Reactions: Secondary Symptoms

Yes indeed .To find the need underneath every reaction is the way to healing and change .

When I started studying Counseling, this was one of the first thing I was taught: the client always faces deep pain under the surface and the facade he brings into therapy.

I remember when I started practicing therapy, Richard Harvey’s teaching about the secondary symptoms of the presenting client was most helpful. The revelation helped and guided me to seeing through the client’s veneer, fa?ade, and character strategies. Later in my own spiritual study I come across the teaching regarding the twin truths about anger. First, we are never angry about what we think we are. And, second, anger is merely the ego’s attempt at making someone else feel guilty for our own inner pain and grief. A few years ago, I was standing at a bus stop, at a busy intersection, during rush hour traffic. I watched a car begin to turn right onto a one-way street, that had they continued their turn would have seen them drive head on into oncoming traffic. There was a transit bus directly behind the right-turning car. The bus driver saw what was unfolding and, in an attempt to warn the right-turning car they were turning the wrong way on a one-way street, sounded the bus horn to alert the car. The driver of the car, startled by the bus’ honking horn, stopped their right-hand turn, thinking the bus driver was honking at them to ‘move out of the way.’ The driver of the car, now realizing they were turning into oncoming traffic, redirected themselves away from imminent danger and continued down the street they were originally travelling on. But as the driver of the car veered away from oncoming traffic, having thought the bus driver was honking at them in frustration (instead of as a caring warning to avoid oncoming danger), the driver rolled down their window, thrust their arm through the window and gestured to the bus driver with their middle finger to…well, shall we say “Mind your own business” (to put it more politely). The driver of the car sped off down the street thinking they had put the bus driver in their place and, thereby, preserved their sense of dignity. The driver of the car demonstrated to all the onlookers that they were angry at the bus driver for honking at them. But underneath that anger was likely their unconscious embarrassment at having started to turn the wrong way onto a one-way street. And underneath that self-anger was an unconscious fear of what could have happened had they continued turning right. And as the feelings and emotions coursed through this car driver’s body and mind, they decided to attempt to expunge themselves of the unwanted feelings and emotions and project that onto someone else (in this case the bus driver) as a way of processing the guilt that was building inside. The above scene similarly plays itself out in all sorts of ways through the course of a day. We get angry, we lash out, many times to unsuspecting passers-by. The real, and healing, questions we need to ask ourselves about our anger is: 1. What are we really angry about?; and 2. What pain are we trying to conceal by projecting our anger onto others?