Posted by allisonf on March 24, 2002, at 19:38:18
In reply to Re: In love with my therapist, posted by bonnie_ann on March 24, 2002, at 12:01:33
Thanks for your replies, Dinah and Bonnie. I appreciate all your thoughts…
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like my therapist and I hadn’t really talked about this quite a bit. We have discussed my feelings at length and how they relate to my personal issues & other real life relationships I have had. I have an enormous “need for approval” thing going on and I have always seemed to get involved with these older men mentor types who are somewhat emotionally inaccessible to me (father figures maybe?) (with the exception being my husband who is neither older than me nor emotionally inaccessible—go figure?!). I think that is in part what is going on with my therapist. She is emotionally inaccessible to me in a lot of ways (b/c a good therapist tries to keep his/her “stuff” out of your session, right?) and I am dying for her to think of me as her special, favorite client—better than all the others. I think these feelings are happening now, b/c I have been trusting her more fully and going farther with her than I ever had before.
I do agree that if I can really focus on my real life and the benefits that this experience, once resolved, will have on my future relationships, I will be better for it, but…I think my problem is that knowing this still doesn’t seem to stop the instinctual, rather infantile, regressive feelings that I am having—it’s like I can’t seem to reason my way out of feeling this way. It’s got that obsessive, infatuation quality and part of me doesn’t want it to stop. I think the real difference will be that I am ultimately not getting anything back from her for my efforts and energy (unlike the previous relationships with men) and eventually I will just forget about it. But until then…I have no one to talk to about it/her!! (As you can imagine, this isn’t really my husband’s favorite topic!) Dinah, my therapist and I did specifically discuss whether to keep discussing it…and just last session, she said that she thought it would be better to not discuss for awhile, as it was causing me so much agitation (I was feeling so much shame from feeling this way, it was making therapy difficult), but I think I am like you, Dinah, in that if I don’t completely analyze it then there is no way to move past it. Even with a full analysis I’m not sure…so, given that, do you think I should just be assertive and say that I need to discuss it more?
And as for the sexual feelings, I agree with you both that it is probably an interpretation of the strong emotions I am having. It’s true that the fantasies about her that move me most are not sexual, but more maternal in nature. Dinah, I just ordered that book you recommended “In Session”. I haven’t done a lot of reading on the therapy process or transference, so I am eager to see what the author has to say.
Thanks again for all of your helpful thoughts.
Allison
poster:allisonf
thread:20769
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020320/msgs/20792.html