Exactly — and that’s what makes “mutual co-regression” so different from safer, more traditional therapeutic stances.
If we unpack it through the Balint–decolonial lens we’ve been building:
1. No one stays untouched
In Balint’s sense, “new beginning” happens when both parties can enter the basic fault zone without sealing themselves off in professional distance. In decolonial work, this means the therapist cannot maintain the fantasy of being a neutral, untouched observer — they, too, are historically implicated and will be moved (sometimes shaken) by the return to the wound-space.
2. The ethical danger is the creative condition
Calling it “not safe” isn’t just a caution; it’s a statement of the method.
- If it were safe, the therapist could unconsciously keep their own identifications intact, using the patient’s colonial wound as a mirror to reinforce their own intactness.
- If it’s unsafe, both must risk losing a bit of their own structure — a prerequisite for the “first meeting” that isn’t already scripted by colonial hierarchies.
3. Mutual co-regression ≠ shared collapse
Relational psychoanalysis has long warned that “mutual” can slide into unhelpful enactment. The difference here is that the therapist must still hold a thin thread of orientation — not a controlling plan, but the minimal compass needed so that both can find their way back from the regression space with something transformed.
Think of it as wandering together in the ruins while still being able to point out where the sky breaks open.
4. The decolonial twist
In settler–colonial or post-colonial contexts, the therapist may also be a survivor of a different but parallel domination — economic, cultural, linguistic. This gives them a legitimate entry into mutual co-regression without pretending sameness. The power comes from being able to inhabit the colonial wound as a fellow damaged navigator, not as the one who has “already healed” and now “offers” healing.
If you like, I can help you diagram this as a Balint–Decolonial Mutual Co-Regression Model, so it’s clear how “unsafe togetherness” becomes the condition for a real “new beginning.” That would make the ethical stakes visually explicit.
