Handling the Erotic Transference
Interesting take on Erotic Transference in the female therapist/male client dynamic, but I think there’s a lot here that applies in general. Written by a therapist and provides a glimpse into their perspective, I thought a lot of people would be interested.
Seem to be getting lots of queries about erotic transference, otherwise known as falling for your shrink. Since I specialize in treating men, thought I’d take a crack at the subject from the particular angle of male patient/female therapist.
Male patients – all patients – bring to therapy the gender role expectations, attitudes and behaviors they experience in their other male-female relationships. But because the doctor/patient relationship in psychotherapy is a unique – and often new – experience, male patients often do not know quite how to proceed. And this can make for discomfort difficult to tolerate. For both the patient and his therapist.
In part this is so because there are so few models for an intimate professional relationship. In fact, it’s often rare for a man to have a relationship that is intellectually and emotionally intimate but with no physical/sexual intimacy. They tend to go together for many, if…
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Why keep going back?
***Trigger warning: Religious content, I talk about my Christian faith in pretty specific terms late in the post.
A reader emailed to ask me a question whose answer I thought would make a good topic for a post. So with their kind permission, the question is below, followed by my answer.
I would like to ask how you got through it. I mean when the feelings became so intense with your therapist, how were you able to keep going back? What stopped you leaving?
This is a really good question. There were so many times I threatened to quit, or told BN I wanted to quit. I lost track of how many times I said (often out loud) “I cannot do this anymore, I can’t take it.” Sometimes on the way to therapy. I wish there were a simple answer to this question, but it was, as usual, a complex interplay of a number of factors. Experience, fear, attraction, desire, longing, faith, hope, determination and belief. One at a time, all at once, or some subset were what kept me going. Continue Reading
Silence
I’m doing a shift on the crisis line tonight and someone put up a wonderful quote from Rachel Naomi Remen on the wall. It’s about the power of silence and it’s so good (and true) that I wanted to pass it on. If you have never read anything by Rachel Naomi Remen, may I recommend that you stop whatever you’re doing and buy one of her books? I read her book Kitchen Table Wisdom a few years back and it was incredibly powerful and moving and led to one major breakthrough (I was a business card that wanted to be a marshmallow. See, now you have to read the book to figure out what in the world I’m talking about. ;)). I read it on BN’s recommendation and then brought it to session with 15 different yellow stickies in it. She understands the power of human stories, but the even more powerful effect of having ours heard and understood. Continue Reading
(Highly overdue) Blog of the Year 2012 Award
The very lovely Chatte Nocturne from Not All About Cats nominated me for a Blog of the Year award back in early December and I am finally getting around to acknowledging it. So first, thank you so much Chatte, I was very touched by you nominating my blog and very sorry it has taken me so long to get around to writing about it. 🙂 
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What I missed
Since I’ve been on the topic of how we work through our grief for that which we did not have, I thought I would share some particulars losses I ran into and what was underneath them. As I’ve worked my way through therapy and uncovered the feelings I had buried so long, I also uncovered losses I had not been able to admit, let alone grieve. This is a very personal list. I expect that some of this will resonate with other people and some of it will be not true for them or seem like a significant loss. These are mine, what I needed to mourn, and I again offer the disclaimer that not everyone will need to do this the way I did. But I am hoping by being more specific about some of the issues I faced, that the process might be more understandable, even if my reasons to mourn do not resonate with you. Continue Reading
To Let Go
My first therapist shared this with me a long time ago and I really liked it. I am gratified to realize that I understand it so much better now. Thought this would be helpful for a lot of people.
To let go does not mean to stop caring, it means I can’t do it for someone else.
To let go is not to cut myself off, it’s the realization that I can’t control another.
To let go is not to enable, but to allow learning from natural consequences.
To let go is to admit powerlessness, which means the outcome is not in my hands.
To let go is not to try to change or blame another, it’s to make the most of myself.
To let go is not to care for, but to care about.
To let go is not to fix, but to be supportive.
To let go is not to judge, but to allow another to be a human being.
To let go is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes, but to allow others to affect their own destinies.
To let go is…
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Myth of the Good Client
Interesting read (as always from Martha) on what makes a “good” client.
So you want to be the best, most gratifying client ever? You want to insure that your therapist adores you, always looks forward to your sessions, gets as much out of working with you as you get from them? Thinks of you as polite, funny, intelligent, astute, self-reflective?
All that probably makes you totally anxious, ties you in knots, and blocks your ability to teach your therapist what it is you actually need from them. And what you don’t.
But it won’t make you a good or a bad client.
There are in fact clients that I’ve thought of as “bad clients” – and I’m certain that if you are concerned at all about “being good” that you are probably not one of them.
“Bad” therapy clients are those have presented in therapy with completely ulterior manipulative non-therapeutic motives (See Deliver Us: Thoughts on Evil in Psychotherapy http://wp.me/p1AOzF-74) who want…
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Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
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