I love your list, sister. Great topic.

I don't feel a parent-child connection with my T. Although, as I've written in another thread, we have worked with a child ego state of mine in therapy, I have never felt a parent connection to my T and neither has this particular ego state. (I have learned to relate to my own younger ego state as the older sister or mother but not drafted T into that role.) I know this is a little off topic, but does inner child work mean relating to your T as a parent? (I thought maybe gerber implied this?) If so, I guess that would be another way it is different from ego state work, which doesn't require that (although it could include it).

Another type of connection I feel with my T: the male-female connection. I'm not sure I could bond this way with a female therapist. I strongly feel his maleness each session. I don't mean that in an obsessed way or that I want to have a romantic relationship with him, but yet there is a very powerful man-woman dynamic that, for me, is therapeutic. After so many years of a negative, demoralizing relationship with my husband, it was very powerful and healing to find a man who would be nice to me once a week for an hour.

I also feel a sort of connection that derives from the profound trust I have in my T. I trust him to always have my best interests at heart and to never do anything to hurt me. I don't question a lot of stuff he does because of this. I let him go where others don't. It's like this strong trust generates its own feeling of connectedness.

gerber, I also have a strong intellectual connection with my T. It is the easiest type of connection for me to make. I do enjoy discussing ideas with him. My T doesn't really try to steer me into the intellectual or the feeling. He lets me choose the path. The "fusing of brains": sometimes when my T really "gets" me, I feel this. As time passes and I know him better, I feel more and more that I "get" him too. This definitely has an intellectual component, but there is a feeling part to it too.

Another type of connection I feel: that between healer and the one being healed. I see my T as a healer, complete with a certain inexplicable, shamanistic element. It sometimes seems very primitive to me, what he is doing. I feel it is part of a tradition that stretches back through time, and in our own time, across cultures.