Yes, I have. My current therapist hypothesizes that my first therapist was dealing with some major countertransference when she terminated. So if he's accurate, she didn't handle her feelings well. At all. It wasn't discussed, as the last time she and I communicated was when she terminated the therapy.

With my current therapist, it was obvious that he was having some countertransference as it relates to my biological mother. I have a lot of unresolved feelings towards her for neglecting and abandoning me as a child, so it's become an important part of my therapy. My therapist also had an emotionally absent mother, and while our stories aren't the same, they're similar enough.

It was first obvious to me when I was talking to my mother using the empty chair technique. T started out pulling out the chair saying, "what would you like to say to your mom? I know what I would say!" I don't remember everything from that moment, but I remember finishing my thought with an "F you." My therapist replied, "THANK YOU! If you weren't going to say it to her, I was. F you, f you, f you."

A couple of sessions later we discussed my first therapist that I mentioned above, and that's when we discussed countertransference. He framed it as how important it is for therapists to manage their countertransferences, because they come up commonly with clients. "For instance," he said, "I actually have a lot of countertransference when we discuss your mom." I thanked him for acknowledging it, but we didn't say anything else about it.

Then sometime later, my therapist and I were discussing my mother and how I'm grieving the absence of a relationship with her, and how I felt that I was betraying my (amazing) stepmom by not having a "mothers bond" with her. Then my therapist went into this like, 15 minute self-disclosure about how he felt similarly during his childhood and early adulthood. I know a lot about his childhood relationships. It was too much. He wasn't handling his own feelings well.

I posted about all of this when it happened, actually. https://forums.psychcentral.com/psyc...y-about-t.html

So I took the advice of my fellow PCers and discussed it next session. His heart was in the right place, but acknowledged that if I was feeling the way I did, he self-disclosed too much. He's been very, very good since then making sure that he's keeping himself out of the room as much as possible.