Has anyone successfully worked through their transference?

Are you older or younger than him. I am 51 and he is like 34 so it is really awkward for me to feel this way. I know age and gender does not matter in things like this.

Yep agree age/sex not matter as my feelings are actually maternal/primary care giver type. So he should be a woman!

But am 42 he's 50 or 49. If it helps until I clarified it, he was like am married. Am like eeewwwwwww. Also he's my doc not therapist to be clear.

But I've had transference to a number of mentor, caring type figures of both sexes but mostly older male over the years- obvs a huuugeeeee hole to fill as it just latches anywhere

My T is a woman of perhaps 45-50 and I feel negative maternal transference to her! Told her girl me views her a mummy but the prickly non trusting version. In email. Never acknowledged! Well she tries to raise it every so often and I blank her.

But will do something like sit in my 10 yr old pose and that is her cue that am interacting as a child. Also talk to her as if it is that part talking so I guess we talk around it.

I see transference as a useful tool in therapy, but not in exactly the way you seem to be talking about it. It's not something I've ever had to bring up specifically, just an interesting lens through which to examine some of my feelings and behavior in therapy.

So it's not like I ever said oh hey Dr. Therapist, I have XYZ transference towards you. I just do what I can to describe how I'm feeling, including how I'm feeling towards him, and what feelings being around him seems to stir up. And then together we look at where those feelings could be coming from, whether that's something about him or something he did, or something from my past and my internal world that's being evoked. Or often a bit of both.

It's difficult sometimes for sure, but it's certainly nothing like an addiction.

In my experience, seeing my former T as a father figure is not the same as a paternal transference. The difference is that now that attachment isn't fueled by needs. The needs were met. So what remains is a mutual fondness, a normalized adult daughter/father relationship. For me it has been one of the rewards of seeing the process through.

I never did. My experience was more like starfishing's. I was open about my feelings as they arose, but it was my T who explicitly brought it up after it had played out for a long time. My understanding is that this is common in psychoanalytically informed therapy: that the T brings the transference into explicit sharp focus only at the point the client is able to reflect upon it from a position of emotional strength, rather than act/express it through unmet needs. That's where the astuteness is especially important, I think. If it's brought out while the needs are still active, the realization that the T can't fully meet them can be too painful to bear. If timed correctly, there is a tinge of sadness or regret at the realization, but it's greatly tempered by the experiential awareness that the caring received is enough.

Just out of curiosity what would it look like for a T to bring up the paternal transference, like what would he say? This sounds horrifying to me, clearly I must not be ready.

So you think the sign that something has been worked through means not needing or wanting therapy any more?

I think I used to think that I would get to a point of saying 'great, the (original) problem is solved, so no more therapy', but I've kind of changed my point of view as things have gone along.

In my therapy we don't really use the word or the idea of 'transference'. Still I have been through positive transformations that have been huge for me and in the context of my life, and the therapeutic relationship has been very important to me. So I am very thankful and I see it as a positive thing generally. I'm also quite comfortable with carrying on seeing my T for many years as long as I can afford it and as long as I find it helpful and a positive thing in my life. I am totally fine with this and I don't really see it as a negative or a sign that something has not been worked through.

My T began very early in our work to tell me that he was having strong feelings - strong feelings of care and protectiveness. He will still bring this up in our work on his own. He will tell me just bluntly mid-session that he's feeling strong daddy feelings or strong protective feelings.

It did and sometimes still does cause me a strange sense of physical pain coupled with longing. It's like care hurts... I want it, but when I encounter it, it feels like too much to handle - I used to describe it like watering a dry plant. If you dump a bunch of water on it at once, the plant simply cannot absorb it all.

Mine just said, in the middle of a very emotional discussion (I don't remember the topic, but it was @ 2/3 the way through a long therapy), "FKM, do you want me to be your Father?" It was said very matter of fact-ly, not at all incredulously. My answer was to deflect him, telling him he couldn't be. His response was to say that was true, that he couldn't be my father biologically. Then he said, "FKM, do you think that means that I can't care about you as a Father?"


And then we talked about how I didn't know much about being fathered, and he shared the fatherly feelings he had for me, what they felt like, and how they affected him. That led to a discussion of the ways in which I showed I was searching to fill the emotional need for a father, why that came about, and how I could satisfy those needs through him. Of course, this conversation was only the beginning, and that exploration deepened for the next few years.

For me the path to resolving an all-consuming therapist entanglement was:

(a) stop using self-defeating and meaningless terms like "transference"
(b) stop buying into industry propaganda about the need to "work thru" something that was conjured up therapy itself
(c) recognize the insanity of the process generally... developing strong feelings of any kind toward a virtual stranger and professional actor
(d) trust myself to sort out what happened

Also, I think just because people can extract a handful of insights or have some pleasant feelings during this process does not make it a good thing, on the whole, nor does it justify that existence of the process.

I agree with this.

I tried to work through “transferences” for many years but my feelings only intensified. I became a full blow therapy addict - complete with compulsive emails, inability to tolerate vacations, constant preoccupation with my therapist, ‘crazy’ responses and reactions, and pretty much total mental deterioration.

The only thing that worked for me was removing the source of my addiction - my therapist. The endless torture stopped but a part of me feels irreparably broken and violated by therapy.

I don't see what could be "worked through" since these feelings are created by therapy itself imo. Every human being on this planet has a hole they need to fill, even the most healthy ones. Therapy seems to often uncover those needs and then magnify them and boom! the client is hooked. I also think some people replace the addiction with a therapist with the addiction of another therapist. They go from one to another chasing the same "high". It took me a while to realize I was in fact addicted to therapy because 1) therapy is never described in this way by mainstream media and 2) I had never been addicted to anything before therapy so it was hard to recognize the effects. When my "supply" was cut off (ie I was terminated) I slowly started to realize what had been happening and the whole thing (therapy) crumbled. I could no longer believe in it and now that the high had worn off I could see the deception and the dishonesty. Therapy holds no interest for me anymore. Ironically I have "worked through it" but not thanks to a therapist, just by myself by questioning the whole thing and by reading stuff.

"All consuming therapist entanglement" is not the same as transference. Anything that results in a feeling of addiction, of life hinges on contact with the therapist, of desperation both in the presence of and away from a therapist, is not transference work.


You all are describing highly dysfunctional relations that are not a part of functional transference therapy with competent therapists. Apples and oranges. Not all therapists nor all clients are suited to transference work, nor is it applicable to all situations. And no, I'm not interested in a debate about the system as inherently dysfunctional, nor of therapists using "transference" to entrap clients, and will not engage in such baiting as that would be a derailment of the thread.

I don’t understand this.

Transference originates in the client. It exists or it doesn't because it stems from unmet needs in childhood. A competent therapist cannot "implant" a transference in a client. There are, of course, incompetent/unethical therapists who inflict all sorts of harm. But to call such experiences "transference" is both inaccurate and misleading.


If a client is engaging in therapy, and the process of that therapy results in persistent feelings of desperation, self harm, life altering obsessiveness, etc--worse than before therapy-- then that's either bad therapy, or inappropriate therapy for that client at that time. Transference has nothing to do with it.

I don't describe my feelings as transference, either. For me the transference happened a long time ago, when T asked if my husband and I wanted to "go deeper" after about 6 mos of successful couple counseling. I said yes because there was part of me that wanted to please him, liked the attention and that sort of thing.

Unfortunately we said yes. That was a bad decision on our parts as it has played out. Each of us had some deep stuff that we were coping with fairly well. The deeper stuff was opening a Pandora's Box. The feelings I have struggled with/still sometime struggle with are intense and painful.
T hasn't bailed on me, continues to be supportive and do his best. I see a second T who is experienced and has specific training with the stuff I struggle with. It is better, most of the time.

I think that a clean break might have been a good idea, but almost 11 years into this, I'm not going to do that. At least not today.

The other thing that I would add is that I think that people who are doing well in therapy don't seem to be on this forum. I do know lots of people who have found therapy helpful and I have had the experience of it being helpful over the years. But the deep, painful dependence on T is not, IMO (or in the opinion of other providers) transference. It is dependence and attachment.

I’m not too concerned about labels.

Bad, inappropriate, etc are all relative, and meaningless when one finds themselves ‘in it’ with very little hope of getting out without serious damage. Until one has suffered through it, it is impossible to convey to someone who hasn’t.

I think many clients are unable to find the line between ‘transference’ that needs to be worked through, and a harmful situation. At what line should a person leave therapy? It seems to me from reading this board that there are not a small number of people recovering or trying to work their way out of extremely challenging situations. Often they are encouraged to ‘talk it out’, ‘work through the hard stuff’, etc. I don’t really know what the right answer is.

I want to comment specifically to this part. Many of us have highly dysfunctional relationships with therapists because we had highly dysfunctional relationships with parents or no relationships with parents. Many of us carry that through to other relationships in our lives or have figured out how to navigate life despite. I was under the impression that replaying these dynamics with our therapist and having corrective experiences is what therapy was all about? Deep healing?

Particularly when therapists advertently or inadvertently try to provoke a parental or authoritative role, it seems to me that dysfunction resulting from a dysfunctional past is inevitable. Is there no help for those that keep forming dysfunctional relationships if such a thing is apparently not ‘normal’? Perhaps not through the therapy avenue, unless one is lucky enough to find a therapist who is truly exceptional.

I actually don't hear much advice on this forum about "working out" issues in the presence of alarmingly negative symptoms. What I see more of is posters who are negatively bonded to Ts they should walk away from, but are too deep in desperation to do so. Assuming no one can understand a situation unless they've experienced it is just another way of staying stuck.


I guess I don't think of terminology as "labels." I think words are important because otherwise there's no chance of shared meaning.

This is exactly the point of therapy. Working out the dysfunctions your life brings to therapy, with a competent therapist, is how therapy can work. A competent therapist doesn't provoke in most cases (there are modalities like Gestalt that are more confronting) . But that storminess isn't the same as dysfunctional therapy. When the therapy itself is causing more problems than it's solving, something is wrong. When the therapy itself is introducing new conflicts, something is wrong. It's not usually so obvious in a single session sort of way, but in an over time sort of way.