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Old May 16, 2007, 02:06 AM
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are you in therapy, drunksunflower?

when people are doing long(ish) term psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy people tend to regress / develop transference.

it can be a fairly scary thing to experience. basically... ones therapist starts to become about as important to one as ones parent/s were when one was a kid. all the painful things we experienced as a kid (feeling abandoned, feeling neglected, feeling let down etc) come up as feelings for ones therapist. feeling those feelings as an adult allows us to process them as an adult so we are more aware of patterns of inter-relating in our current lives. so we become more aware of what assumptions and schemas we are bringing to our present relationships and so we become aware of alternative ways of interrelating so as to break out of those past patterns.

it can be a really scary experience to feel vulnerable. to feel like one depends on and needs ones therapist. to feel panic and terror that ones therapist will leave or that if they get to know us they will reject us or need for us to be otherwise than what we are. it is a considerable emotional risk.

sometimes angry feelings come up too. especially if we were never able to express them as children (or our parents would threaten us with loss of love / abandonment).

i'm just saying that when these feelings come up people often feel quite mortified with themself for feeling that way.

and when they share that they feel that way with other people they often feel quite mortified if the person seems less than sympathetic for how they are feeling. people tend to be (hell, i know for a fact that i am) very vulnerable indeed when i express my feelings for my therapist.

i probably wouldn't look twice if i saw him on the street or if i met in in a different setting. but he is my therapist. he is my father / mother / anyone who has ever been emotionally important to me. and... its not particularly rational... but feeling those feelings... is part of the process of working through.

structural changes to the personality.

but the working through takes time.