[quote=bamapsych;2691332]I agree with you that it's horribly wrong, in large part because she is telling you that it is about something related to s*x when that's not about it for you. Denotes for me a lack of listening. One of the things that makes me most upset in therapy is when I feel I'm not being heard.

But I'm not sure that I would assume it's about something personal related to her. To me it sounds like the influence of a T school that is very psychodynamic in nature. To a psychodynamically-trained person, one of the basic developmental tasks for girls is to transfer "desire" from the mother to a man. That is one reason why Freudian shrinks used to label lesbians as immature (and why being gay was considered a mental illness in the DSM until around 1970)-- it was thought to be a developmental delay that was pathological. So I think that she may be coming at this from a therapeutic perspective that is all wrapped up in the Freudian paradigm-- which can at times have a lot of value, but IMO misses the mark in lots of ways.

I've worked with a fair number of psychodynamically trained therapists professionally, and one of them described for me his issue with battered women that has always sort of stuck with me about the power of T training. He said that in school they were taught to believe that when women complained that their husbands were hurting them, that they were "mistaken" about any physical attacks, but the hurt was symbolic. In other words, they were taught to believe that no one ever really was beaten by her husband, she just *felt* abused. He was very clear about needing to reorient himself in the face of his training to understanding how to work with people who have been abused, so it all ended well.