I checked my stats, and there are all these search engine searches in my stats results for about the past year having to do with people looking for info on being in love with their therapist.
The malady seems to be going around…
Personally, I’m highly suspect of therapists. This is because I know a lot of them, and I know for a fact that none of them are any more mentally healthy than most “unhealthy” people I know.
The fact that they are dispensing mental health care to others worries me a little bit. It truly does.
One thing I’m not overly fond of, is the tendency of therapists to simulate parents or significant others, so they can establish an intimate bond with their clients.
It seems downright creepy, in fact. I suspect it happens more with opposite-sex situations — female client, male therapist — but maybe it happens the other way around, too.
Either way, the dynamics are just too weird. Therapists need to get their own lives and stop using their clients as pseudo-lovers. And clients probably need… well… less therapy. Maybe?
The whole business of transferrence and regression raises lots of red flags for me, but it seems to be quite widespread. It’s just not the right thing to do, in my opinion, especially considering that lots of therapists have their own screwed-up issues, and it’s a rare individual who can actually manage their intimacies. When you get into a position of such power and influence over another — which therapists often do — it opens the door to a whole world of hurt that is downright dangerous.
Of course, the therapists get to charge you money for it, and they can always walk away from the situation using their “professional” discretion. They’ve been taught how to ply a powerful trade, but very few clients actually know what they’re up to.
Until it’s too late. And then, well, it’s too late.
Broken Brain - Brilliant Mind 
The short answer: No!
The longer answer: Once upon a time, a couple of decades ago … Yes, sort of, in that weird, gooey transferential therapeutic Krazy-Glue way, I passed a trio of years in a mostly regressed state, crazy-smitten as a two-year-old street urchin with a therapist who wanted me to call her “Mom.”
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OMG – Mom?
That, if you’ll excuse the expression, is crazy.
I once worked with a therapist who had huge issues around having abandoned their family because of career demands. It seemed pretty clear to me, after a time, that they were using their therapeutic relationship with me — if not other clients — as a way to recreate the family ties they had lost.
I stopped working with them. Afterwards, I realized that they’d been working overtime trying to get me to regress. I felt pretty violated, actually.
Another therapist I worked with had huge issues with their older sibling, and since I’m an older sibling myself, they seemed to cast me in the role of their “evil” elder. I spent way too much time deliberately ‘being myself’ and doing damage control around their subtle little digs. I also stopped working with them.
Well, it’s all an adventure, I suppose 😉
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So true Broken Brilliant; it’s just a job and they’re just people.
See Kenneth Pope – What therapist don’t talk about and why: understanding taboos that hurt us and our clients.
It should be the LAW that ALL “therapy” sessions are TAPE RECORDED to lessen the inevitability that, what a clients says, WILL be twisted into something else.
At the very least get copies of the notes taken in every session before you leave the building.
It may come as a great surprise to clients how these professionals are “interpreting and misinterpreting” the information they are being given.
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Wow – there’s an idea – get copies of the notes. I had never thought of that. In fact, it always seemed to me that those notes were sacrosanct — off limits to us. Of course, if we want to be current and responsible with mental health care, as well as medical health care, we’ll get copies — or a tape recording.
I’ll have to check out the Pope book. Sounds interesting – thanks.
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I despise the idiot I seen, He misdiagnosed me and then almost killed me on the toxic meds.
You can and SHOULD requests a copy of your chart. You have to pay for it but it is covered under the FOIP laws. And if you end up sueing these people, your lawyer and the defense will get them.
You can also Request ammendments to the Errors they write or rather the fantasies they spin in those notes.
By law you can record the meetings without their knowledge because the meetings are “confidential” ( they can send it to others -technically with your consent, but if your not on top of it, you’d be surprised where they can end up. A copy of the intake always goes to the “referer’, so keep that in mind.)
You can record and share the recording because the “confidentiality” is YOURS and you have the right to waive it. So getting copies of the session notes and comparing the discrepancies of YOUR words against the writers notes- could actually save your life- by showing that the 2 things have nothing in common.
See Idiogenic harm, deaths- about “doctors” and their “treatments” cause-some 200,000 deaths a year.
Buyer beware and Que Bono (who benefits) should be upmost in the mind of anyone going anywhere to BUY HELP.
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