Loving your therapist as being healing or damaging?

both.......

All of the above I guess. I love the therapist because of those qualities they display. Without those qualities I wouldn't feel that emotion toward them. Love is that positive association of internal affection and regard I feel towards people. How intense that feels varies with the person and the relationship.

Like Anne said, I don't associate negative feelings with love. If I have negative feelings, they have a different name. Thus, I don't fear or avoid feelings of love just in case down the road I might experience a loss of that love or that person nor do I avoid a positive feeling for fear that feeling will be negative somehow in the future. I love. And if that person is lost, then I feel sadness and grief. I can still appreciate that love even if that person is gone, and I can feel sadness for the loss of that person's presence at the same time.

I had a therapist really work with me on defining emotions and being specific about them because it helps me clarify my thoughts, feelings, and reactions to events in my life. It definitely keeps me less confused and has helped me with resiliency when life goes awry (which it inevitably does at times). I can experience and honor my emotions without judging them as wrong much moreso than I once did. Love is just one of those emotions.

To me, loving or feeling deeply for my former therapist only hurt me. She terminated me abruptly knowing I had those feelings for her even if my feelings themselves weren't the primary reason.

I think it's to walk on very thin ice to love or having loving feelings towards a therapist who isn't very good at understanding and processing transference.

Often the client gets stuck in transference feelings and left alone within those feelings when the therapist either ends therapy or lacks the ability to work on transference.

I'm left with grief and an even larger mistrust in people than ever before.

Feelings of love toward a person aren't always transference, but certainly that would be a different kind of issue and more complicated. Personally, I've never experienced transference for a therapist, but I imagine it can be confusing and painful, particularly with ill-equipped therapists.

People have different definitions, but idealizing, attachment, and feeling loved by a T because they make you feel good or loved comes from a young place and is transference. I think it is part of the process in some therapies but I consider it transference, not love. It has benefited me in that those young parts of myself were able to express themselves. I feel more of a bond with him now so there is some love there, but it is probably more gratitude and fondness.

Working with a therapist could lead to a mature love, but that doesn't happen until you are separate from them rather than dependent on them. For example, if what a T says in an average mail (or lack of one) can lead to chaos, self hate, or abandonment fears, then you are not separate from the T. Feeling more separate from my T makes me feel closer to him, oddly.

I think it has been healing in a sense that it can result in a better outlook on life, autonomy, distress tolerance, and more internal locus of control. Relationships progress for different reasons. Much of that comes from restructuring and integration work we did, and I don't think all types of therapy offer that.

It is a risky thing to do because the therapist has to be solid, having done their own extensive work. I also think the damaging most likely doesn't occur when one is separate from the T. It's the dependency aspect that makes one vulnerable in my opinion.

Love is a word that can incorporate so many layers, vagaries, and characteristics.

Love can be longing.

Love can be yearning.

Love can be a spark glimpsed, a spark of wanting to live again.

Love can be hope.

Love can be excitement, a spring in the step.

Love can be a fountain of creativity.

Love can be deep, warm comfort.

Love can be compassionate loving-kindness.

Love can be in shared smiles and laughs; even in ‘gallows humour’.

Love can be about feeling met: truly seen and heard.

Love can be holding someone in mind; thinking deeply about them.

Love can be terribly, painfully sad (think of grief and loss).

Love can be a tender, vulnerable sweetness.

And yes, sometimes (but not always) love can be erotic, passionate desire.

https://emmacameron.com/therapy/do-t...their-clients/

Very poetic...

Did you end up giving your T the letter?

Nope I did not send my T anything.

Also seems that that blog post no longer exist on the website. I wonder why?

There are different forms of love, but therapy "love" in my experience is an awful form...

- You have to pay for it.

- Once expressed, it is usually objectified and analyzed, possibly to gratify the needs of a voyeuristic or bored therapist.

- Say the wrong thing, and there is good chance it will result in rejection and/or termination.

In short, I think therapy "love" is always one step away from abuse.

But the love happens even with therapist holding boundaries. Is it their fault? What I do not understand is how they do not know this is going to happen especially if they are trained trauma specialist that understand the attachment disorder that goes along with childhood abuse and emotional neglect. They have GOT to know this is going on with their clients. I do not buy into that ******** of not bringing it up unless the client does. They should be checking in with the client if they are feeling severe attachment and love to the point it causes mental anguish.

This is also a great contention of mine.

I mean does death happen to everyone who undergoes surgery? No but you'd expect to know the specific risks.

I remember my T saying therapy can be intense.

Watching a movie can be intense too.... It doesn't really give the greatest over all picture of the agony that many of us can feel now does it....

The problem is with the relationship itself. I think it has little to do with boundaries or training. Therapists do so much harm because they are too stupid to realize that human relationships are not clinical objects. You can't "manage" human emotions according to theories in a book. You can't just assign someone an attachment "style" and then predict what will happen.

Therapists seduce people, with attention-bombing, body language, tone of voice, implied and stated promises. They dont have the self-awareness to see how weird this and how this affects people.

The problem is therapy, not therapists.

I have had many T’s that I have loved and it has been extremely harmful because they were very much into the power dynamic or used it to shame or manipulate me.

However, I am with a new T (5 sessions in) and there is a lot of love and this time it is OK. It is OK that is there, he is not using it, abusing it or manipulating me with it. We both know that it is part of the process and there are going to be feelings both ways. While we both know and respect the power imbalance in the relationship I do feel that the love is mutual. As I move towards being more whole the love will still be there but the intensity and neediness that goes with it now will dwindle. He is the one T that I have not worried about how damaging the grief process will be when we terminate. I know he will make sure I am ready and have the supports I need and that he will be there for “check ins” or tune ups as needed after the bulk of our work is done.

I can't imagine love in any situation ever being anything but joyful, hurtful, exciting, terrifying, and fulfilling, emptying. I think love is about simply being open to the possibilities of what it can bring to our lives, and accepting it without trying to label or mold it into something is not. This includes accepting the possibly of pain with just as much openness as the joy. It's our fear and unwillingness to be vulnerable that does us in. I think this applies to all love from that we share with our family to that we share with a therapist.

I had a maternal transference (sometimes erotic) towards my CBT therapist for years. It made things very difficult for me. I was putting more effort into trying to gain her approval and attention, than I was into trying to make therapy work.
When I finally understood why I was behaving that way I tried to talk things over with my therapist; but at this point I had already decided that I was going to quit therapy because it was making me more harm than good.
My T seemed to be uncomfortable talking about transference. She said that if I had already decided to quit then there was no reason to talk about anything else. This made me feel ashamed and like I didn't matter.
Being so attached to my T and going through this experience helped me understand myself better; but I had to do all the work on my own. It was very painful and I never want to go through something like that again. It's been almost 2 years since I quit therapy with her, but sometimes I still feel mad and hurt about the way it ended. I also miss her and wish she would come to rescue me sometimes when things go wrong or I'm struggling... But I know this is my inner child wanting a mother figure to protect her.
Idk, if I could go back I wouldn't change what happened because it was an eye-opening experience in many ways... but maybe I would have left sooner. The relationship with my therapist kept me stuck in using self-destructive behaviors for many years as an attempt to cope with what I was feeling. It was counterproductive in many ways.

This. My therapy stopped being therapy and became about the relationship. My ex-T had poor boundaries and it just became talking like close friends. Instead of helping me find a way to fill the void (from childhood abuse/neglect) on my own or through building a satisfying life IRL, she tried to fill that void herself (with our relationship). For awhile, it felt amazing. She would sit next to me and hold me, she would say “I love you,” and say that she would be always be a significant part of my life. Then, she started being inconsistent and self-absorbed. She would say she would do something and then flake. She would spend session talking about her dating life. She would dismiss really significant things that happened to me (like a sexual assault). Because she would tell me she was going through difficult things herself (medical illness, family problems, a divorce, etc), I would stop pushing her to focus on me and stop relying on our sessions to do anything for me. I spent so much time focused just on making our relationship good again. And it was a constant roller coaster. When it was good, it was like getting a high of undivided attention and care. Then, when it was bad, it was like being kicked in the stomach by someone who says they love you. It was confusing. But whenever I would try to talk to her about this and lay out what she was doing, she would gaslight me and make it all my fault. Then, one day, she didn’t show up for session. No note or call. Just a locked door. For over a week, I had no idea what happened. When I finally heard from her, she said she had suffered a seizure from MS and was going to take an extended leave for treatment. I found out, three years later, it was actually a suicide attempt. A bunch of **** went down, she ended up losing her license, and she then became my friend IRL. Several times, I’ve cut her out of my life, let her back in, cut her back out again, etc. To this day, she still says she loves me and has my best interests at heart. I think she has convinced herself that is true, but I’m not sure she knows what love is or what it means to have empathy for anyone other than herself (and maybe her kids). I’ve found the whole experience damaging. Even though I rationally know she is toxic, I still miss that high I used to get from having her undivided attention. It made me feel loved, but I don’t know what it was in reality. She has said “I’m sorry” for not handling things the best, but I don’t think she actually understands even 1% of the damage she caused. I don’t think she has the capacity to understand it.

Oh, and finding a new T willing to work with me to process and heal from this was impossible. No one would do it. They all wanted to report her and would say she’s toxic, but if I wanted to actually dig into why I keep letting her back in my life, why I still feel like I love her after all this ****, or how to heal, no dice. They all cut me off the second I bring her up, change the subject, and want to talk about something else. Their “cure” is moving on without actually working on the pain or doing any processing.

Or they want to process my childhood for the 5,7368 time. But not talk about why I fell for this manipulation as an adult, how to move on gradually, how to respond when she contacts me, or what to do when I feel the desire to reach out.