Countertransference in Addiction Counseling After a Clinical Death: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

Exposure to drug‐related death is a common part of addiction treatment. Minimal scholarship has been put forth as to how patient deaths affect clinicians, particularly those who specialize in working with socially marginalized and high‐risk populations. This study employs an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach to understand the experiences of six grieving addiction clinicians and investigates how these experiences later impacted their countertransference (CT) with future high‐risk users. Analysis revealed that a synergy between trauma and grief led clinicians to countertransferentially withdraw from or apply pressure toward their patients after experiencing a patient death. The results section provides a detailed account of these phenomena at work. Implications for the training and supervision of clinicians are discussed.