COUNSELING/THERAPY

can it help your love search?

Part 2

 If you are searching for love or are disappointed in your love life, or have a low-self esteem (or simply because your therapist has chosen a certain therapeutic path), you may run the risk of 'falling   in  love' with your therapist . I write this in brackets because, no matter how strongly you may disagree if you feel this right now for your own therapist, you have definitely NOT fallen in love with your therapist. It's  something else. Be aware, please! Your feelings may be strong, but they have nothing to do with love. Sometimes it's 'transference'*, sometimes it's 'displacement'   **, sometimes it's just that your therapist is acting in a way you would like your potential boyfriend/girlfriend to act. He/she is kind, attentive, interested in everything you say, makes you feel like a sexy bombshell even, or/and allows you to act, completely freely, in a way in which you'd never acted/expressed yourself for years, and so forth. Who would not want this from his/her boyfriend?

But it is his/her JOB. This is what they are trained to do. They are WORKING. Moreover, and this is KEY, you do not know anything about them. If they are any good, they will have said very little about them to you during your sessions (by the way, if they talk more than you do during a session, especially if they talk about themselves, they are NOT good therapists, and you must leave, no matter how interesting they may sound - unless they pay YOU and you don't mind wasting time!). So, if you know that little about them, how can you truly love them? What's often happening is that you just love how they make you feel. That's it.

If you feel stuck in this 'emotion', tell your therapist. Disclose your feelings to him/her. Sometimes it's a BRIEF part of therapy. However, if you feel 'in love' with them for more than a VERY SHORT time, if such feelings have not faded and your therapist has not helped you 'out of them', you absolutely must seek another therapist. Do not waste time, do not waste your money; you are not 'getting better' (even if you may feel temporarily elated - who wouldn't, elation is what you initially feel when you are attracted to someone for whatever reason). Wise up!

It's even worse, and you are at even greater risk, if your therapist appears to reciprocate those feelings. She/he may be experiencing what they describe as 'counter-transference'*** or, simply, they may have 'lost their ways' and become emotionally involved. Again, I would recommend that, rather than getting stuck in a therapy that's going nowhere but rather making your life even more complicated, you find another therapist, even the same gender, and let him/her help you out of it.

Yes, you have guessed it! I experienced this myself. And let me tell you, I now regret having spent all that time (and money!) with someone who wasn't concentrating appropriately on helping ME. He kept on reassuring me that it'd get better, but it never did, not whilst I was seeing him. Now I know that he was actually prolonging it all for either his own emotional satisfaction or because he'd become lost himself in a web of emotions, for whatever reasons.

Ironically, even if I'd thought it'd take a gigantic effort to 'fall out of love' with that therapist, it was in fact a very easy step: it only took two sessions with my new (and last!) therapist to completely wake up from that 'trance'.

So, if you find yourself 'in love' (or rather, in 'trance') with your therapist for too long and the two of you can't work it out in a way that helps YOU, find another one, same gender than the previous one even, and tell him/her what happened. If the new therapist is any good, you'll be out of that 'trance' in a very, very short time; you will feel liberated and much, much happier. It was the best thing that happened to me and, ironically, the first step to understanding where I'd gone wrong all my life with regards to boyfriends! It was as if I'd opened a secret door.

Let me tell you this, which is also what I was told by the 'good' therapist: once you have opened the 'secret' door to a happier life, you never go back. You never get 'worse'. You can only get better!

 ** The concepts of 'transference', 'projection' and 'displacement' are explained by various sites on the Internet; you can 'google' Wikipedia or any good dictionary. You don't have to really know what they mean in detail, but you can always ask your own therapist too. I will soon write a simple explanation so check again in the coming weeks. Knowing what they mean helped ME understand how I was applying these 'processes' to my 'enamourments'. A real-life example well worth reading is described here. 

*** Counter-transference is, in very simplistic terms, when your therapist becomes emotional involved with you (they 'fall in love with you'); sometimes they are reacting to your own 'transference' and become entangled in those feelings.  I have read that the best psychologists avoid transference techniques especially if they can recognize that the client may not be the best candidate for them.  Unfortunately, some counsellors and therapists love the powerful feeling of generating transference and, even if their intentions may be good ones, they overestimate their own abilities and think they can handle it.  

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