Telling your therapist how you feel about them...

[UnicornSightings]

So, have you seen your therapist? how did it go?

I have, just a bit ago. It went really well! I had a list of things I was ashamed of and ended up talking about all but 2 of them. Like I didn’t hand it to him, I looked him in the eye when we talked about it. I was so proud! It felt so scary until I started and then the shame that I was expecting just never came. I talked about feeling jealous of his other clients or people in his life and about how I want to bail so often and we formulated a plan to not be able to do that over email but in person since I turn him into another person outside of session (the negative transference can go crazy at times), we talked about something I was gonna day a couple weeks ago but didn’t cause I got scared and that went pretty well. I talked about wanting to be his favorite and it was all just taken really well! I’m so glad I went.

 

[UnicornSightings]

I think the only way around this is through it. You know changing therapists only prolongs the process. Attachment wounds can only be healed in relationship. I know adding attachment stuff to trauma work is frustrating but that IS the work right now. Along with the other work. In my experience it goes hand in hand.

I have had to be honest with my T from the start, telling her how much I hate feeling like I need her, feeling like if I’m more vulnerable I’ll feel more attached and how uncomfortable that is. How I fear I’m a burden and she hates seeing me. It took about two and a half solid years of telling her that stuff and now that I’m three years in I don’t have any issues thinking I’m a burden or that she hates seeing me. But that resolved itself only because I was honest all the time and she reassured me all the time.

Now it seems like I need reassurance in other areas. But they’re more directly related to trauma and not our relationship per se.

One way I know the attachment is working itself out is that I used to feel super needy when she would go away. Now I don’t. I feel like she’s still there and she still cares and I don’t NEED her every minute. This is the way normal attachment works in infancy. And we have to go through the same steps now, to get there. But it won’t work itself out if you don’t get the support you need to help you get there. For me, because I was honest and told her “I feel like you disappear when I’m not with you. And every session I feel like I have to start over because you feel like a stranger,”she started touching base randomly through the week in various ways. It helped so much that now I don’t need it nearly as much.

This is the work. Don’t run from it. Taking a break will make it last forever. I know it’s painful and embarrassing and difficult. But when you feel that part of the relationship ease a little, it will all be worth it.

It’s very comforting to hear that you were able to work through it! I asked my therapist about attachment and his experience with it (cause I feel like a freak) and he was so reassuring that it was completely ok. I said a lot of stuff I was afraid to and I did it with relative ease once I started. I guess it really does pay to have a good relationship with your t!

 

[UnicornSightings]

HI UnicornSightings,

There are tons of informatoin about erotic transfernece and it is almost as if everybody feels this and somewhat either deals with direclty or they deal it it outsdie of therapy in more mindful and here and now thing.

So far, I do not have attachment issues with my therapist (knock on wood) but I did have a very serious attachment issues in the past...I was like a feral cat or a squirral! in and out of intimate settings...no wonder I did not bother therapy in my younger days.

Now, you are getting a lot of information from others who have exactly same experience but I want to add one thing. first I hope you read about this phenomenon so you are educated about it. The more you read, the more you will feel you are not alone! or unique in this and see how others have come through. Another thing you could do (if finance allows) is to see you old therapist for one time only (if the relationship was not severed) since you are no longer feeling that way and find a way to deal with this from another therapist. Another way and the way I deal with anything uncomfortable whether it is here and now or my trauma is I call it process. Let us talk about the process and the frame of therapy and my feelings here and at the same time, I have my adult side in the room and add, please note this is my feelings and I know rationally and logically you are my therapist and I am not looking for relationship with you BUT I have these urges. Please help me deal wtih it.

You are personalising it but yet you are owning it. What you need to come to realize is these are YOUR FEELINGS. as noted you had them before and you will after. So you need to keep saying that. I am jealous of your other clients, I know I am adult and you are my therapist but I feel that way...you can even go further for yourself and find where this is coming from by adding, is it possible I am having these urges because my mother or father or sister did not love me and I wanted them to love me and they ignored me and showed love to my brother or sister or whoever?

One of the way to get over these feelings are to dissect them and see where they are coming from.

Just remember: you are not in love with the therapist. If he says to you today, OK client let us get a hotel, you would run or be scared.

I find you want to focus on these feelings but a better and more productive way to deal with them is to focus where are they coming from? Who rejected your love as a baby? Who are you trying to reach but maybe was busy or abusive or sick or depressed and did not deliver this love to you? You are seeing that person in the therapist.

you can even say to the therapist, I am very sure you are not in love with me and if you were, that would not be good. Say it out loud to yourself and say it to him but I am confusing my baby love to you.

I have issues with hate and trying to hurt my therapist. Imagine! telling my therapist, I want to hurt you so bad but I know I know it is my mother who I really would have loved hurting!
saying to a person I love you but I am sorry it is really the love I had for my father or mother is (of course my opinion) much easier than I hate you and want to hurt you.

PS. I did hurt my therapist by cutting the time to twice a month! sabotage myself much? I live and learn!


I hope this gives you some food for thought.

Thank you, Grit! What you said has given me a lot of food for thought. Gonna chew on it for awhile.

 

[ShadowWolf]

Good job bringing it up and talking about it! I know how hard that is.

 

[Muttly]

That's fantastic. You were super brave and it sounds like you had a great conversation

 

[lux.]

It does sound like you were really open and honest and that takes a lot of guts when it is about something you are very ashamed of.

I don't talk about my relationship with my current therapist pretty much ever, but the last therapist insisted we talk about it pretty much all. the. time. I hated it, and at first I resisted it, but I guess my attachment to her got so intense that I realized I really needed to talk about it. I dealt with it first with another therapist I saw when I was inpatient for like a month or so. It helped to first sort it out with someone neutral.

I didn't have any erotic transference with her, but I kind of viewed her as a mother figure, I think, and wanted a lot of attention from her. I emailed her a lot. She said it was okay, but that made me very ashamed of myself. Having any attachment to anyone really makes me ashamed, so this was especially difficult since she wasn't really a person in my life, just someone who worked for me, essentially.

Once she apparently started listing ways in which a person could feel about a therapist, and the first one was they could feel attracted to them. I guess I thought she was saying that I was attracted to her, and I just dissociated the entire rest of the session so badly that I didn't really hear any of it. Apparently she kept on telling me that she did not think I was attracted to her, but it just went in one ear and out the other. I couldn't really talk to her the following week. I had two therapists at the time, so I talked to my other therapist about it, and was able to calm down enough about it that I could talk to the first therapist about it the next session...and discover that I had been freaking out for two weeks for no reason.

Like someone else said, it does really help to have another therapist to talk to when attachment stuff gets really rough in therapy, but in the end you do have to go back to the original therapist and talk about it with them in order to really work it through.

I hope you can continue to talk openly to your therapist about your feelings about him. It should be an integral part of therapy for everyone, not just after struggling with it. Transference can interfere with things, but talking about it can really illuminate some of our deepest issues.

 

[DharmaGirl]

My therapist now made a really good point when she told me that she wanted me to be able to depend on myself. My long time therapist, who's gone, had a way of getting people to depend on him so that they weren't helping themselves. I would tell him that I felt like the middle monkey in the experiment where there were 3 fake monkey mom's and 3 babies. The first fake mom ignored her baby, the second was warm and snuggly until some spikes came out of her randomly, and the 3rd was always warm and snuggly. The middle baby had disorganized attachment and that's how I felt about him. He would metaphorically snuggle me, then once a month or so say something mean and stabbing. It left me worse rather than better. I now have a therapist that puts everything on me, so I don't feel I have to please her, or make her like me. I can work on the issues at hand.

 

[Missycat]

Well done and good for you for talking to your t. Im pleased it went well and you got the outcome you are comfortable with.