Its kind of paradoxical, but i think your t sees you as being in denial about your romantic feelings, and as long as he feels you are in denial about them, he cant ethically work with you on them? Cuz like holding your hands - he KNOWS that would be feeding your fantasy, even tho you deny it. Even if the fantasy is just the two of you running in a park with a dog. He's going to interpret that fantasy as something else, they always do!

Whereas, if you could ACCEPT your fantasy, and follow that train of thought and think about what it ultimately means to you - i think that would salvage this therapy.

For example, i desperately wanted to marry my last two ts. Following the fantasy, i realized what i wanted was for them to come to sunday family dinner and shut my brother up. So... ultimately thats what i needed to do for myself, accept that my relationship with my brother is crap, has always been crap, and probably will always be crap, unless he gets struck by lightning and turns in Christopher Walken.

For the record, yes, my t hugs me - greeting and goodbye. But he is cute as a button and fit and i am... way not. Plus we are both old, but in denial about that! Plus we are both old hippies, so there is a lot of shared history, even if we havent actually shared it together, it SEEMS that way.

So it is LIKE having a friend, but more like an online friend rather than IRL. Weird!