I’ve
been embroiled for the past six years in an epic transference/counter
transference relationship with my female therapist (I’m female, too).
I’ve been “in love” with her, attracted to her, loved her
more benevolently, hated her, tried suicide after one of her rejections,
looked up to her, and everything in between. However, over the past year
or so, I started becoming more detached from our
interactions. . . . I developed a capacity to step back and
watch myself and her interacting, and I began to feel that it was like a
game—in other words, we both had specific roles and specific moves we
could make, and that we were both trapped in these roles. I began to feel
like we had been replaying the same conversations/roles over and over again.
It was like chess, in which the first person’s gambit significantly
constricts the response of the next player. That sounds like a very detached
analogy, but in fact I was feeling all the same chaotic emotions—there
was just a part of me that had risen above it and felt incredibly tired and
trapped by it. Every time we started talking about “us” ( the main
topic of our sessions), I could see the whole predictable moves and where
it would end up and, honestly, I was bored and despairing, tired of
it.
I kept
bringing this up to her, but she couldn’t see it—she’d go
right back to pushing old buttons, buttons that didn’t work anymore,
I guess. So I felt like I had no options—it was like whatever I said,
I’d be participating in this weird passive aggressive game we’d
built up over the years—and so I just stopped talking altogether, gradually.
I kept going out of loyalty and a desire to disrupt my emotional equilibrium
as little as possible, but I wanted a freer, clearer, simpler conversation,
but I could never achieve it with her, no matter how I tried, no matter how
many meta-analyses I would do for her of how we always had the same fruitless
conversation.This clamming up must have really frustrated her, because at
our last session, she started acting, well, extremely childish. She acted
bored, sighing, looking out the window, juggling her foot. Part of me was
upset and rejected, but part of me said I’m not leaving a session I
paid for because she decided to act unprofessionally. I left early eventually,
but I was pretty disgusted with this behavior. I guess more than I’d
realized at the time, because I told her I’d take a break and go back
in a couple of weeks, but it’s been a few months and I never went back.
Sometimes I feel sad about it, but overall I got to a point where I said,
“This is just so...*stupid*”
My question
is this. Everyone recommends doing termination properly—going back,
saying goodbye, getting some kind of closure. But boy, I don’t want
to. I’ve been having a great time taking a vacation from that relationship
that always made me feel like nothing. I started wondering if I did the whole
thing out of some existential guilt, that I need to work on myself to make
myself marginally acceptable. That I had to work and work to be lovable.
I guess that changed. Now, having left, I’m happy (previous breaks,
attempts to leave were torture) and I know going through that process with
her will make me more unhappy, maybe for a long period of time. On the other
hand it was six years of incredible intensity, and its strange to simply
walk out. So should I go back and do it anyway? I’m also wondering if
I should find another therapist to work out the issues that were probably
incompletely resolved. Or rather, intellectually they seem incompletely resolved;
emotionally I feel they’re gone, that that woman who walked in six years
ago oozing with transference was a completely different person. But that’s
the thing about the psyche. Nasty unconscious stuff can pop up even when
you think you dealt with it. . . .
I like the way you conceptualized the game going on between
you and your “therapist,” because it helps to explain how she got
as caught up in her own unconscious issues as you did. When you witnessed
her acting childish, you were catching a glimpse of her own hidden conflicts
about feeling frustrated—conflicts that have much to do with frustration
with her own father. Maybe, all to often, her father treated
her as if she were “stupid.” For that matter, maybe your father
did the same to you, and maybe that is why you became entangled in such an
intense transference.
In any
event, congratulations for realizing how the distorted relationship with
your psychotherapist was “just so . . .
*stupid*.”
So, to
your specific question, should you go back and terminate
properly?
The answer
is “No.”
Many clients
get confused about this, but a proper
termination depends
on both the client and the psychotherapist. If the client can speak
honestly, and
if the psychotherapist can listen objectively, then psychotherapy can be
terminated with a mutual assessment of the treatment progress, and the final
parting can be done in an atmosphere of good will. If, however, despite the
client’s attempts to address the real issues, the psychotherapist keeps
missing the point, and the process degenerates into a “fruitless
conversation,” then the client has no other option than just leaving
and not looking back. It would be masochistic
to return to a fruitless passive-aggressive game.
As for
whether you should find another psychotherapist, the best thing would be
to consider why you started psychotherapy in the first place. You must have
had a good reason at the beginning—but then you got diverted into the
transference. Given that you have essentially resolved the transference by
recognizing the game behind it, ask yourself if the original issues still
need attention. If so, then find another psychotherapist to continue the
work. If you’re not sure if those original issues still need attention,
however, then relax, take a break, and wait for the truth to “pop up”
in due time. The unconscious isn’t out to get you—it’s simply
truth itself, so you can trust that if you need more psychotherapy, your
unconscious will let you know.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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