[Petra5ed]

It seems like the more blank slate a therapist the more opportunity for transference. What about therapeutic relationships that are several years or even decades old, where the client comes to know quite a lot about the therapist, would the love a client had for a therapist they've known for years be just mere transference / projection? Is love always just projection?

The more I get to know my therapist the more I love him. The intensity and desperation is relenting, but the love is deeper and stronger felt, less needy but still very real to me. He's said I like to project on to him, but I don't know what I'm projecting. I love all the things I know about him. I don't think he's a saint or spectacular in any objective way, but to me he is perfect in all his imperfection. I have seldom felt a love I thought more genuine than this one, so why am I told it's projection and transference?

[Parva]

It's hard to know what transference feels like sometimes. I got to know it because it was the sense of pending abandonment by my T, so it became easy to recognize. We called these '90-10 reactions' because 90% was 'old stuff' from childhood maltreatment and 10% was rooted in reality. Really, they were more like 99-1 reactions, but you get the idea. I think you can both love a person and experience transference, although these can get mixed up, for sure. I guess it depends on the nature of the transference and how you both experience it.

My transference didn't start until my mom died, about 2 years into therapy, and then it was POW! This, too, made it sort of easy to understand the nature of the transference. I had / have genuine love for my T. Why wouldn't I? More importantly, why is that a bad thing? Many of us grew up unloved and not knowing what love is, and to be more clinical, with screwed up attachment. So here comes this person that is your stability while you have to go back and learn (as an adult) what infants learn - to trust someone close to you. So my question still stands - why wouldn't I love this person?

Perhaps your T is simply trying to protect the therapeutic relationship? Which would be a good thing. This is a very tricky deal, though, so my unsolicited advice is to talk openly with your T about this. I needed mine to be open about her feelings, so that also helped me really ferret apart the transference vs care/respect/love vs attachment to her.

[AllHeart]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

It seems like the more blank slate a therapist the more opportunity for transference. What about therapeutic relationships that are several years or even decades old, where the client comes to know quite a lot about the therapist, would the love a client had for a therapist they've known for years be just mere transference / projection? Is love always just projection?

The more I get to know my therapist the more I love him. The intensity and desperation is relenting, but the love is deeper and stronger felt, less needy but still very real to me. He's said I like to project on to him, but I don't know what I'm projecting. I love all the things I know about him. I don't think he's a saint or spectacular in any objective way, but to me he is perfect in all his imperfection. I have seldom felt a love I thought more genuine than this one, so why am I told it's projection and transference?

Sounds like a valid case of love to me. No, love is not always just projection or transference.

Have you asked your T what and how he feels you are projecting on to him exactly? Can you feel his love for you when you are together?

I think that's something that keeps unraveling as you Talk about it.

[unaluna]

My t said today that we are a team.

So - no i in team, no u in team. I am our team's creation. That creation of a new active person is what is important.

What would be different if you had a different name for how you felt about your t?.

[Petra5ed]

Originally Posted by AllHeart

Sounds like a valid case of love to me. No, love is not always just projection or transference.

Have you asked your T what and how he feels you are projecting on to him exactly? Can you feel his love for you when you are together?

I feel like he loves me, not in a sexual way, but that he cares about me. Maybe he would **** me too if I wasn't his client. Sometimes I wonder though.

I couldn't ask him because I totally shut down during that session. It was the start of a flashback, I didn't want to hear it. He has acknowledged before that my love is real. I'm not asking him to love me back or do anything, but now that I've taken the risk to tell him how I feel I just want reality acknowledged. If my love for him is a projection then all of my love for everyone I've ever loved is projection...

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

It seems like the more blank slate a therapist the more opportunity for transference.

That's the theory, yes.

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

I have seldom felt a love I thought more genuine than this one, so why am I told it's projection and transference?

The idea here is that you cannot love someone you don't know. No one can love a blank slate. (I seriously doubt this. If your mother was a blank slate, you'll grow up loving blank slates. But I digress.)

But as you say, the blank slate leaks. No two Ts are identical and the T's sex, race, class, clothes, decorating tastes, accent, vocabulary, intelligence, culture etc are there for all to see. They have prejudices and agendas. There's enough there for a patient to fall in love with.

Anyway, projection and transference exist in the "real world", too. It is absurd to suppose that one person's love for another has nothing do with people they have previously loved. Isn't it a cliche that people fall in love with people who remind them of their own parents?

So love in the T's office and love outside it are not so very different.

That's what I think.

[AllHeart]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

I feel like he loves me, not in a sexual way, but that he cares about me. Maybe he would **** me too if I wasn't his client. Sometimes I wonder though.

I couldn't ask him because I totally shut down during that session. It was the start of a flashback, I didn't want to hear it. He has acknowledged before that my love is real. I'm not asking him to love me back or do anything, but now that I've taken the risk to tell him how I feel I just want reality acknowledged. If my love for him is a projection then all of my love for everyone I've ever loved is projection...

I'm glad he at least has acknowledged your love is real. You don't have to know everything about a person in order to love that person. Heck, I don't think that's even possible anyway. You know enough about the man to know you feel love for him. That's fair, and that is real. In my book, love is love -- with or without projection or transference or anything else -- and it comes in all different forms and levels. I hope you get the clarification you need. And when you do, let me know because I'm curious myself!

Originally Posted by unaluna

My t said today that we are a team.

So - no i in team, no u in team. I am our team's creation. That creation of a new active person is what is important.

What would be different if you had a different name for how you felt about your t?.

whoa I think this is mega awesome. the part i bolded. that's just how I was feeling today with my t. that this team that we are, that we have been, for the past 4 years has resulted in the beautiful me that sat in her office today singing for her! I have undergone quite an amazing transformation as a result of our working together as a team.

[iheartjacques]

The more I know about him, the more I like him as a person in his own right.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by iheartjacques

The more I know about him, the more I like him as a person in his own right.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[SkyscraperMeow]

The problem with 'loving' a therapist is that even what you do know about him is only a fraction of the story. There's also the fact that the therapeutic relationship is designed so the client gets all the support and has to do no work for the therapist. The therapist must always be in a therapeutic frame of mind, have positive, unconditional regard, etc.

Who wouldn't love someone who appeared that way?

But the thing is, real love is when you pick someone up from the airport at 2 am and they're grumpy and they snap about wanting noodles and then they fart and it's all gross and you drive them home and make sympathetic noises while they finally get something to eat and spend an hour talking about how horrible their boss was on that business trip. Real love is when you still love someone even when it's all about them sometimes. And therapy is never, ever, all about the therapist. So how would you know?

That's not the same as the self disclosure you claim is the same as knowing someone. It's one thing for someone to say 'I don't like flying'. It's quite different to have been the one coaxing them onto the plane and holding their hand for a flight. Clients are never there for their therapists, so any love they feel is idealized.

The only kind of love a client can really feel is an infantile regression of love for a caretaker figure (because that is the only role a therapist can hope to be realistically cast in, and even then, it's a bit of a stretch.) That isn't adult love. That's desire, and yearning and longing, but it's not the sort of love that real romance is based on.

I also think it's kind of dangerous to confuse having one's needs tended to without the need for reciprocation as some kind of ideal love state. Because that's not what happens in real relationships, and if you try to measure real relationships against therapy, you're going to have a bad time.

[AllHeart]

Originally Posted by SkyscraperMeow

The problem with 'loving' a therapist is that even what you do know about him is only a fraction of the story. There's also the fact that the therapeutic relationship is designed so the client gets all the support and has to do no work for the therapist. The therapist must always be in a therapeutic frame of mind, have positive, unconditional regard, etc.

Who wouldn't love someone who appeared that way?

But the thing is, real love is when you pick someone up from the airport at 2 am and they're grumpy and they snap about wanting noodles and then they fart and it's all gross and you drive them home and make sympathetic noises while they finally get something to eat and spend an hour talking about how horrible their boss was on that business trip. Real love is when you still love someone even when it's all about them sometimes. And therapy is never, ever, all about the therapist. So how would you know?

That's not the same as the self disclosure you claim is the same as knowing someone. It's one thing for someone to say 'I don't like flying'. It's quite different to have been the one coaxing them onto the plane and holding their hand for a flight. Clients are never there for their therapists, so any love they feel is idealized.

The only kind of love a client can really feel is an infantile regression of love for a caretaker figure (because that is the only role a therapist can hope to be realistically cast in, and even then, it's a bit of a stretch.) That isn't adult love. That's desire, and yearning and longing, but it's not the sort of love that real romance is based on.

I also think it's kind of dangerous to confuse having one's needs tended to without the need for reciprocation as some kind of ideal love state. Because that's not what happens in real relationships, and if you try to measure real relationships against therapy, you're going to have a bad time.

Platonic love, romantic love, parts love, true love, unconditional love, conditional love, adult love, child love, enduring love, goodwill love, illogical love, dangerous love, pure love, casual love, deep love, unhealthy love, healthy love, cultural love, therapy love, infinite love, alotta love, a little love... there are 101 ways to define the kinds and levels of love one feels for another. Just because OP isn't picking her T up from the airport at 2 am listening to him complain about his rotten trip while dropping gas doesn't mean the love isn't real.

After reading your negative nelly of a post, it seems to me that you could use a little love yourself. So I'm sending you virtual love! Oh yes, I went there!

[Petra5ed]

Originally Posted by SkyscraperMeow

The problem with 'loving' a therapist is that even what you do know about him is only a fraction of the story. There's also the fact that the therapeutic relationship is designed so the client gets all the support and has to do no work for the therapist. The therapist must always be in a therapeutic frame of mind, have positive, unconditional regard, etc.

Who wouldn't love someone who appeared that way?

But the thing is, real love is when you pick someone up from the airport at 2 am and they're grumpy and they snap about wanting noodles and then they fart and it's all gross and you drive them home and make sympathetic noises while they finally get something to eat and spend an hour talking about how horrible their boss was on that business trip. Real love is when you still love someone even when it's all about them sometimes. And therapy is never, ever, all about the therapist. So how would you know?

That's not the same as the self disclosure you claim is the same as knowing someone. It's one thing for someone to say 'I don't like flying'. It's quite different to have been the one coaxing them onto the plane and holding their hand for a flight. Clients are never there for their therapists, so any love they feel is idealized.

The only kind of love a client can really feel is an infantile regression of love for a caretaker figure (because that is the only role a therapist can hope to be realistically cast in, and even then, it's a bit of a stretch.) That isn't adult love. That's desire, and yearning and longing, but it's not the sort of love that real romance is based on.

I also think it's kind of dangerous to confuse having one's needs tended to without the need for reciprocation as some kind of ideal love state. Because that's not what happens in real relationships, and if you try to measure real relationships against therapy, you're going to have a bad time.

Consider you might not know everything.

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

Consider you might not know everything.

Where is she wrong? Seriously. I like the part about yearning and longing. Longing was a phase i went thru.

[stopdog]

I find the wrongness to be the lecturing tone of absolute-ness condescension and judgmentalment.

[Parva]

Originally Posted by unaluna

Where is she wrong? Seriously. I like the part about yearning and longing. Longing was a phase i went thru.

There is a lot of rightness in what SkyscraperMeow wrote, but it pre-supposes a uniform nature to ALL therapeutic relationships. As I wrote earlier, my first T was forthcoming about her life, her needs, etc... We crafted a therapeutic relationship that was based on mutual needs; certainly tilted towards me, but with her getting a lot in return. From my naïve perspective, psychotherapy generally exists on a spectrum, where T/patient relationships grade from mutual and personal to one-sided and psychoanalytic. It depends on the people and the reason for the therapy.

I think what came across from that post was more of a text book version of therapy than what many of us have experienced. It undervalues the power of the T/patient dynamic and reduces it to an applied formula.

[ruh roh]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

I have seldom felt a love I thought more genuine than this one, so why am I told it's projection and transference?

I think when you're the object of love in a situation where the other person only knows you in a limited context, it might feel more like infatuation to the recipient, so that could be why he calls it projection.

[Petra5ed]

Originally Posted by unaluna

Where is she wrong? Seriously. I like the part about yearning and longing. Longing was a phase i went thru.

For one love is a big and broad term. She acknowledges all kinds of love and then proceeds to cheapen all of them that don't fit our societies socially acceptable norm. Love is love, there's no bad kind. Secondly a give away she's certainly wrong is how absolutes are peppered through, it is "never" a good thing, the "only" kind if love it could be would be infantile. Another thing is that many therapists write about how there must be love. The feelings she's cheapening are the foundations of therapy for most. She states her opinion with the conviction it's fact as if there aren't experts who would disagree, there are. And finally it's condescending and it's assumptive, when did I claim this was an ideal love? Anyways... My therapy isn't the one way only street she describes. It is about me, but I ask about my therapist, I care for him as a person outside of anything he does for me. Are you going to tell me I don't? Lol!

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by stopdog

I find the wrongness to be the lecturing tone of absolute-ness condescension and judgmentalment.

What??? Theres no tone in posts!!! Unless you put in lots of punctuation?!?!?!

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

Anyways... My therapy isn't the one way only street she describes. It is about me, but I ask about my therapist, I care for him as a person outside of anything he does for me. Are you going to tell me I don't? Lol!

I guess i dont see a contradiction between what you write here and what skyscraper wrote. I dont worry too much about the always and nevers.

I would have gone a step further and said, what if when you go to pick him up at the airport and he acts like an absolute richard? Then i realized that most people wouldnt put up with carp like that. That that is abusive?

Its like - the FOO always made a HUGE deal if i said i couldnt make it home for a holiday. I realize now they were overcompensating, making ME feel bad, when actually they felt guilty about not wanting me there. I dont know how thats related but i think it is.

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by Parva

I think what came across from that post was more of a text book version of therapy than what many of us have experienced. It undervalues the power of the T/patient dynamic and reduces it to an applied formula.

I would have said just the opposite! It described my experience very well! It feels personal, not textbook. That is odd. Or i am! Its like thru the looking glass and back out the other side.

[Petra5ed]

Originally Posted by unaluna

I guess i dont see a contradiction between what you write here and what skyscraper wrote. I dont worry too much about the always and nevers.

I would have gone a step further and said, what if when you go to pick him up at the airport and he acts like an absolute richard? Then i realized that most people wouldnt put up with carp like that. That that is abusive?

Its like - the FOO always made a HUGE deal if i said i couldnt make it home for a holiday. I realize now they were overcompensating, making ME feel bad, when actually they felt guilty about not wanting me there. I dont know how thats related but i think it is.

In several years of therapy he has made mistakes. He's been late, he's forgotten an appointment, he's canceled, he once asked to cancel so someone else could fill my spot. He's dressed poorly. He's slipped up and said things that offended me. He's said he'd do things for me and forgot. He's left me hanging when I've texted asking for help because he was busy.... So no I haven't picked him up from the airport and him be rude and fart in my car, not sure I've even had that happen with my husband actually.

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by Petra5ed

In several years of therapy he has made mistakes. He's been late, he's forgotten an appointment, he's canceled, he once asked to cancel so someone else could fill my spot. He's dressed poorly. He's slipped up and said things that offended me. He's said he'd do things for me and forgot. He's left me hanging when I've texted asking for help because he was busy.... So no I haven't picked him up from the airport and him be rude and fart in my car, not sure I've even had that happen with my husband actually.

Okay, but those are ways he hasnt taken care of your needs. They are not ways you had to take care of his needs?

Eta - altho i get it - those would have been dealbreakers for me in the past because the other person wasnt good enough.

[Remy70]

Originally Posted by SkyscraperMeow

The problem with 'loving' )ist is that even what you do know about him is only a fraction of the story. There's also the fact that the therapeutic relationship is designed so the client gets all the support and has to do no work for the therapist. The therapist must always be in a therapeutic frame of mind, have positive, unconditional regard, etc.

Who wouldn't love someone who appeared that way?

But the thing is, real love is when you pick someone up from the airport at 2 am and they're grumpy and they snap about wanting noodles and then they fart and it's all gross and you drive them home and make sympathetic noises while they finally get something to eat and spend an hour talking about how horrible their boss was on that business trip. Real love is when you still love someone even when it's all about them sometimes. And therapy is never, ever, all about the therapist. So how would you know?

That's not the same as the self disclosure you claim is the same as knowing someone. It's one thing for someone to say 'I don't like flying'. It's quite different to have been the one coaxing them onto the plane and holding their hand for a flight. Clients are never there for their therapists, so any love they feel is idealized.

The only kind of love a client can really feel is an infantile regression of love for a caretaker figure (because that is the only role a therapist can hope to be realistically cast in, and even then, it's a bit of a stretch.) That isn't adult love. That's desire, and yearning and longing, but it's not the sort of love that real romance is based on.

I also think it's kind of dangerous to confuse having one's needs tended to without the need for reciprocation as some kind of ideal love state. Because that's not what happens in real relationships, and if you try to measure real relationships against therapy, you're going to have a bad time.

This is the most mature, realistic post I have yet to read on Transference on Psych Central.

Love is never painful, that's how you know that "loving" your therapist is actually desire and or infatuation, and not love. (I'm not saying relationships can't be painful at times, of course they are. I'm talking about LOVE.)

Yes, you can love the person--what you know of the person, that is, because truthfully, no one knows his or her therapist (unless the therapist had no boundaries whatever).

Thank you for your response.
I see many people have left disparaging remarks about your comment, but the truth is that the truth hurts.

I love my therapist because she is the first person I ever met who accepts me unconditionally, has great respect for me, and is patient and always kind. I THOUGHT I was falling in love with her, but then I realized I was getting infatuated with an idealized version of someone I didn't really know. Plus, during therapy sessions it is her JOB to be on her best behaviour in terms of being the empathetic blank slate that she is (I'm glad to say she's not a Freudian therapist; she's not a total blank slate).

I'm not in love with my therapist.

I love that she is showing me through her words and actions what I NEED TO DO: learn to love and accept MYSELF unconditionally, with great respect, patience, and kindness, like she does. ONLY THEN will I be able to have a mature, balanced loving relationship.

I also recognized through my infatuation with her that I was perpetuating a habit I created as a kid, a defense mechanism to shield me from the pain that the infatuation masked; the pain from my childhood sexual abuse.

I always got infatuated with people I couldn't have so I didn't have to look at all the pain a relationship would bring up.

So I would seriously ask ANYONE who is experiencing transference to talk openly and honestly about the transference because it's surfacing for a reason.
You all deserve to know why.

Again, thank you for your mature comment.
It's painful, I'm sure, for many to read, but it is the truth.