I’m
a woman who started psychodynamic psychotherapy two
years ago with a woman who I guess is in her early sixties. I’m training
as a psychotherapist. . . . my strongest issue is having been brought up
by a mother with deep depression who wasn’t emotionally there for her
children. It took ages for a transference to develop. A year ago I started
to develop a very positive transference. I started to trust my therapist
more and work on deep issues but I also got the feeling that my therapist
was trying to encourage an erotic transference—the way she looked at
me, interrupted what I was talking about to focus on our connection. She
said several times that the relationship went beyond the consulting room,
that we both had each other on our minds, talked about our closeness and
things of that sort. I began to get strong emotional and erotic feelings.
. . . My response was of absolute devastation that after having told me several
times that she thought about me outside the sessions. . . . I came to the
conclusion that she had been lying to me all along in order to encourage
the transference and felt totally manipulated. When I’ve told her how
angry I was her replies have always been defensive—that . . . we could
meet by chance in a shop or elsewhere etc. The result of it all is that my
trust has gone. Not only has it gone and been replaced by anger but also
by terror. I have had terrifying experiences when she has tried to come close
again—the last one was last week. She said I had to trust her and that
night I had nightmares and woke up with the feeling that someone could pull
up the sheet over my head, put their hand on my face and smother me. It’s
the feeling almost of a baby having been carelessly dropped by the mother
and now every time the mother comes close the baby shrieks out that there’s
no way she’s going to allow herself to be carried for fear of being
dropped again. I have discussed all this with her several times but get defensive
replies and feel she is brushing the issue aside, as if not understanding
why I can’t just move on. At the same time I wish I could trust her;
I need so much to be able to trust her but what comes up in my dreams and
images is the total opposite. I no longer know how to work on this—if
I talk about it again I know I’ll end up feeling upset and spend the
rest of the day upset. It’s come to the point that from several things
she has said, I have the feeling that she’s angry at me for not letting
her be a successful therapist, for not trusting her. At the same time she
has power over me, but a power that I have sometimes felt like a black hole
that could swallow me up. The whole issue is wearing me down and wearing
me out.
When you were told “several times that the relationship
went beyond the consulting room” you were
being groomed in lust, not trained in psychotherapy. So it’s no wonder that you have
felt terrified even to the point of dreaming of the terror. Lust, after all, only
degrades mental health; it has no healing properties.
Your best
recourse is to find a real psychotherapist who can help you understand your
proclivity to being
seduced,
because that impulse to seduction is an
unconscious way to
hide your fears of real
love, just as you desire your mother’s love and fear it at the same time.
It will also be important
to resolve this issue in real psychotherapy so that you can make sure you don’t do
the same thing to your own clients that this so-called “psychotherapist” has done to
you. By this I mean that even if you recoil at the idea of seduction and would not
consciously groom a client as you have been groomed, still that conflict about desiring
love versus fearing love could interfere with the honest intimacy necessary for your
clinical work in the future.
Furthermore, note that you
did not put an end to your distress by terminating the treatment once you perceived
that your psychotherapist was not listening to you therapeutically; instead, you
continued trying to reason with her so that you might “let her be a successful therapist.”
This dynamic resembles a child trying to reason with a mother about her failures in the
hope of helping her to become a successful mother. The danger here is that if you
succumb to the temptation of a child who tries to rescue her mother, you could fall into
the trap of a psychotherapist who tries to rescue a
client.
The defensive replies of
this woman to your concerns are very similar to a mother dropping a baby. That image
that you used of a baby being dropped is uncannily appropriate to your situation. It’s
no wonder that you cannot trust this so-called “psychotherapist.” So, stay away from her
the way that a bat that has just flown out of hell stays away from hell. And then seek
real healing with someone who is competent to do the work.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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