In the four years I've been seeing T, I've had all sorts of transference with him...and all sorts of feelings, from anger to parental love to fear to "erotic" ones. It always comes back to parental transference for me, but it seems like every type of transference is fair game at some point.

Transference is such a normal phenomenon. We experience it all the time in our everyday life. I notice it a lot more now that I've been in therapy...when I react to my H like he's my angry mom, for example...but from what I've read, it's just part of how we operate.

My guess is that if you have a good therapist, he won't lose respect for you or become scared of you if you admit your feelings for him. In my experience, the more honest I am with T, the MORE he respects me, the closer our relationship grows, and the more I move forward in my therapy. The feelings you are having contain important information, and getting to the bottom of that information will help you with your relationships outside of the therapy room.

As for your question about signs of transference...I honestly have no idea. I would imagine it's different for everyone. But my guess is, the more you start trying to control the way you present yourself, the less genuine healing you'll be able to do in therapy....it seems like you would be so busy trying to hide your feelings or present yourself a certain way that the real, authentic you might get lost. Therapy is the one place we can and should be exactly how we are.

I went through a short phase of feeling erotic transference for my T, and I was horrified...it was the last thing I wanted to feel. When I finally forced myself to talk about it, it was such a good thing. I was able to find out that all of my feelings are okay, and that therapy would remain a safe place no matter what. And for me, just getting the feelings out in the open and looking at them did a lot to calm them down and I was able to keep moving forward in therapy.