Posted by Dinah on September 15, 2003, at 8:48:13
In reply to Help......for a newcomer, posted by Emmaley on September 15, 2003, at 5:59:09
Welcome, and I'm sorry for your pain. If you've read the archives of this board, you've probably seen that it's not uncommon (although that doesn't lessen the pain). You've also probably seen me recommend the book "In Session" so often that people are probably sick of seeing it. But really, it's a great book for helping you sort out those feelings.
You are so right that "love" is such an imprecise term. I love my dogs, my husband, my son, pasta, my therapist, my grandma. And it's all so confusing to sort out love sometimes. "In Session" helped me a lot with that. It made me feel comfortable enough with my feelings for my therapist that I can discuss them fairly easily.
But when you think about it, for two hours a week you have someone listening to your every word, and focussing totally on you. Whether it's a man or woman, as handsome as Harrison Ford or resembling a toad, we humans are primed to feel attachment for anyone who treats us that way. But how we feel the attachment depends a lot on us. My personal style is to mold the attachment into a parent/child attachment. So with my dogs and my son I take on the mummy role. While with my therapist and admittedly to a certain extent with my husband, I take on the little girl/daughter role. I rarely eroticize anything. But for other people the attachment takes on a different form.
They say that working through the transference is healthy. But I can imagine times where it might be enormously painful to continue to want something from your therapist that he/she cannot give. Because I imagine it's the wanting something unobtainable that is the painful part. I've long since worked through that with my therapist.
Let's see. I want my therapist to be my mother. So I imagined actually having him as a mother. Shudder. When you imagine through to the specifics, what you want is often not so desirable. I imagined all the real mother type interactions. Nagging over dirty clothes, setting curfews, arguing, him in a bad mood. Because the real thing wouldn't look anything like the therapy situation. There wouldn't be the artificial boundaries that at once make therapy so frustrating and so healing. Once I had imagined the real consequences of what I wished for, being careful to be as realistic as I could, I realized that what I had was waaaay better and stopped wanting some unnamed something more.
I still get a twinge of wishing I were someone real to him. Someone that he cared about as a person, rather than as a client. Someone as important to him as he is to me. But they are just that, twinges.
I really recommend that book, and also that you talk about your feelings as often as you wish. Talking about them in therapy and here on the board releases some of the energy that builds up when you keep them a deep dark secret.
Good luck.
poster:Dinah
thread:260159
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030905/msgs/260182.html