Reading this forum will give you an extremely skewed vision of what therapy is and how it works. I read here a lot when I started and I was worried about a whole bunch of stuff, like serious transference issues or pain etc.

But really, whether you experience these things or not depends way more on you and your therapist than anything that happens in this forum. I don't think most of of the experiences here are remotely typical. That's not to say they're not valid, but they're at the extreme end of the spectrum.

In fact, I actually think that's the role this forum plays. It caters almost exclusively to people with extreme experiences (and sometimes, pretty serious pre-existing conditions which bought them to therapy in the first place), which is why you read a lot about abandonment, intense transference, wildly unethical therapist actions, people staying with what are obviously really terrible therapists...

In the wider world of therapy, most of these things aren't concerns. Most people won't fall in love with a therapist. Most people won't be abandoned by their therapist. Most people will experience transference in mild, therapeutic ways, which are managed by the therapist.

It can be immensely painful and damaging when therapy goes wrong, but if you trust your therapist and click with them, odds are everything is going to be just fine, transference or not.

I'm sure I have all sorts of little transferences, but they're fairly benign. I trust my therapist, I like him, he's good at his job and I don't have any super strong feelings which aren't appropriate for the relationship. That doesn't mean therapy is always easy, or that I'll never be annoyed by him, but it means that it's possible to have a stable, healthy, intact relationship with a therapist without things going wildly awry - and that's actually way more likely than the horror stories which dominate this forum.