Oh VH I am very distressed for you. You were VERY brave to bring up this subject. I am sorry T reacted the way he did. He does not even have the excuse of being blindsided since you have been dancing around this topic for awhile. Can I aske what article you shared with him? I do know exactly how you feel because I experienced this same thing with my oldT.

It started one session when I read him a poem I wrote about... what I believed was my therapy journey and how he was such an important part of it. There was no reference to ET or love for him or anything but he froze. He looked like the deer in the headlights when I was done. Then instead of discussing the poem which took a LOT of courage to read to him in the first place... he totally changed the subject. I was like, huh? Then of course I felt that I did something horribly wrong. I was so humiliated that he hated that poem so much he couldn't even address it.

So I went home and did a search for transference and found another board group on line and joined them to get support and figure out what was going on. I met our AG on that other board and she was so instrumental in helping me go back to talk this through. BTW, I had been in therapy about 5 months when this happened. My oldT was a Ph.D and had 15 years of experience as a T. We were exactly the same age. AG and I discussed transference and ET and she encouraged me to go back and talk it through with him. So I did. And that is when I found out how woefully uninformed he was about this subject, despite his education and experience.

I had read the book In Session by Deborah Lott about transference and also some articles. I bravely went in and re-read the poem line by line with my own interpretations for each line of the poem so there was NO misunderstanding. I did have ET with him mixed with the parental feelings but the poem was not about that. So after I re-read the poem I asked him what was so romantic about it and he said the line where I said "when I look into your eyes". OMG. I had written something like... "when I look into your eyes I hope to see acceptance and understanding".

So then I pushed him a bit and he waffled around and said "well you know that in therapy you sometimes have this intimate relationship and then when "other" feelings come into play it could disrupt the therapy and cause it to fail... blah blah". How stupid! Like it was a danger and my feelings were going to ruin the therapy. You are SUPPOSED to have feelings in therapy. I told him that even if I professed my undying love for him that it was HIS job to address those feelings, accept them and be willing to discuss them with me. I had to reassure HIM that I would not act on my feelings and that I had no agenda other than talking about how I felt.

I thought I had done something so horrible that I would be immediately terminated. I ended up trying to teach him and then I had to calm him down. In effect, I became the T. This role switch would continue throughout my therapy with him. I then offered him the book In Session to help him come to terms with transference (it was the only book I knew of back then) and after six months when he had still not opened the book I took it back. I had even gone through the trouble of highlighting and marking the areas of importance to me.

I am surprised by your T because in the past he seemed comfortable with discussing sex and he has had many years of experience. This is not about you or even how you feel or the relationship, you have done nothing wrong. it's about his discomfort with the topic and maybe it triggering something in him. We assume that T's, even with experience and knowledge can handle ET but not all of them are comfortable with it. I would not withdraw but go back and face him down. Hey, I walked into the witches den today! You can do this. The relationship is worth it. He may just need a little time to digest everything and decide the best way to work this through for you.

I am sorry to ramble on about myself and my own experiences in T. I do want to just add here that I had a horrible disruption with current T over the "hug" topic. I thought it was a relationship ender. We just kept going back to it over the past 2 years and it really has strengthened our relationship and that has helped me get through this recent issue.

Hugs to you VH and I hope you are okay and that my rambling has somehow been of help to you.

TN