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I was half-watching the latest series of the Netflix romcom Nobody Wants This when suddenly things got interesting. Spoiler alert: it had just been revealed that one of the characters (Morgan) was in a relationship with her newly ex-therapist (Dr Andy). While some of the characters freaked out, declaring the relationship very concerning, I felt a frisson of excitement. Because I, too, have harboured the desire to date my therapist.As it turns out, this fantasy is neither unusual nor unexpected. “Psychoanalysis almost insists on transference,” explains psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber, using the term coined by Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, in his 1895 work Studies on Hysteria. The basic premise is that the patient projects old feelings, attitudes, desires or fantasies on to their therapist. This can manifest in numerous ways – often at the same time – covering the whole gamut of emotions and relationships, from love to hate, maternal to erotic, and everything in between.While relationships between clients and therapists are generally frowned on – even once the therapy has ended – they do happen, and, like transference, have been a feature of “the talking cure” since the start, with Carl Jung entering into a romantic relationship with a patient.“I think that many people fall in love with their therapists, because why wouldn’t they?” says Sally Openshaw, a sexual and relationship psychotherapist. “You’ve got someone who’s listening exclusively, who’s fully attentive, who’s doing everything they can to be alongside you. And that means idolisation of the therapist is very likely to occur.”I can relate. I have a hugely supportive group of friends; however, there’s something about the way my therapist listens, the look of compassion in his eyes, that just hits different. It doesn’t help that in many ways he seems to be exactly what I’m looking for in a partner. We’re around the same age (I think; annoyingly, he’s incredibly discreet and not prone to self-disclosure), and he’s kind, intelligent and attractive. So, while the sane part of my brain understands that I don’t really know who he is outside the therapy room, there is also no doubt in my mind that if he popped up on a dating app, I would swipe right immediately.double quotation markI felt embarrassed and guilty, and worried that it might be considered emotional cheatingKat, 28, works in customer service. She has been having consulations with her therapist for a year and says she has found the “empathy and consistent support” she offers to be intoxicating. “Everything about the way she engages makes me feel a way I haven’t felt in years – probably since the start of my relationship with my now husband,” she tells me, explaining that she was just four sessions in when she began noticing “a strong, intense attraction”.“During sessions, I found myself trying to make her laugh and wanting her to like me, and after they ended there was this hollow feeling and I would feel restless until the next one,” she says. “Sometimes I wish I had never told her I was married, because the fantastic, illogical part of my brain thinks that then I would have a chance with her.”Daniel’s romantic transference was more of a slow burner, surfacing about eight months after he started therapy. “Truthfully, it was a really bad time for me to start processing trauma,” he tells me, explaining that his wife had just given birth to their second child. For his part, the 38-year-old admits that he wasn’t “as present a father as I would like to have been”, while he says his wife “wasn’t as kind and caring as she could have been, and I received a lot of anger from her”.While Daniel insists that he doesn’t blame his wife – “This isn’t me saying she’s not a good spouse; she just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to assist me” – he now sees how this difficult dynamic led him to project romantic feelings on to his therapist. “There was this juxtaposition of, I go home and I feel like I’m not enough, whereas I would go to therapy and I would get that kindness and compassion that I was needing in that moment,” he says.When Emma, 31, first started experiencing feelings of transference – for a sex therapist she was seeing with her wife – it manifested as an obsessive crush. “I started thinking about her often, and it would bring me a lot of warmth but also pain, because I knew that nothing could ever come of these feelings,” she says. “I would Google her name and try to find out more about her. I’d keep looking at her picture on the clinic’s website, and I’d sometimes check the website of a university where she’s a professor to see if there was anything about her or her class.”Soon, however, her feelings took on an erotic charge. “She was giving us homework around sex and masturbation, and she would often pop into my mind during those moments and became part of my fantasies,” she says. The erotic transference began only after they started “delving deep into emotional aspects and I started feeling more connected to her”.Clover, 35, also described how feelings of connection and safety morphed into erotic transference within a couple of months of starting therapy. She says: “One day I noticed that just the thought of speaking with my therapist was arousing.” In the weeks and months since that first time, her fantasies have only intensified, growing in frequency and becoming increasingly explicit. “Sometimes I’ll get a flash of doing a sexual act,” she says. “More often it happens outside of the session, but occasionally it’s in session, too.”Aside from Clover – who studied psychology in college and says that when the erotic transference started she thought, “Oh, I know what’s going on, this can be a good thing!” – no one I spoke to was aware of the phenomenon before they experienced it, which made their feelings all the more disconcerting.“I felt embarrassed and guilty, and worried that it might be considered emotional cheating,” says Kat. It was only after she stumbled across a post about romantic transference on TikTok that she realised her feelings probably weren’t the “genuine romantic attraction” she had assumed. Daniel had a similar journey, initially feeling immense shame, before finding some clarity on message boards on Reddit. “It takes effort not to spiral if you’re not aware that it’s going to happen,” he says.Another common theme was that none of the people I spoke to had felt able to fully admit their feelings to their therapist – or their partners. Clover came the closest, once telling her therapist about a dream she’d had that included a sexual encounter between the two of them, but said she felt disappointed by his response. He seemed “neither judgmental nor overly interested” in her disclosure, she tells me, adding that she felt his response was “careful”; that there was “just the slightest bit of hesitancy on his part”.double quotation markThe first thing I say to any friend when they talk about their feelings about their therapist is: say it to the therapistFor the others, the fear of destroying their therapeutic relationship or upsetting their spouse means they are left to deal with these intense and confusing feelings alone. “It felt like punishment. I have these feelings, I can’t tell anyone about it, and I just have to feel them alone and hope that they vanish,” Emma says. “I didn’t want to disclose this to the therapist in an individual session, because that would be creating secrets and that’s not how couples therapy is supposed to work. And part of the reason we sought sex therapy was due to how undesired my partner felt, so I thought disclosing the erotic transference would have been disastrous.”Fox Weber, who touches on the subject in her book What We Want: A Journey Through Twelve of Our Deepest Desires, says, “It really upsets me when I hear about therapists responding awkwardly or shutting the conversation down. The first thing I tell any friend when they talk about their feelings about their therapist is: say it to the therapist. How can you not tell your therapist that you’re having erotic dreams about them? It is the space for uncensoring yourself.”Openshaw – who runs training in how to work safely with erotic transference and countertransference, and is now writing a book on the subject – believes avoiding these conversations “stops the client being in real contact with a therapist”. Once that happens, she says, “the material that needs to be discussed in therapy is left out”.She tells me that erotic transference in particular is “a royal road into past trauma and past developmental needs. It’s not about the sexual contact, actually; it’s usually a manifestation of something else.” She says this could be old memories, or even a kind of test for the therapist to see if they could handle this kind of revelation. “That’s why, if you leave clients in isolation with it, they develop their own fantasies and shame themselves. And I think that does a lot of damage.”Then there’s countertransference: the feelings a therapist experiences in relation to a client. The classical Freudian definition posits that countertransference is simply a reaction to the client’s transference – something Openshaw and Fox Weber both reject in favour of a more modern, relational outlook.“My feelings may be in response to the client, but it might be my own history that’s stirring up,” Openshaw tells me. And Fox Weber says, “I think that it’s rich for opportunity when it’s acknowledged that there are two people in the room contributing to a dynamic. It’s always valuable to consider the feelings that you have about someone and to question and be interested in whether it’s about you, about them or about something in between.”Both Openshaw and Fox Weber take pride in welcoming transference and countertransference into their therapy rooms. “I make space for the possibility right at the start,” Openshaw tells me. “What I’m basically saying is, this will feel confusing and awkward, but it’s really important if it happens that either of us bring it out into our therapeutic relationship.”The problem, she explains, is that erotic transference and countertransference is “a completely avoided topic in many, many trainings”, meaning that a good deal of therapists simply don’t know how to work with them. The reasons for this are complex, she says. “Most of the training that I’ve had was saying ‘don’t’; it was a danger‑threat. And so, because it’s not normalised, people get frightened and don’t know what to do next.”Openshaw believes that attempting to ignore erotic countertransference leaves therapists at risk, rather than protecting them. “Once it’s gone into the shadows, your vulnerability to acting it out is very much higher,” she says. Ultimately, if you don’t confront it, she warns, you might end up behaving inappropriately.double quotation markNeuroscience-wise, the sensation of yearning is real. But the meaning that then gets put on it – I want to have sex with my therapist, I want to be loved by my therapist – is incorrectIt doesn’t help that therapy in the UK is not regulated, meaning that anyone can call themselves a therapist or counsellor whether or not they have the relevant qualifications (some titles, including clinical psychologist and counselling psychologist, are protected). In the place of formal oversight, there are a number of professional bodies, of which the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is the largest. “Our members are required to abide by our ethical framework, which prohibits sexual or romantic relationships with current clients,” a BACP spokesperson tells me. When a complaint about a member is received, BACP says it provides “a fair, balanced and thorough conduct process”, explaining: “If they are found through this process to have breached our ethical framework, they will face a sanction, which may result in the withdrawal of their membership.”Fox Weber has a slightly more nuanced take on whether relationships between therapist and client should be banned. “I really try to not be judgmental and purist about this,” she says, explaining she knows of two couples, both in their 80s, who met in the therapy room and appear to be in happy, healthy relationships. She also tells me about the “mistreatment” she witnessed of a psychotherapist who began a relationship with an ex-patient. “The shaming response to the whole thing seemed appalling and hypocritical to me,” she says, explaining that the couple had tried their best to be “honourable” about it, terminating therapy and waiting some time before seeing each other romantically.However, Fox Weber acknowledges that this is a boundary that should never be crossed lightly, saying: “It’s really up to the therapist to be rigorously self‑aware if there is an exceptional situation, or if there’s a narcissistic pattern of taking advantage of making people feel special.”While many people fantasise about having a relationship with their therapist, Sara, 37, is in the minority of people for whom that became a reality. “I felt completely seen, loved and safe,” she says of the early days of the romance. However, as with Morgan in Nobody Wants This, things quickly took a turn for the worse.“She’s poly and married, and her partner was aware and said he approved … until he didn’t,” Sara says. “She strung me along for a couple of weeks, before telling me we’d take a few months’ break so she could see if her marriage could be saved. I got sick of waiting and told her I couldn’t do it any more. She all of a sudden found boundaries and blocked me, and we haven’t talked since. It was then I decided to report her, and that’s when her licensing board stepped in.”The fallout was catastrophic. “I’m not exaggerating when I say she, and this situation, destroyed my life,” says Sara, whose ex-therapist turned lover lost her licence for a year, and was on probation for a further year after that. “I had a complete breakdown. Lost my job, failed grad school classes and eventually had to withdraw. I am currently unable to work. It’s over two years later and my life is still a shambles.”As time has gone on, Sara has come to believe the romance was doomed from the start, and is doubtful that a relationship between a therapist and former patient could ever be healthy or equal. “I think it would be a very rare case for it to work out,” she says. “I’ve only just recently realised that the power imbalance never went away. The way she knew how to meet my needs and reassure me was solely because of her clinical insight. I inherently trusted her because of the foundation we built in therapy. It was her job, her ethical duty, to protect me. And she chose not to.”Sara’s may be a cautionary tale, but for those in the throes of romantic or erotic transference or countertransference, the fantasies can feel hard to resist or rationalise. “Neuroscience-wise, the sensation of yearning is real,” says Openshaw. “But the meaning that then gets put on it – I want to have sex with my therapist, I want to be loved by my therapist – is incorrect.” Fox Weber agrees, cautioning that while “your feelings are valid, they’re not necessarily final. I have had countertransference feelings that I have experienced intensely for time periods, and then they moved into something else. I’m very grateful that I didn’t act out on those feelings.”As for my crush, two and a half years on, I find my therapist as charming as ever, but have no desire to act on my feelings (not least because I am sure I would be rejected, and who needs that?). Thankfully, I have no shortage of other material to discuss at my weekly sessions, so while I have Openshaw and Fox Weber’s words ringing in my ears – telling me that I can’t do “the work” if I’m not showing up with full honesty – for now, I have decided to keep my feelings to myself (and pray that he doesn’t see this article!). Some names have been changed
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