Death of a spouse, divorce, moving house and losing a job are four of some of the major most stressful incidents that could happen to you.  I’d like to add a fifth one; and that’s making the decision, or having the decision made for you, to leave your long-term therapist.

I don’t need my therapist anymore for therapy – or survival.  I am able to look after myself and be my own therapist.  I can survive in the big, wide world with all the tools and devices I have learned over the years, yet to move on from my therapist would leave a huge hole in my heart.

The more child-like and dependent I was the more I needed her to stay alive, but the more I grew up and matured in therapy the more I relied on myself and less on her.  It’s not about the therapy itself.  That is the giddy part, growing up and away and moving on.  One can only move on in therapy as one gets stronger and eventually that dependence is replaced with independence.  And as one gets stronger one naturally starts to separate, first at an unconscious level and then one becomes aware that the nature of your feelings are changing.

My therapist, who is a great fan of the Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, has a dog that she loves very much but when he misbehaves or breaks a boundary he is firmly disciplined and because of this he is now a well-behaved dog.  She is pretty much the same with clients who break important boundaries as well – as I found out recently.

I broke a boundary when I asked her an intrusive question.  Seeing as I am about to embark on a career as a peer support worker, my personal boundary issues have to be exemplary so she thought she would, not unkindly, teach me a lesson; an experiential one and a message I am unlikely to forget.

I was in session last week with my emotionally and socially intelligent therapist learning important role-modelling and personal negotiation skills when my mobile phone started to ring.  I swore loudly, threw my arms in the air, jumped up, and raced out the door and into the courtyard.  I was expecting a phone call to tell me whether or not I had a much-wanted part-time job.

Only for me it wasn’t someone giving me potential employment – it was a life or death experience.  If I got the job I would be ecstatic and if I didn’t get the job I was going to throw myself under a train.  One would make me feel very important and the other would annihilate me.  If I didn’t get the job, I would just keep walking to my car, without explanation because the alternative was to tell my beloved therapist I had failed – yet again.   I just could not face that.  Ever.

Not that I overreact or anything.

Ever since I can remember I have had major issues with food.  This was not a problem till I was ten and my mother told me I was going on a diet.  I promptly went to the shops and bought a bag of lollies.

By the time I was fifteen I was medically obese, then I discovered bulimia for a short while.  At 22 I revisited bulimia with its partner in crime laxatives, lost and regained half my body weight within two years.  I went up and down for the next twelve years and developed type 2 diabetes.  Then the lap band was invented and over the next ten years had two lap bands installed, followed by numerous cosmetic surgeries, and two lap bands removed due to slippage and erosion.

This was followed by several hospital stays for abdominal pain resulting in a small bowel obstruction operation.  My pancreas died completely and I was now insulin dependent and whenever I moved my insides swirled around like a sack of goldfish and I regained back half my body weight.

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.

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.

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?

There are some things I need to be taught, that I cannot learn for myself.  If I had my way, I would mire myself in binge-eating, TV marathons, smoking, drinking and drug-taking all enveloped in a toxic bubble of anxiety and depression.  It’s an easy, seductive path I get lured down occasionally.  But with help and inspiration from others, especially my therapist, I can pull myself out of that hole and into life.

Here are five things I have learned from my therapist that I could not teach myself.

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?

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 …