I am not suicidal but I believe that if I continue working with my therapist I will very soon be. If you want to know how I ended up in this hellhole read on:

I learned about transference. I discussed it with my therapist. My therapist said it was normal and something we could work with. But that was 4 months ago and to this day I keep getting only sicker and sicker.

You can argue that I should enjoy my current feelings and continue working with my therapist, but unfortunately, after all this time, I can't force myself to do it, for the following reasons: I understand that my therapist treats me the way she treats all her clients and I understand that while my therapist is very special to me, and that while I lose sleep thinking of her, to my therapist I am just another client.

I just can't accept this situation without feeling as though I'm deceiving myself and insulting my own intelligence. I feel as though I've have fallen in love with "something" that is not legitimate, "something" that is just a facade, and I don't say it only because I know it's impossible for me to know the degree to which my therapist is play acting, but mainly because I understand that the moment I stop paying there will be no more friendly phone calls and no more friendly e-mails between me and my therapist. Obviously she doesn't care about me as anything other than a client.

I understand that my relationship with my therapist is a business matter and should be treated as such, but that's difficult to do especially given the fact that after all my mental efforts to not fall victim to my therapist's charms, I ultimately failed.

This situation is making me feel horribly because I never in my life had felt so much affection toward another person, and when I finally find someone I really like, it had to be someone who cannot reciprocate my feelings. I feel like I'm no better than the idiots who fall in love with movie stars.

And I feel like I am going insane, because no matter how much I repeat the same story I always get answers from people who keep telling me that I should just go along with this bull**** because it's "normal". But feeling pain after you hit yourself in head with a hammer is also normal.

All I know is that when I started therapy I didn't feel so badly. I wasn't even looking for a relationship. I was happy with my solitude. And some of you could argue that I should use this experience as an inspiration to find a woman, but I know I'll never find a woman as great as my therapist, which is very obvious, because real life people usually expect something in return from a relationship; and, as a thirty something underachiever with no goals in life and who has never had a girlfriend and who still feels uncomfortable in the presence of women, I know it's very unlikely I'll ever find a woman even half as great as my therapist. You could say that I should settle for whatever I can find but, if you remember what I wrote above, I wasn't even looking for a relationship when I started therapy. I don't want some random woman to act as a surrogate for my therapist. My attention, unfortunately, is focused on one person.

And to make matters worse, I am now afraid of women and afraid of the amount of power they can wield over me. I worry that I'll turn into a misogynist, if I haven't turned into one already.

Comparing my mental health now to my mental health before I started therapy, it's obvious that my mental health has significantly worsened: I now hate myself and I am beginning to hate women. I also feel disturbed by the fact that this therapy, which supposedly was based on friendliness and understanding, is turning me into a bitter, hateful person.

How can "love" turn a person into such a monster? Wasn't "love" supposed to heal me and turn me into a better, happier person? What went wrong? Is my therapist incompetent? Did she misread me? Did she overdo her friendliness? Or was it all in my fault? You can say that it was my fault, but I know that I did not choose to feel attracted to that person, and I also know that I was not the therapist in the room. And I also know that four months ago, if I had known what I was getting myself into, I would have found another therapist or stayed away from therapy entirely.

Maybe what went wrong is the fact that I was able to understand that while the "love" I received from my therapist looked and felt real, it wasn't "real" in the sense that I would have wanted it to be "real". If the "love" stops the moment I stop paying, if the relationship itself ends the moment I stop paying, then the "love" was not "real" because real love does not know artificial boundaries. Hence, this type of therapeutic "love", make-believe "love", business-like "love", can hurt more than heal some people. And it makes a mockery out of human nature and discredits the validity of the therapeutic process, for it assumes a certain amount of ingenuousness and naivete on the part of the patient. It assumes that if the patient has a mental or emotional problem that he can't solve on his own, then the patient is stupid. (And I see little therapeutic value in being told that I am stupid).

If you want to tell me that I am wrong and that my therapist really loves me, be my guest. But my conviction is unlikely to change.

What I need help with is understanding what went wrong in this therapy, what its outcome says about me and my therapist, and whether I should continue working with this person and enduring pain as I delay the inevitable, or find another therapist and hope that he or she can actually help me recover from my wounds.