Maggie is thirteen pounds of cuteness.
She is a small Shihpoo who has become part of the emotional life of my practice. My clients know her. My clients love her. She is remarkably friendly, loves people, loves attention, and quietly monitors the emotional temperature in the room.
When clients become angry, loud, tense, or agitated, Maggie moves behind me. She creates distance. She gets out of the line of fire.
When clients soften, tear up, cry, or speak from a more vulnerable place, she moves toward them. She wags her tail, presses in gently, and becomes warm, available, and comforting.
There is one exception. The Dobermans.
There are a couple of large dogs in the neighbourhood who seem to activate something completely different in her. When Maggie sees them, she barks. She pulls forward. She runs toward them if she gets the chance. She makes herself louder, bigger, and more threatening, as if the display of aggression will protect her from the danger she is running towards.
It is terrifying. Her nervous system registers danger, and she mobilizes.
That same pattern shows up in therapy.
Clients often soften when they feel understood. They feel relief when someone listens carefully, takes their pain seriously, and helps them make sense of why they respond the way they do. That part of therapy matters. Validation matters. Empathy matters. Caring matters.
But validation is only half of the work. Therapy also has to challenge people to change what they do with their pain.
It has to ask people to take more ownership of their lives, practise new skills, repair damage, interrupt old patterns, get out of bed, make the call, have the hard conversation, tolerate disappointment, stop attacking, stop avoiding, stop waiting for someone else to change first.
That is often when the bark shows up.
Years ago, I worked with a family where the mother was afraid the father was going to seriously hurt her twelve-year-old son. He was small for his age and still very much a little kid. But when his father became angry, he did not shrink. He fought back. The father escalated. The son escalated back.
This was a child who got into fights at school, often with kids much bigger than him. He blew up at teachers, principals, and sometimes at me when he felt criticized, controlled, exposed, or cornered. Underneath all of that, he was small, overwhelmed, and trying to protect himself.
The work was to stay steady, keep caring, and help him discover that being challenged did not mean being attacked.
Over the years, I worked with many angry adolescents and deeply conflicted families. Some of those kids screamed at me, blamed me, threatened me, tried to shut the conversation down, changed the subject, or pushed back against anything that required them to look honestly at themselves or the impact of their behaviour.
Underneath that defensiveness, there was often shame, guilt, grief, helplessness, and a feeling of failure.
I understood this long before I became a therapist. Even as a teenager, I could see that people often became angry when they felt exposed, challenged, powerless, or ashamed. The anger could look intimidating from the outside, but it often came from a younger, more frightened place inside the person.
As a therapist, I have always understood that when someone lashes out at me, it is because something vulnerable has been touched. They may feel exposed, ashamed, cornered, powerless, misunderstood, or afraid of what change will require from them.
If a therapist sees only the attack, they lose access to what the attack is protecting.
Over the years, I have watched many therapists lose their footing in those moments. A client becomes angry, critical, accusatory, dismissive, or contemptuous, and the therapist starts organizing around the attack. They become defensive. They explain too much. They soften the challenge too quickly. They back away from the work because the client’s reaction starts to feel like evidence that something has gone wrong.
Sometimes something has gone wrong. Therapists do misattune. They move too quickly. They challenge before enough trust has been built. They miss shame. They make assumptions. They push past capacity.
When that happens, the therapist has to own it, apologize, repair, slow down, and rebuild trust. But sometimes the client’s defensive system is simply activated because the work has touched the exact place therapy needs to reach.
When the client’s defensive system activates, the therapist has to remain steady and capable of holding the line. If the therapist retreats, the old pattern remains untouched. If the therapist becomes defensive, the session becomes another version of the client’s familiar conflict. If the therapist rushes to reassure, the client may feel soothed for a moment while the defensive pattern remains unexamined.
The work is to stay connected, name what is happening, and help the client notice the moment when pain turns into attack.
I truly believe that in order to do this work, therapists have to understand that the bark is not the whole story. Underneath it, there may be fear, shame, helplessness, grief, or the terror of being exposed.
Effective therapy requires the therapist to hear the bark without becoming organized around it: to stay close enough to understand what it protects, steady enough to keep the work moving, and committed enough to help the client learn another way to respond.
