When Feelings Aren't Wrong In Therapy
Sometimes what a client feels in the therapy room is accurate, and it functions as a warning rather than a symptom to be corrected. That distinction matters more than most people assume.
I work as a therapist, and I have also sat in the other chair, doing my own work in psychotherapy. The opening line a therapist offers is often some version of: trust me, I'm here to help. On the strength of that, and on the credentials you believe are solid, you hand over something close to your soul to a stranger you hope can untangle your problems. Occasionally the person you trusted leaves you with more problems than you arrived with.
If that sounds tangled, it is.
My own memory of what happened is partial, which tends to be the case with sexual abuse. Early in our work together, this therapist told me he found me sexually attractive. It made me uneasy. He waved that away and said I had no reason to feel uncomfortable, that I should take it as a compliment.
Months after we had finished, maybe closer to a year, he invited me back so he could hear how I was doing. I opened the door to his office and found him on the floor, pillows arranged around him. He said, come here, let me touch you. What followed I can't reconstruct. I was, at the very least, stunned and thrown off by the offer.
Whole stretches of it are gone. Every time I've tried to lay the events out along a timeline, the picture gets murkier instead of clearer. Years passed before the memory surfaced at all, and by then the window for doing anything about it had closed.
So where is the line between what belongs in therapy and what doesn't? Plain common sense says that touching, and certainly any touch meant to arouse, has no place during treatment or afterward, as long as the client still sees the therapist in that role. People who have survived sexual abuse carry a particular vulnerability to exactly this kind of violation, and the practitioner's first obligation is the old one: do no harm.
Consider how an orientation like his could have poisoned the therapy itself, draining it of any value and possibly leaving me worse off than when I started.
The weight on a therapist is real. They have to keep watching their own reactions to a client and go to supervision whenever they're uncertain about what those reactions mean. A code of ethics exists precisely because clients hand over so much, and it governs how the therapist is supposed to conduct the relationship. Following it should be straightforward for anyone who brings ordinary common sense and a personal standard of conduct, both as a clinician and as a person.
Transference is where the deepest danger sits. It shows up when the therapist or the client starts experiencing the other as though they were someone from the past, and then behaves toward them the way they once behaved toward that earlier figure. Training is supposed to teach therapists to spot this and to turn their own transference into material that helps the client heal, rather than letting it run unchecked and warp the whole relationship.