Do T's encourage attachment?

I don't think she encouraged it, but I do feel somewhat attached to her and she has been really good with trying to normalise my feelings and not make me feel shame for them when I have.

The whole set up of therapy attracts attachement. When in real world would you have anyone attentively listening to you week after week, without their bias getting in the way. People love to be heard, listened to. I do think that not getting attached is unusual. Being understood, being heard is a human need.
Spending a week reading posts in here made me look at therapy differently. I always thought that even in teraphy its two human being talking and thats more important than the therapist figure and me -the patient. Even in my job I am proffesional, have bounderies but ultimately I dont turn into a work robot, its still me. Now, having read so many stories I don't see my therapist as a person like me. I think of her as this distant persona who has been trained to ask questions!

Please don't be disillusioned by the posts you read here. Many people have T's who act like real people and don't act like robots! They just don't post about them because there's no problem! I think it's normal to become attached to your T. Some Ts, like mine, encourage it. I saw other T's who didn't, but my current T does because that's the way she treats my attachment issues. She's not a persona at all. I hope you can look at your T as a real person and not be affected by the negativity in the forum.

My T encourages attachment if and only if that is what the client wants.

I came to my T saying I was looking to do healthy, boundaried attachment therapy, and he absolutely encourages and embraces my attachment.

It could depend on what the therapist (correctly or not) thinks about the client. The ones I have seen have all over-acted excessive enthusiasm whenever they thought I was reaching out to them. "Hurrah we got the avoidant dismissive person to bond with us" sort of thing. They were wrong, but the idea of it seemed to make them feel all smug and self-satisfied.
Perhaps they under-act or discourage those they think are too attaching and over act encouraging those they believe to be not attaching. I think they are arrogant enough to believe they know such a thing and then try to manipulate clients around it. I find them an arrogant lot to begin with. I completely believe they have a therapist persona. I have a professor persona and a lawyer persona. It may have bits of my true personality in there - but I do not treat/talk to/think about etc my students and clients like I do my friends and loved ones. It does not bother me - I paid the therapist to act a role. I believe that is what they do.

I am cross-posting this because it has helped me. If anyone chooses to read it I think they will see that therapist are real people and have crap to deal with a lot like us.

My ex-therapist gifted me the book, "Up From The Pavement: Triumph over Grief and Trauma through Medicine... by a psychologist named Marlo Archer who practices in Arizona. She had a major motorcycle accident 2008. The book strips her raw emotionally and physically with her thoughts and feelings plastered amongst the pages. You get a front-row seat to a psychotherapist's real-life uncensored.

I am or was anti-foul language till reading the first few pages of this book, but this therapist cured me of that. At times it is laughing your arse-off funny and at the same time empathic to what she is feeling both emotionally and physically. It has also helped me cement my vision and feel more confident getting through the processes.

I also understand that she is a very decent therapist. She has given up motorcycle riding at the request of a dedicated husband.

Her website gives background info on her if you are interested: About Me | Dr. Marlo Archer.

I'm sure you'll all be shocked by this analysis, but I think my marriage counselor encourages attachment. Sharing lots of personal stories, reassuring me, being accessible by outside contact. Plus he's apparently psychodynamically oriented, which tends to be of the philosophy that the therapeutic relationship is very important (as I understand it and as current T, who is not psychodynamic, explained it to me). I don't know that he realizes quite how much what he does encourages attachment though...

Current T doesn't seem to really encourage attachment, though he's told me, in response to my asking, if I get attached to him (he knows my history with MC) that we'd work through it, that he wouldn't drop me or anything. He limits outside contact and doesn't divulge that much about himself.

None of my Ts did. They did encourage me to trust them, to contact them during crises but in no way did they encourage dependency or unhealthy attachment.

I would say, they probably encourage a healthy working relationship, and the ideal or requisite degree of attachment is probably proportional in some way to the issues presented by the client.

Tl;dr: it depends!

I just realized my therapist doesn't do a whole lot from the relational perspective. He is psychoanalytic, so the way he does therapy promotes transference, which intensifies attachment needs.

But I found some basic, really simple things therapists do to help forge a bond:

More on synchrony:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...C4907088/#B139

Be a good parent, holding and containing, lending ego, etc.:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330607/

and

People who didn't have these loving things growing up seem more likely to react to these things with intensity aka become attached.

Mine has said I could stand to let myself get MORE attached, I guess since I've historically been more avoidant. But now that I depend on him and email him several times a week, I'm pretty sure he regrets encouraging this.

My therapist is a trauma t who is trained in attachment trauma and developmental trauma. She is pretty aware of my dismissive avoidant attachment style and the reasons for it. She is very respectful of my boundaries. I am very aware of my boundaries too. I am also very aware of her attachment dance and the little things she does to "test the waters" so to speak. I can sense her continually checking the level of trust I have with her and how much I am willing to reveal or needing to pull back.
Yes, I do think she is actively promoting attachment, but I also think she is very wise and knowledgeable about what she is doing in that she simultaneously promotes independence. There is a crucial difference between attachment and dependence which bears mentioning here. They are not the same thing but often get confused. Healthy attachment does not include dependence.

Thank you- these sources were fascinating

Seems to me therapy as a practice encourages attachment, and what individual therapists do is secondary. Even a robotic therapist with "good boundaries" is encouraging dependency by orchestrating such an asymmetrical and potentially regressive relationship. Plus a walled off therapist is liable to induce obsessive fixation in the client as they try to figure out who is this cipher.

The main point to me is that therapists have little or no control over how a client will respond. I mean, do they think they can flowchart some sort of therapy attachment process?

Mine did and it backfired lol. Now I'm obsessed with him. I feel like a leech sometimes... T! T!! Love me!!!

It's not a crime in every state