I have never experienced parental transference in my therapy. There was a little erotic here and there but it never bothered me. What I did experience extensively in my youth was being very drawn to and developing affection for mentor figures, people with considerable life experience and wisdom, whom I saw having something important to teach me. It very often mixed with erotic feelings that I acted out before I learned to recognize the differences in motivation and discriminate what really drove me. I do not regret any of those relationships, they were all constructive and respectful for me, but were definitely driven by a form of transference on my end, which sometimes faded and so did my interest with it. I confused many people with the whole thing before I understood clearly and was able to actually explain my motives and be transparent.

So what was the drive exactly? I wrote about it here on PC a few times. It was a form of identity search, being drawn to features in other people (real or projected) that reflected my values, things that I wanted to see and develop in myself. It wasn't a need for love and care at all for me, more this intense desire to align and merge with my own developing value system. I still experience it mildly sometimes (I am 44 now) when I see perceive traits and behavior in people that I find very appealing and want to incorporate into myself more, but nowhere as intensely and persistently as in my young years. I think it has dissipated because, over time, I did integrate and develop those features in myself. What is interesting is that now there are young people who seem to develop the same kind of interest/transference/call it whatever toward me, mostly in my mentoring roles but also on a broader scale, which appears as an indication that what I was striving for in my youth has worked quite well. By the time I got to therapy at age 40, this was pretty advanced, I guess that's one reason why the same transference never showed up in my therapy. It's also true though that none the two 2s embodied those traits and values I tend to be drawn to much, not even the newer ones that are more characteristic of my more mature state. Some little things yes and, interestingly, I automatically reacted to it with trying to incorporate them into my own styles. One such thing was my last T's professional email style.

So, for me, the way for these transference feelings to decrease is usually developing the admired features in myself. Of course some are easier than others but I've never found that I intensely desired features that were foreign to me - I think because they derive from the very core of my identity and what drives me naturally.