Tired of the pain

Soccer Mom, you've mentioned several times in several different threads that you've been seeing your T for a long time and this painful transference didn't start until your mom died.

You've described your mom as cold and distant and not meeting your needs as a child. But the global total of your threads and posts sound as if you really loved her despite whatever flaws she had.

To transfer means to move from one place to another. Is it possible that you're literally transferring your grief and pain (and all sorts of other emotions -- anger, longing, desire to hang on tightly and push away at the same time and on and on) about your mother's death onto your T as a way of avoiding feeling the deep grief that's normal to feel after one's mother dies.

My mother and I had a complicated relationship. In a nutshell, she was mean as a snake and kind as an angel. I kept distance between us to avoid being bitten by the snake and smothered by the angel. When she was sick at the end, I'm the one who took care of her and I grieved mightily when she passed. Grief is not a rational emotion. Maybe if you look at the way your mother treated you, you think you shouldn't grieve her so much. But you do. I "should" have been relieved when my mother died. Unfortunately, my emotions never got that memo.

You've gone through all sorts of pain and hostility and anger and suffering and embarrassment over your feelings for your T. I can see how that transference could easily take place. T was there for you while your mother was so ill, texting regularly, checking in on you, relaxing her boundaries while you were in crisis. Then she pulled back, becoming more distant, putting the boundaries back up, basically saying you can't have what you want. She's become more distant, like your mom was. You already know this transference is about your mom, but maybe it's more narrow than that -- your unconscious defenses directing you away from the bigger pain of basic hardcore grief over a death.

Your T is alive. That means you still have the chance to work things out with her, to get your needs met, to get things resolved. The finality of death puts an end to all that and that makes grief even worse.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that a person would transfer complex grief feelings directly onto their T after going through what you did, passing the pain of the full grief process and going directly to transference as the lesser of two painful things.

Maybe this painful transference is about avoiding the bigger pain of fully grieving. As painful as all this transference for your T feels, your unconscious defenses may think it's a heck of a much more bearable pain than grieving directly for mother's death. I've discovered through hard experience that avoided grief doesn't go away.

I give you my deepest condolences on the passing of your mom. Even if she was cold and distant, and failed in many ways, she was still your mom. You were a good daughter. Direct grief work does help in time. It's something to think about and talk to T about.