Are the feelings for my therapist normal? Yes, here’s what you can do.
If you have been in therapy or know anyone who’s been in a therapeutic process, you probably are familiar with the idea of a special bond between the patient and therapist. When it comes to being a patient, it’s very likely for you to start having some feelings or thoughts for your therapist, and not all of them will be precisely positive — some might even lead you to try to abandon the process, whereas some others might even make you blame the therapist for your disgrace, or, the opposite, feel like looking for his/her constant approval. At first glance, this might sound like a very inappropriate thing to happen; you might even feel ashamed or uncomfortable to even admit it to yourself, or, worse than that, to open up to someone else — especially the therapist!
Well, turns out this is more normal than you could ever imagine. When you decide to start a therapeutic process, the bond you build with your therapist is based on trust and hope, of course, but also on a great variety of emotions and memories you bring to your therapist every session. As the process continues, many of those emotions get mixed with the expectations of what you think the therapist should do about them. Suddenly, you find yourself feeling things that can range from a great attachment, admiration or something similar to love, to resentment, anger or even hatred, just to mention some.
Why are you feeling this? In therapy, we remove, stir and dig deep down into your past, which results in many emotions that seemed to have been buried yet suddenly become active again. The figure of the therapist becomes, thus, like the joker in the deck of cards: he can somehow reincarnate and substitute many other significant people in your life. As a result, many emotions that were originally attached to those people become somehow addressed to the therapist instead; the expectations you had from other people are put onto the therapist, the feelings you once had for someone are present now in your process, and all this seems so confusing that you might start having all kind of reactions: getting frustrated or discouraged to continue, wanting to end the process; or, to the contrary, feeling attracted to your therapist or even building a certain dependency to him.
First of all, do not panic. As stated before, this is a completely normal process that any well-trained therapist is familiar with. There is no need to hide it from him/her. Instead, you might want to talk about it to find out what scenes or emotions you are trying to heal there. Your therapist will guide you to understand those feelings better and address them to move in the right direction.
There is no shame in having positive or negative feelings for your therapist, but it is extremely important to recognize them, admit them, and process them together so that they don’t become the perfect excuse for you to sabotage your therapy.
Deciding to start therapy is not an easy thing, as it is not easy to stay strong when being asked to confront many emotions and open up wounds in your past. And, while it is extremely common to find excuses like “I don’t have time”, “My therapist was mean to me”, or “I feel ashamed to say what I’m feeling” to interrupt and abandon your process, it is also remarkably important that you find the courage to do the right thing and bring all those concerns to the therapist you are working with. Together, you’ll learn and understand the real feelings behind them, and will find a way to get through them without having to stop the incredibly important work that therapy is.
