Letting go of the fantasy of a post-therapy relationship with your beloved therapist means you are ready to move on from the transference.  When your mind starts to shift from an enmeshed relationship with another to a singular meaningful relationship with yourself where the focus is now “me” and not “we” it signals a profound shift in cognitive thinking.

There is much self-examination and reflection and untold pain that comes with this.  Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living and I have explored every possible nook and cranny of my inner life.  Letting go of someone you love is the hardest part and this creates a vacuum which needs to be filled with something that is just as meaningful.  Never take a crippled person’s crutch away from them unless you have a replacement that is equally as effective.  But before you do that, you need to reach into all corners of transference options and the therapist who is willing to explore every aspect of your attachment to him/her and their own considerable counter-transference issues and/or attachment to you is doing themselves and their client a huge favour. 

In Greek mythology, there is a story of the Sirens who lured sailors to their death with a bewitching song.  The Sirens lived on an island surrounded by large, sharp and dangerous rocks. They sang so mellifluously and in such an enchanting manner that sailors were drawn to the island where their ships were dashed against the rocks and they all drowned.

Jason and the Argonauts were saved from them by the music of Orpheus, whose songs were lovelier.  Odysseus and his men escaped by tying themselves to masts and placing wax in their ears so they could pass through unscathed.  It is said that the Sirens themselves committed suicide after failing to attract and entice the men to kill themselves.

In the past I have been tempted and drawn by the seductive siren call of suicide.  I now realize it is more of an attempt to relieve myself of the excruciating pain of mental anguish rather than a wanting to end my existence.  Life has always been precious to me, but this siren call to suicide happens every time the pain of life is greater than my perceived ability to cope with it.

Sometimes, women who did not connect, attach and receive the right sort of emotional nurturing and sustenance from their mothers as infants and children need to have a non-physical “love affair” with their therapist in order to feel experientially the unconditional love of another who represents a mother-figure.

Even if you have a romantic partner you connect with, sometimes this is not enough. This is not something that is taught in “therapy school” and certainly not in Universities.  It is more intuitive and based on the therapist’s personality, and it goes a long way towards healing a wounded soul.

Over the past few months your therapist has put on weight.  All around her middle.  In the back of your mind you are thinking, “For goodness sake, go on a diet, and get some exercise.”  At the rear end of the back of your mind an idea is forming that is so reprehensible it gets snapped shut before its presence is fully comprehended.  For some even when your therapist is nine months pregnant it is possible not to acknowledge what is blindingly obvious.  Your therapist is about to have a baby very soon and it’s not you.

My therapist had children before I started seeing her so it has not been an issue for me.  What was an issue was when she got a pair of dogs and I thought they were getting more attention than I was.  And I was right; they are a pair of pampered pooches.  Thank goodness she was never pregnant when I was a client.  I would not have handled it well.

When you trip over and hurt yourself the narcissistic mother will sneer in a condescending voice, “Get up, you’re embarrassing me,” and the therapist would say in a tender dulcet tone, “Have you hurt yourself, can I give you a hand?”

While it’s a no-brainer that many people seek therapy for childhood psychological injuries, what is it about therapy that actually heals?  What therapy works best, CBT, DBT, Gestalt, REBT or supportive psychotherapy?  Do the therapist’s educational qualifications have any bearing on outcome?  Do male or female therapists heal clients quicker?  Or is it the person of the therapist who connects with the client that has the ultimate healing power?

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.

Transference can be the duct tape that binds the psychotherapy universe together.

One of the interpretations of my mostly positive, idealizing transference was to use my therapist as a role model. This is similar to Social Learning Theory where people can learn new behavior through reinforcement, punishment and observational learning and are then more likely to model, imitate, and adopt the behavior themselves. This occurs through four stages; close contact, imitation of superiors, understanding of concepts and role model behaviour.

Albert Bandura, expanding on this theory, studied patterns of behaviour associated with aggression by conducting the Bobo doll experiment in 1961. Seventy-two 3-6 year olds were divided into two groups. Two thirds were placed in a room with an adult and Bobo the doll where the adult hit and kicked the doll and the other third was placed in a control group. In a nutshell, Bandura found that the children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to act out in physically aggressive ways than those who were not exposed to the aggressive model.

So if in therapy I am exposed to someone who deals with life by displaying good manners and an unruffled aura in a situation where appalling manners and a decidedly undignified process of behaviour is apparent; then by the wisdom of social learning theory, good role model behaviour by my therapist will begat new thought processes, schemas, beliefs and behavioural patterns by me, the emotionally-dysregulated client. A classic case of monkey see, monkey do.

For me, mirroring this process was at first largely unconscious in the real world until I related the stories in therapy and realised I had well and truly kept my wits and composure about me. Similar situations would then compound on themselves. As well my therapist would tell me personal stories of adverse situations where clarity and coolheadedness were required. In a similar situation where I would explode, burn my bridges and later have serious regrets, she would be able to stay calm, centred and (most importantly) in control – move on, regret nothing and remain the person she always was.

When I deliberately started to imitate her behaviour, after a …

Yesterday my family enjoyed the company of my mother and her husband. I made the effort to organize and cook a special dinner party because she, along with the help of my daughter, had made a valance for my lounge room curtains. My mother and I had a fabulous time reminiscing about our parenting skills (or lack of them) both when I was young and when my children were young. The conversation flowed freely and laughter was the order of the day.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I was looking after a newborn baby. I was trying to wash him but lacked the necessary skills. My mother very gently took the baby from me and sat under the shower naked and washed herself and the baby. I was the baby and I was also the anxious mother and my mother was herself. It was a very peaceful, serene dream and I woke up bathed in warmth, love and contentment. This is the sort of dream I usually have about my therapist.

But this time it was about my mother, the woman who gave birth to me as opposed to the woman who does therapy with me. The sole reason for seeing my therapist was always to reconnect with my family, my husband, my children, my work colleagues, my friends and most importantly my mother. Transference and dependency are side effects of therapy I had no idea existed all those years ago. Side effects which have worked better than the actual cure itself.

I’ve had a lot of criticism leveled at me on this website for my transference and dependency needs for my therapist, but these two phenomena were always meant to be temporary states of mind designed to get one in touch with, and resolve, childhood issues. I know not everyone has completion and closure of the stuff of their formative years, but I believe I have. My heart goes out to those who are permanently scarred from experiences far worse than I have ever suffered.

My mother is a good woman who, for all her flaws and faults, loves me dearly. Over the years we …