There are some people who make us feel calm, there are some who make us feel confident. There are also people who depress us, or make us feel insecure, or angry, or anxious. While there is certainly something about them that makes us feel this way, there is also something about us that reacts to them that way. Conversely, we ourselves have the same effect on others: we make them feel confident, or anxious, or loved and appreciated. They affect us and we affect them.

But it is very easy to get confused. Everything seems to get tangled up in the in-between, so that it’s impossible to tell which feelings belong to whom. Untangling it all seems impossible because it’s so messy and confusing.

Getting Untangled and Staying Untangled

This is the goal of intersubjective therapy: learning how to step into the in-between without getting tangled up.

Because the same thing will happen at the beginning of your therapy. Even being in the same room together will bring up feelings and associations (for both of you), and those feelings and associations will start to tie themselves up in knots. In other words, from the first moment you meet, you are both reacting to each other, activating thoughts and feelings and memories, both positive and negative.

Thinking about it this way can feel a bit uncomfortable to start with, but as you get used to it, it grows to become a deep source of wisdom and insight. If we understand how we affect our therapist and how our therapist affects us, you can start to see and feel:

1. Which feelings are yours and which are theirs.
2. Where they end and you begin.

Untangling In Therapy

Doing this in the safe, controlled environment of therapy takes the confusion and the stress out of the situation. The intersubjective therapist has spent years learning how to be with you in the in-between, but without getting confused and tangled up, too.

They can help you see just how tangled up you are, and help you identify each of the different strings that is tying you up in different ways. You will begin to disentangle yourself from it all and see clearly what is happening within yourself and between the two of you.

Untangling in Real Life

The more adept you become at doing this with your therapist, the better you will get at doing it with the people in your life. You can finally disentangle yourself without having to cut anyone out of your life (unless you really need to).

So this is the goal of intersubjective therapy:

1. To learn where the other ends and where you begin.
2. To establish boundaries for yourself which allow you to maintain connection without getting tangled up.

This is the foundation of what we call “mental health,” and with it comes confidence, agency, understanding, and self-control. Being able to set healthy, flexible boundaries is essential to building healthy relationships, with others and with yourself. This is one of the goals of every form of therapy, but it is the core of the intersubjective approach.