Thank you for your response - very thought provoking. It's so hard for me to see this as wrong as I am convinced I can do this in a therapeutic way. My normal me does not sexualize relationships at all but the times in my life this trauma has come up, yes, I use sex to connect and save me from isolation of PTSD.
I have sexual trauma from a 'care taker' sort of...I was hurt by a very violent person as a young adolescent and I actually ran off with him for over a year. It's very confusing. I had desire to protect him and I enslaved myself to this violent crazy person. I can't really explain it well. It's nuts.
It's not crazy or nuts. It's trauma bonding. It's how someone survives, especially if they are young. Think about Stockholm syndrome - that is an extreme example of trauma bonding. When someone who is taking care of us when we are young also abuses us, the abuse and the need for care and affection get all mixed up with each other. In order to get basic developmental needs met and to actually NOT go crazy, many kids and teens (and even adults) will become super attached to their abusers. In fact, abused adult women really struggle to leave abusive partners a lot more than women who are not abused. When good feelings are experienced with terrifying ones, it gets all encoded into the brain and what we need on a very basic and fundamental level.
I am either so deep in a fog and disconnected from him that I feel alone and isolated or I feel desperate to sleep with him so I don't slip back in the fog.
Feeling these feelings only becomes dangerous when we act on this kind of stuff. But the fact that it is coming up is a sign your brain is trying to work through the trauma of the past. It is either dissociated or you want to have sex with your T, which is about as close of a childhood caretaker as one can get in adulthood. To now have this desire with your therapist is not a bad sign. It simply means your brain is trying to work through the past. Right now, you only know the path of sexual connection in an unhealthy way as the path out of the fog and terror. There are other ways. That's part of healing.
My therapist and I talk about traumatic transference of all types all the time. With a previous therapist, I had a huge desire to have a romantic relationship with her, and she was gay, and I was not, but I actually started to think maybe I was gay or bisexual. It was so confusing and it seemed so so so real. I wasn't in love with her, but I still wanted to have sex with her.
I finally had the courage to talk about it, and in time, I realized I was wanting sex with her wasn't about her, or even the touch she could provide. It was about what I didn't get in the past, what terrified me in the past, and a common draw for survivors to reenact childhood trauma.
Instead of sex, we worked on connecting without the sex, feeling safe and grounded without sex.
It's SO convincing that sex will make this therapeutic relationship better. I can't believe not one person on here feels this could possibly be true.
Lots of people actually think sex with their therapist will help. Sometimes even therapists think it - and even though they are TRAINED to never go there, in the US, they still back it up with pretty strong legal prohibitions because even to a therapist, it can seem so convincing.
Sounds like I should just ask him if he'd like to have sex with me to even see if that boundary is there.
This would be a good thing to ask if you are testing out where his boundary is. Even better to ask him if/when he would ever cross that boundary. If he suggests there is any chance at all that he would ever take a client up on any sexual advances EVER, then it's time to RUN.
If you feel at all dissociated, ask him for his policy on sexual contact with clients in writing - you could even say it casually like, "can you write that down for me so I don't forget?"
His response should be that regardless of any feelings he may or may not have for any client, he would never ever engage in sexual contact or sex with a client. Every therapist I have seen has always included a statement in their mandatory state disclosures about how it's illegal to engage in sexual activity and where to report concerns. What is required in your state may differ, but the principle remains the same that he should be able to adamantly declare that he would never have sex with a client.
He asked me what I would do if he came on to me once. I was pretty dissociated when he asked and so it's hard to know if I was understanding him well.
He asked you that? That's another odd and very concerning comment. I could see how a therapist might ask this in order to help a client role play saying no to the therapist, but that would be really weird and super inappropriate to do when the client is so triggered already that they are dissociative.
To better understand why you feel the way you do, and to know you are not alone in feeling this, these are two of the best articles on erotic transference and general transference that I have read:
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/erotic_transference.htm and
Set your inner child free!
