weight far heavier than the moment seemed to warrant.

This is not a malfunction. It is the past doing what the past does ~ arriving in the present, looking for something it needed and did not get the first time.

Transference and countertransference are the clinical words for this. They are the subject of the fourth episode in Dr. David Puder’s therapeutic alliance series, and they are concepts I find myself returning to constantly ~ not just as a framework for understanding clients, but as a lens on my own reactions in the room.

What transference actually is

The older definition of transference was relatively simple: the feelings a client develops toward their therapist that originate in past relationships. A client whose father was critical begins to feel criticised by you. A client whose mother was emotionally unavailable becomes hyperaware of any moment your attention seems to drift.

The more current understanding is both simpler and more layered: transference is the whole of how a person experiences you ~ a mixture of who you actually are and who their history has prepared them to expect. It is not distortion exactly. It is the lens through which every new relationship gets filtered, shaped by every significant relationship that came before.

Puder puts it well: clients are simultaneously anticipating the past repeating and hoping ~ often unconsciously ~ that this new relationship will be different. They bring the wound and the longing for repair in the same moment. The therapist’s job is to understand both.

I see this most clearly as a window. When a client reacts strongly ~ when something I say lands harder than I intended, or when warmth comes toward me that feels larger than our short time together would explain ~ I try to receive it as information. Not about me, but about them. About where they have been hurt, and where they have been held well. Both tell you something important.

The moment of being ganged up on

In one session, a client felt ~ strongly felt ~ that I was taking someone else’s side. That I was ganging up on them. The intensity of their reaction was real and I stayed with it rather than immediately defending myself or correcting the record.

What I noticed in that moment was something personal. Their experience of not being seen, of being outnumbered, landed in me in a way that felt familiar. It reminded me of my own history of flying under the radar, of being in rooms where the attention went elsewhere. That recognition did not make the moment about me ~ but it helped me understand what they were carrying. Being unseen was not new to them. It had a history. And that history had just walked into the couples session.

That is what transference looks like in practice. Not a dramatic projection, but a moment of intensity that is pointing somewhere. The work is learning to follow where it points rather than reacting to its surface.

What I feel in the room ~ and what that tells me

Countertransference is the therapist’s side of this ~ the total emotional reaction the therapist has toward the client. Puder reframes it not as a problem to manage but as a diagnostic instrument. What you feel in the room is information about what the client is carrying.

One of the clearest examples from my own practice involves my genuine enthusiasm for somatic and emotional release work. I have experienced firsthand ~ on the mat, in my own therapy ~ what becomes possible when the body is given permission to complete what it started. That experience is real and it has shaped how I work.

But I have learned ~ and I am still learning ~ to notice when that enthusiasm becomes a pull in session. When I find myself hoping a client will go toward emotional release, I have to ask: whose need is this serving right now? Because some clients are what I would call emotionally amputated ~ they do not have easy access to their emotions. Pushing toward release with them is not therapeutic. It is my countertransference getting ahead of the relationship.

Naming it internally, setting it aside, and returning to where the client actually is ~ that is the work. The excitement about what is possible has to be held in service of what is true for this person, in this moment.

This is what Puder means when he says countertransference is a major therapeutic tool. Not because acting on it helps, but because noticing it does. Your reaction is always pointing somewhere. The question is whether you are curious enough to look.

When the old expectation meets something new

One of the most meaningful things that can happen in therapy is what gets called a corrective emotional experience ~ when a client expects one thing based on their history, and the therapist offers something genuinely different. Not a performance of difference. An actual one.

I had a client who wanted to feel tall ~ confident, present, taking up space ~ but had learned early that staying small was safer. (Shared with permission.) In childhood, making yourself smaller was not weakness. It was intelligent adaptation to an environment that did not have room for you to be large.

But that adaptation had followed him into adulthood, into situations where it was no longer necessary and was in fact limiting. The corrective experience did not come from insight alone ~ from understanding the pattern intellectually. It came from doing something different in the body.

We used a piece of string on the floor to mark a physical boundary around his chair. A circle that was his. And within that space, he practiced saying no to an imagined person outside it. Practiced using his voice to hold the line. Small experiments. But the body was learning something the mind already knew ~ that he had a right to take up space, that his boundaries could be spoken, that saying no did not have to cost him the relationship.

Shame came up in that work too, as it almost always does. I find that shame is rarely the final word on anything ~ it is usually protecting something underneath. In this case it was protecting the old adaptation, the one that kept him safe when he was young. Honoring that intelligence while gently questioning whether it still served him ~ that was the doorway.

What the therapist brings into the room

There is a version of transference that goes in the other direction ~ the therapist’s own unexamined patterns shaping what they see and hear. Puder gives a sobering example: a therapist who had experienced trauma of their own began leading a client toward a trauma narrative that was not actually there. The questions became leading. The framework became a filter that distorted rather than clarified.

This is not a story about bad therapists. It is a story about what happens when the therapist’s own material has not been looked at carefully enough. The more clearly we have examined our own wounds ~ our patterns, our defences, our histories ~ the more cleanly we can see the client’s. The less we project our own story onto theirs.

This is one reason I believe deeply that a therapist doing their own therapeutic work is not optional. Not as a credential or a box to check, but as an ongoing practice of keeping the lens clear. I continue to do that work. It shapes every session.

Presence as the offering

Looking back on some of my sessions ~ including one I have reflected on honestly in a previous post ~ I can see moments where I moved too quickly. Toward labeling, toward making sense of things, toward solutions. Missing the relational depth that was available if I had stayed longer.

What I understand now is that in those moments, a client is not primarily looking for the right answer. They are looking to feel seen, tracked, stayed with. The corrective experience is not always a string on the floor or a somatic experiment. Sometimes it is simply a therapist who does not flinch, does not fix, does not leave ~ who stays present with what is there, and lets that be enough.

Surrendering the urge to make sense of things in service of being present ~ that is something I am still learning. I expect I will be learning it for a long time.

If you recognise the pattern

If something here is familiar ~ the relationship that keeps repeating, the reaction that feels too large for the moment, the old smallness that shows up where you least expect it ~ that recognition is worth paying attention to. It is the past signalling that it has not yet been heard.

Therapy offers a space where those patterns can be seen clearly, held carefully, and met with something different. That is not a small thing.

If you’re curious about working together, the free discovery call is a good place to start. Book one here. I work with individuals and couples online across British Columbia.

Published May 2026  |  Updated July 2026

Cyrus Jagosh, RTCc (ACCT)  |  MPCC-P (CPCA) — Registered Therapeutic Counsellor (Candidate) at Cyrus Counselling, offering individual and couples therapy online across British Columbia. He draws on trauma-informed, somatic, and relational approaches.

This post is written for general informational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. If you are in crisis or need immediate support, please contact a crisis line or emergency services.

This is part of an ongoing series on what makes therapy work.