For the last month or so I've been experiencing extremely strong erotic transference towards my T, along with strong attachment to him in general, and a sort of image of him as a 'magical' person... All of this, of course, taking place despite the arguments of my 'rational self'!

I had a session with him on Wednesday and I came out of it feeling strange - not at all like I usually feel. I usually end up pacing round in circles at the bus stop, or marching all the way home, because I'm so buzzing and excited and full of thoughts about what's happened. But this time I felt very calm and very sad.

My ET appears to have disappeared - and, as I suspected might happen, I feel totally bereft without it. The fantasy was keeping me going when my life is otherwise in a total state. Instead of feeling like my T is magic and I'm in love with him, I have started to feel angry with him.

So I've been thinking a lot about what happened to cause this. It didn't feel like a 'bad' session, and I wasn't immediately aware of anything in particular that might have caused my feelings to change so drastically... but I have become aware of some things...

My T is an integrative humanistic therapist. He sometimes uses transactional analysis. I know a bit about it myself as a humanistic student myself, but to be honest it's never really made a big impression on me. Anyway, there's been a lot of talk between us recently about the 'ego states model' - parent, adult and child - and some of it has definitely resonated with me. I'm aware that I have a tendency to slip into 'child', particularly when I'm feeling strong emotions. My T appears to want to help me to spend more time in an 'adult' state - that seems to generally be the aim of using the ego states model.

I realised last night, though, that some of the things my T says could easily be looked at as coming from a 'parent' state. For example, one of the things we discussed on Wednesday was a comment he'd made the week before. I had said "I don't know" and he'd responded with "...children say 'I don't know'. Adults don't say that." Ostensibly he's making this comment to try and encourage me to speak from an 'adult' rather than 'child' state, but in fact, upon reflection, he sounded very much like a 'parent' to me here - and not even a 'nurturing parent', but a 'critical' one. It was really an attempt to control my behaviour.

When I brought the comment up again last session (though I didn't mention the 'critical parent' thing - that only occurred to me afterwards), saying that I didn't agree with it, he continued to argue his case and he seemed somewhat defensive to me. He ended up questioning why I wanted to discuss it, and I suggested that perhaps I just felt like arguing with him. I think I did - sometimes the things he says make me want to behave mischievously, argumentatively, like a naughty child. And no wonder, because he's speaking to me like I'm a naughty child!

There are quite a few more examples of him speaking to me in this way - and I swear last session he actually wagged his finger at me at one point! Seriously!

So. It seems to me that rather than doing what he is ostensibly doing - encouraging me to be 'adult' - he is actually playing along with the whole thing, being taken in by my 'child' and responding by becoming the 'parent', or perhaps being the one pushing me into 'child' in the first place! That would fit with the ego states model theory.

Erm, I think I might basically have just done a whole bunch of rambling here, sorry... Of course this is all stuff that I'm going to discuss with my T next week, but if anyone here has any thoughts on it, or thoughts on transactional analysis in general, I'd be really interested to hear!