How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 147

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view!
Counterprojective Statements
Counterprojective statements are arguably a special kind of counterassumptive statements. They aim to “lightly
undercut” a specific sort of false assumption, one that started with someone else or some other situation and is
now being “projected” onto you or the current situation.
Such psychological projections come up all the time in therapy. In fact, they are a big piece of how therapy
works. Patients project onto the therapist conflicts from their past. For example, they may unconsciously expect
the therapist to act as their parents once acted. The therapist uses the projection to help the patient work on the
past conflicts; the goal is to disentangle the past from the present so the patient can put the past into perspective
and move on, instead of reenacting the same plays over and over again.
Something similar happens sometimes in risk communication. People’s interaction with you probably isn’t their
first contact with “evil, dishonest” corporations or “bureaucratic, incompetent” government agencies. You
remind them of other times in their lives when they felt mistreated by big organizations, and perhaps also by
more personal authority figures – including, yes, their parents. They may project onto you their reactions to
these past contacts. And so you may have use for counterprojective statements.
Havens’s prototype is when somebody stubs a toe on a piece of furniture. The normal response to the pain of
stubbing your toe includes “anger toward the object, blaming it, even wanting to kick the offending object
again.” The anger then gets generalized and projected, so anybody standing nearby is likely to be resented.
Havens continues:
The treatment of such small, paranoid psychoses is, first, empathy with the pain and then alliance against the
object. A friend can be quickly made by kicking the offending object for the injured person…. Just as certain
exclamations, “How painful!” or “That must have hurt,” are the prototypic form of empathic speech, so another
exclamation, “That damn chair,” is the prototype of counterprojective speech.
Or, in a therapy example, the patient is projecting onto Havens other people’s failure to provide needed help. He
keeps putting the pro