Struggling With Sexual Transferance

[kilted]

Transference is the meat of many humanistic therapies..... to avoid talking about it is a form or transference in itself.

There are stages in therapy... initially there's forming the therapeutic relationship....which is often combined with psycho-education. Then there's a process of building awareness and deepening trust and working on "symptom relief". As this process moves forward some therapists move into exploring transference and counter-transference.

This isn't something that all therapists are happy doing, however many therapies assert that without exploring transference the healing process isn't deep enough to give long term relief.

Erotic transference goes both ways. THere's a lovely article by the UK therapist Helena Hargaden describing her erotic transference with a male client and how this helped guide her work with the client.

Exploring transference is about exploring and then naming that which is normally out of awareness and unsaid. It is very powerful, but needs considerable levels of trust and safety to explore. Unfortunately my experience has been that few recently trained therapists have been through the training required for this kind of work.

 

[lostforgottensoul]

I have been with my therapist for 2 1/2 years and we have a good relationship but I am so scared of ruining that.

I don't think you will. I still have sexual fantasies about my therapist, mostly at night when i do the majority of maladadtive daydreaming to try to go to sleep and he says its a way i make myself feel safe at night. He has never said its bad or to stop doing it.

I don't want to tell him that I found him on facebook because I don't want him to think I am invading his privacy, have crossed some line of acceptable behavior or some other thing that changes how we interact in our sessions.

I both googled and looked on facebook for my therapist. I did it out of curisoity really but a while back in the studies area on here there was a study of googling/searching online for your therapist so that doesn't seem uncommon at all.

It's not invading privacy, in my opinion, unless you like go where he goes or something like that. Like if I went to my therapist's church (something I wanted to ask him if I could do but never did as I realized that was a boundry) but something like that is invading privacy. You have no privacy online so if he has a facebook profile that isn't set to private or has work online, it is meant to be found or not a private thing so thats not invading privacy in my opinion. If you friended him on facebook that would be trying to move the theraputic relationship to more of a friend relationship so thats why my therapist has a rule of never allowing current or past patients to friend him.

None of which do I think would change your relationship one bit because it is all very normal therefore I am positive your therapist has had it happen many times before and has dealt with it all before. But I get the fear as I had the same one. Today I tell him everything and sometimes thats TMI and sometimes we will laugh about it and sometimss he will stop me and advise me its getting a bit TMI (in a nicer way) but I am no longer afraid to tell him stuff. My fear was of him ending sessions as thats happened 4 times before and just that fear of abandonment plays a huge part there. It doesn't today.

Now I eased into it so i didnt just out all info at once. I sort of tested him with a lesser thing and sort of poked him to see if he would leave. So thats how I did it. He didnt know everything for about 5 or 6 yrs so it was a slow process and i imagine it will be for you as well but if he has been in this career for a long time then I assure you he has heard it many times over.

And none of which should you be ashamed of.

Gentle :hug:s as you figure this out!