Hi iam
Welcome to the forums! I'm looking forward to getting to know you.
I think transference can actually happen for a lot of different reasons. And some of that depends on how you define it. When I'm using the term transference, I'm referring to the relationship template formed when you were a child. From the time we're born and through childhood, we accumulate our experiences in dealing with other people, especially our attachment figures (usually our parents and more likely to be our mothers) and all of that experience builds up into a template (some use the term schema) which is essentially our "working model" of how relationships work. This model holds our deepest beliefs, often unconscious, of what happens in relationships, and what we can expect.
We carry this model with us into adulthood and it is the prism through which we filter all of our relationships. We tend to repeat behavioral patterns and in some ways, people who "fit" our working model tend to feel more comfortable to us, so we are drawn back into re-enactments.
The theraputic relationship is a chance for us to be able to examine our feelings and how we relate, and bring to consciousness those unconscious beliefs because we can examine and discuss this relationship in a way we can't other relationships, because this one is totally concentrated on our needs.
In my, admittedly limited, experience, people who experience a really intense "transference" relationship with their T, either parental, erotic or both, are usually suffering from significant attachment injuries. When they start to experience a caring relationship, centered on their needs (the kind of relationship we should have originally experienced with our parents) those unmet, long buried needs, surface with the life and death intensity they had when we were small.
I've had a very intense dependent relationship with my therapist who has extremely good clear boundaries. If he didn't I wouldn't have been safe enough to explore this. I can honestly say that he has in no way behaved in a seductive manner, not has he had unclear boundaries or led me to expect that anything would happen outside his office. Actually, he's made it painfully clear that in his office is the only place that we have a relationship and the only thing that takes place there is being able to talk about any or all of my feelings.
To make him responsible for my feelings would seem to me to be the opposite of what I went to therapy for. I already had these feelings. One of the things I have been able to recognize in dealing with my T, is just how many times this has really happened to me over the years. That this intensity happens whenever I had a relationship with a man who seemed to hold out a promise of getting those needs met. But this time I've been able to stop and examine it and get to the roots of the problems. And I must admit that all of it has turned out to be mine. I once told my T that I wish once, just once, how I'm feeling would really turn out to be about just him and not also about my past.
So I'm open to the fact that you've had a different experience. I know that there are some therapists out there who don't maintain clear boundaries and can use patients to fulfill their own needs, leading them into really unhealthy ways of relating. But I know that hasn't been true for me. My therapist did NOTHING to foster these feelings in me aside from being a caring person operating within ethical boundaries. Its not his fault that I had a such deep wounds; he has given very freely of himself to help me heal them.
AG
