So, after all of these odd signals and pressure about our relationship and those two dreams and hours spent thinking about what they meant and how I felt and talking to my college buddy who thought Sam was hitting on me… and after thinking about how she’d told me that my marriage was weak and that I should consider an affair… and all of the vulnerability of thinking about where that left me… it became clear to me that I did now have feelings about Sam.
Let me give you an audio example of one of her comments to me. During Covid, I often took my sessions over FaceTime from my car, the car acting as a “cone of silence” in our relatively small home. While I was in a session, my wife drove into the garage. Without a non-awkward way of dealing with it (hiding the screen vs. introducing the two of them), I opted to open my window and let them say hello to each other. Afterwards, here is the association Sam said she had from the experience of “Erin enter[ing] our relationship for a moment:”
It’s from the movie with Russell Crowe. Is it ‘Officer and Commander’? Is that the name of the movie?” . . . “There is a scene in the movie where they’re in captain’s quarters, and all the officers are sharing a meal together. And Russell Crowe, the captain, he stands up and he gives a toast. And he says (I’m needing to paraphrase), ‘Here’s to my love and my wife. May they never meet.’
She was positing herself as “my love” while Erin was merely “my wife.” These are the sorts of comments that any normal person would take as provocative — and this just happens to be one I recorded. Others I will just have to tell you about.
The feelings I realized I had were not particularly romantic feelings, but something more amorphous, just the wanting of more. Like at the beginning of a friendship, when you want to know more about the person you realize you like. What therapy had been it no longer was. We were relating as peers much more than as a therapist and client. I read a lot on the web (like this) about what you should do if you find that you have feelings about your therapist. That is, talk about it with her. From that article:
An ethical, well-trained therapist will be open and welcoming to a discussion about your feelings. Therapy is a safe place to discuss interpersonal processes, and a lot of personal growth can occur from doing so. Your therapist should handle this news gracefully and explore it with you. By sharing your emotional experiences and secrets with your therapist, you are being vulnerable. That’s crucial to the process—but taking advantage of your vulnerability and reciprocating in any way is a clear ethical violation.
Jenev Caddell, PsyD
That last sentence will turn out to be important.
I had done enough reading to believe that I was undergoing a transference experience, which I’ve defined in a previous post and which the link here goes into less theoretically. I told Sam what I was feeling, that I felt that she was prompting some of those feelings with the language she used with me, and that after a lot of thought I couldn’t trace back where the transference might have originated.
She took me completely off the hook, telling me it might not be transference at all. “Sometimes,” she said, “what feels like love is love.” (She took herself off the hook too. If what I was undergoing was a transference experience, she would properly have tried to explore its roots. That’s not something she ever undertook.)
So, was I experiencing a therapeutic phenomenon that was useful in psychoanalysis, or was I falling in love? Her response made it seem like the latter. In either case, it was confusing. When someone tells you that they think you’re falling in love with them, you wonder what their feelings are about that. I had already picked up signals from Sam that she thought differently and more warmly about me than other clients; I wouldn’t have to wait long for clearer ones.
In fact, it is not unusual for a therapist to be attracted to a client. They’re just not supposed to do anything about it.
Here is a very thoughtful blog post by a therapist, Dr. Keely Kolmes, about how she feels love for some clients but contains her feelings, lest she damage the relationship. Sam should have read it.
Boundary Violations in Psychotherapy - A Personal Case Study 