The Wounded Healer: Who Heals the Helper?

Arnold Lee（TreeholeHK counselling and psychology services consultant）

Many friends have told us that "Imperfect Love" is one of the rare films in recent years to capture psychology and its applications with such genuine insight, because it portrays so many scenes of counselling, and its dialogue is woven through with vocabulary drawn from counselling and psychology — including countertransference, trauma, mental disorder, schizophrenia and more. This time we look to the heroine, played by Cya Liu, a clinical psychology counsellor named Yip Lam, to understand the wounds a helper carries.

Warning: spoilers ahead — please read on with that in mind.

Trauma and its cycles in "Imperfect Love"

In the film, Yip Lam serves as the counsellor of Lok, a man living with schizophrenia. Unlike the cheerful, guileless figure Lok imagines in his delusions, Yip Lam is a woman starved of love, low in self-worth, who has used sex to obtain the things she wants. From the conversations between Professor Pao and Yip Lam, we learn that Yip Lam's childhood was an unhappy one: born into a broken family, she lacked a father's love and any chance to learn what a male figure should be. According to Adler, the father of individual psychology, people are born with a sense of inferiority — and while that inferiority can drive us to learn and to cooperate with others, negative early experiences and inadequate social learning can instead leave a person with an inferiority complex. Losing her father left Yip Lam without an adequate understanding of male figures, which led her to build intimate relationships with men through improper means.

Yip Lam also recalls how, as a child, her mother would strip off her clothes and punish her by making her stand out in the corridor, and would even scold her: "If your own mother doesn't love you, no one ever will." From this we understand how, growing up, Yip Lam came to think so little of her own worth. Beck, the renowned founder of Cognitive Therapy, pointed out that early experiences give rise to a psychological schema around particular experiences; the negative emotions, thoughts and behaviours (Affection, Behaviour, Cognition, or ABC for short) triggered by a given experience interact with one another, producing a vicious cycle. When later life brings a similar experience, an immediate Automatic Negative Thought, linked to that schema, fires at once, dragging later life back into that original vicious cycle. Yip Lam's experience of abuse in childhood left her feeling she was not someone worthy of being loved; this low sense of self-worth in turn produced the negative emotion of self-loathing, and that negative emotion in turn led her to behaviours of using others to get what she wanted, behaviours that then left her feeling that the things she had fought to win did not truly belong to her — a vicious cycle.

In the film, Yip Lam has sexual relationships with several men, and the vast majority are bound up with her early childhood experiences and the trauma behind them. Yip Lam remarks, "True healing is when the scar of the old wound no longer hurts even when it is touched." In truth, whether the scar hurts does not lie in the wound itself, but in how we look at that wound. When Yip Lam once again brings up her mother, even though she no longer feels the pain and the suffering, the self-loathing behind those experiences has never truly left her.

Supervision and countertransference

Throughout the counselling process, Yip Lam continually turns to her clinical supervisor, Professor Dr. Fung. In reality, a counsellor must have a supervisor overseeing the counselling process; the responsibility of clinical supervision is to safeguard the quality of the counselling service and to watch whether the counsellor's own psychological state is sound enough to provide support that meets the required standard. In the film, Dr. Fung offers Yip Lam reminders on various occasions, and is even able to connect points in Yip Lam's early history with those of her client, Lok, and raise them with her; on top of this, once Dr. Fung discovers that Yip Lam and Lok have developed a romantic relationship, she orders that the counselling service be terminated. Sadly, although Dr. Fung observes professional ethics, she never explores with Yip Lam the ups and downs of her counselling process — much of the time she only offers pointers and reproach, without taking in everything Yip Lam felt during the process, which indirectly contributed to the intense countertransference Yip Lam later experienced. In truth, beyond safeguarding the quality of the service, clinical supervision should also offer empathy and detailed consultation.

At one point, while supervising Yip Lam, Dr. Fung mentions two psychological terms: transference and countertransference. She points out that Lok experiences transference towards Yip Lam. According to psychoanalysis school founder Freud, psychoanalytic therapy works precisely by having the client, within the counselling relationship, project onto the therapist or counsellor their repressed emotions and needs — a process called transference — while the therapist uses this as a resource to help the client rebuild a normal way of living. Lok's mother told him from childhood that no one loved Lok more than she did; fearful of love, Lok dared not imagine that he himself could have love, so when he met Yip Lam, his long-repressed needs transferred onto his counsellor (although Lok initially fell into a fantasy of romantic love, this may also have stemmed from excessive repression). If Yip Lam could make good use of Lok's transference, she could help Lok understand love anew and relearn how to express affection, rather than repress the intimate needs that everyone longs for.

Although Yip Lam is a counsellor, because she had never recognised her own need to be loved, the film likewise never shows her taking on this counselling case with an awareness of her own history. When, during the counselling process, Lok says of her, "I feel she is so kind, just like an angel," it suddenly fills the void left by a lifetime of low self-worth and makes her feel accepted, and in that very moment Yip Lam develops countertransference towards Lok. Countertransference refers to a counsellor unconsciously projecting their own needs onto the client during the counselling process, which makes the counselling relationship unrealistic; if the counsellor can recognise it early, the counselling relationship can be improved. But because both parties over-repressed their longing for love and their need to be accepted, a beautiful yet sorrowful love story unfolded, one that in the end still had to bring the counselling to a close.

The wounded healer

I remember that, in Year 3, when I was studying professional ethics in counselling, the lecturer pointed out to us that the classmates who were drawn to counselling had, for the most part, been through some experiences of their own. When we meet someone going through the very same experience we once had, we badly want to rescue them, to spare them the same pain we once suffered. That is entirely understandable, but if we have not had the capacity to work through our own past experiences, how can we have the capacity to step into the client's world? In the end, is the one we are trying to rescue the powerless version of ourselves, or your client?

That's right — most of us are wounded healers. When we heal and counsel others, some of our own wounds may still be bleeding, just like Yip Lam and Lok in the film: possessed of the most sensitive of spirits, of a calling to rescue the other person, of a willingness to accept the other more than anyone else — yet unable to accept their own sensitivity, unable to rescue themselves, unable to accept their own dark side.

I have witnessed many counsellors and social workers who, even as they help others, become exhausted in the counselling process because they have not been able to work through their own feelings and experiences, burning through their own inner resources (Burnout). In truth, counsellors and social workers also need to be helped; they too can receive counselling and supervision, share their own hopes, voice their own grief and wounds, and so distinguish their own problems from those of their clients, refining the counselling service they provide.

Victor Frankl, the renowned psychologist of the existentialist school, has a famous saying: “What is to give light must endure burning”. To give light, one must endure being burned; to step into the world of those we help is always to endure being hurt.

To all of you helpers who shine your light: thank you for your hard work. We believe the road you have walked has not been easy either, and we hope that, as you bring light and warmth to society in the years to come, you will also take good care of yourselves.

This column will continue to share more information on psychology and counselling in the future. We hope you will keep following the column; if you like what you read, please like and share, and if you wish to learn more about counselling, you are welcome to contact TreeholeHK.

Image source: still from "Imperfect Love"