Newsflash for all therapists of all orientations:  Your clients are generally not stalkers, serial killers or axe-murderers disguised as the depressed, the anxious, the bipolar or the schizophrenic, they are mostly desperately lonely and needy people with compromised interpersonal skills and mostly require a bit of common-sense TLC along with their chosen therapy.

A warm hug can imbibe and instill in your clients a much-needed sense of relief, attachment, security and belonging to a newer and better role-model.  Refusing a hug can so easily retraumatise and regress a depressed, mentally ill client and has a potential and tendency to remind them of the lack of love and affection from their family of origin.

We all know good therapy when we experience it, that warm fuzzy feeling where we are heard, understood, validated and start healing from the inside.  But what about bad therapy, what does that feel like?  And what if bad therapy turns ugly and ends in termination?  Here are five reasons why good therapy turns bad and ends in termination.

1.  Countertransference – when a client triggers the therapist’s issues.

It has been a long established rule of good therapists never to take on a client who will trigger personal issues.  The therapist who has been raped may not be able to cope with the raped client.  The therapist with children who finds out her client is a paedophile or the client who triggers off mother-issues with the therapist who has not resolved her own childhood.  These well-meaning people can sometimes unwittingly do more damage than good if they have not received their own therapy or supervision.

Is there ever a good time to have sex with your therapist?

According to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in Australia who noted that ”in some circumstances, it may be appropriate for a psychologist to have a personal and sexual relationship with an ex-client,” but that it should not start until at least two years after therapy ends.

However, in the case of one particular transgressing psychologist, it wasn’t two years and the client wasn’t a fully consenting adult, he was a brain-damaged sex killer on parole.  Apparently this makes no difference.

I’ve often wondered what being a therapist and giving therapy feels like?  What does it feel like to be on the other side of the couch, the so-called mentally healthy side, slowly building up that all-important trust, respect and safety, dispensing wisdom, experiencing and sharing flashes of insight, feeling the poignant pangs of empathy and for some, being able to conjure up that third person, the second client in the room – the inner child, the little girl/boy who so desperately needs a voice to be heard after being silenced many decades before?

Warning – contains spoilers for Season One of In Treatment.

I have just finished watching Season One of In Treatment, and I have some very mixed feelings about some of the so-called therapy that Paul dishes out to Laura. Therapy sex is an absolute no-no, and the fact that Paul can’t get it up and has an anxiety attack trying to do so doesn’t make it any less unethical, immoral and completely illegal. The therapist who sexualizes his clients, no matter what the provocation (and Laura is a very seductive erotically-transferred client) is committing a crime.

M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, said that if he thought it would benefit his clients, he would sleep with them. But the cure is not through sex, it’s through relationship. The power differential between therapist and client is always there — even after therapy has essentially finished; and no amount of time will ever resolve the fact that one person has major power over the other.

I know sexual feelings, on the part of the client, is not unusual. I am a female heterosexual, who has never had a lesbian affair, having therapy with a female heterosexual therapist, yet sexual feelings (only on my part) arose in my therapy about six years ago. It freaked me out considerably. I was able, after a few years, to raise the subject in the context of “fluid sexuality” that most human beings — even my therapist — experience on a continuum, with heterosexuality on one pole and homosexuality at the opposite end. It is normal for most people to have feelings for the same sex on a sliding scale.

I received the following comment from a reader on my blog post My Psychology of Cancer, and I feel it is worthy and deserving enough to have its own special place. It’s for anyone who has suffered cancer, is suffering cancer, knows someone who has cancer or is looking after someone with cancer. Or for anyone one else who has an open mind and a warm heart.

I too had cancer a couple of years ago. Mine was not one of the cancers that people so freely talk about. It was ano-rectal cancer. People didn’t know what to say or how to react when I told them I had ano-rectal cancer. I could not understand the reaction. As they averted their eyes, I wondered what questions were poised to blurt out of the dropped jaws. Were they embarrassed by the mention of the anus? Were they trying to figure out how I went to the bathroom after surgery? Were they wondering “How does one get ano-rectal cancer?” The answers to those questions set in order are: I bet they were. I bet they were, but I would never say. Lastly, I wish I knew – it, like many cancers, just happens.

Lung cancer they could understand, breast cancer they could understand and even have 5 km runs to support research. But ano-rectal cancer! Who gets that!?  I could see the embarrassment on their faces. Ironically I found myself trying to assuage their discomfort. It was very difficult to explain to people that I had no idea how or when or why, just that it was a frightening diagnosis. I was numb. But decided there was nothing to do but to hunker down and fight…fight…fight! The alternative tact was one I never really gave thought to – which was to ignore it and die.

After the diagnosis, I was coached by everyone, even total well-meaning strangers on staying positive through treatment. I was also given a CD, by a wonderful nurse, herself a breast cancer survivor, who advised that I to listen to this CD every day after radiation as it promised to “guide me through the wellness …

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Five years ago I found out I had cancer and collapsed in a heap of self-pity.

It’s a life-changing diagnosis.  My first thought was to find out how I’d gotten it.  The list was endless.  I wanted to blame something or someone.  Smoking, drinking, prescription drugs, the pot I’d smoked celebrating the start of the Millenium, rampant city street pollution, global warming, global cooling, too much phenylalanine, breathing in petrol fumes at the local garage filling my car up, macramé weaving I did in high school, my mother, my father, too much caffeine or maybe yet not enough caffeine.  Or was it simply a genetic mutation?  I needed a visible enemy, something I could focus and narrow my sights on, vilify, blast out of existence and eliminate from my life.

I was told I would never find a reason, it just was.

So after two weeks of intense depression I made the very counter-reactive decision to embrace, hug and love my cancer.  During that time I had to work out what that cancerous growth meant to me.  I meditated and visualized this bilious, sulphuric yellow, encapsulated, dangling malignant mass hanging off my left kidney, deep south of my heart, with the potential to kill me and learned how to become friends with it.

Twenty-five years ago my husband and I moved into our present home.  We painted the living areas what we thought was a beautiful shade of pale yellow.  When we finished we discovered what we thought was a light, sandy colour had turned our house into a hideous bile-coloured womb, rather like being trapped inside a renal cell carcinoma.

I spent a month living inside those four yellow walls.  During that time I was also going through intensive psychotherapy with a lot of pernicious and invasive transference issues so for me my cancer represented my many bitter and self-hurtful thought processes and self-destructive tendencies.

I smoked during my cancer.  The stress of knowing the worst had happened made me latch onto the cigarettes like a hungry baby onto its mother’s breast.  This is, I believe, not unusual.  A very good friend of ours, a highly academically intelligent man, once …