Quote:
Originally Posted by Tiberius
I stumbled upon this forum a while ago and the stories I have read so far are truly heartbreaking: people in love with their therapist, people panicking because their therapists are going on vacation, people unable to understand that their therapists are doing a job...
I can see how romantic feelings toward a therapist would form, and I think they are quite normal, but I don't understand why intelligent people would embrace such feelings and not make an effort to bring themselves back to earth. Unless those people are "lucky" enough to have an unethical/ unprofessional therapist, their feelings are just going to eat them alive and possibly ruin their lives.
I've been there myself but unlike most of you I identified my emotions early on and instead of embracing them I made an effort to convince myself that my emotions were directed toward the wrong person.
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I recently went through a similar situation, with a transference that started to occupy far too much of my thought process, especially as how I'm in a very very awesome marriage with a man I adore and love, and have extreme passion for. My transference made me feel that I was betraying him, so I finally sought additional help from a friend, that made me realize, that these feelings were coming from inside of the SESSIONS, not inside of my actual....core, not my actual feelings. Once I realized that this was true, after a very agonizing two weeks, I was freed of the burden.
At the risk of sounding callous and cold, please understand that I am in no way judgmental of anyone here, but having seen the transference issues of some of the forum here, I am all the more relieved to be free of mine, and overtly concerned for the majority of the cases I see here. I think it speaks volumes about the mental health of a person, who would be of a mindset that they secretly hope they have a disreputable therapist who would step beyond the boundaries of the practice. I think when you enter into a place where your fantasy of a person potentially threatens to usurp everything you hold in balance or hold dear, you have a fundamentally steep incline to deal with. Transference, is the result of having someone's rapt attention. If you, like so many here, felt abandoned, ignored, overlooked, etc...and this is the first genuine source of someone paying explicit attention to you, it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that this is "love."
Love however, can not exist with a person you don't know. Anything else, is a crush, or an infatuation.
Your therapist, is...at the end of the day, a paid gun. He's got a gig, and his gig, is to help you help yourself. You do not know this person, as a real person. He is an "idea." Therefore any feelings you have toward this person, have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
So when I see here, how many people really feel they are "falling in love" with their Therapists, I have to wonder....how many people here are aware that they are falling in love not...really with the therapist, but the idea of the therapist as this "person in your mind that you want him/her to be...?"
And as bad as my infatuation for two weeks was with mine, it's nothing compared to some of the situations I've read about here, and it's concerning.
Your therapist ISN'T REAL.