Hi Anton,

I can understand your reaction. It's like being given a diagnosis - as though the assumption is that you are no longer an individual having an individual experience, but a set of typed and predictable characteristics and reactions. That doesn't match up with anyone's real experience of themselves.

I guess you just have to take what is helpful and leave the rest. You posted looking for insight into what sounds like a very painful experience to you. You wrote about being unsure whether to stay or go, and about feeling tortured by being near your therapist. I think a lot of us who have been in this bind or something similar *can* relate, which is what you asked about. And while each of us have experiences that are entirely unique in many ways, there are some commonalities in those experiences we discover as we learn about the stories of others. My impression is that a sense of this commonality is what you were originally reaching out for.

You may have been put off by the categorical way that I and perhaps others have written about this. For that I'm sorry, and maybe it would have been better to just share my own experiences rather than taking that approach. I guess the pattern is *so* pervasive in what I've seen, and the hurt is often *so* great, that one wants to erect a huge danger sign, even though one never knows for sure what is ahead for others.

Well, in case the personal is any use, I'll tell you what happened to me. I worked for a couple of years with a male therapist (I'm a woman) about my own age who shared many of my interests. I was never in love with him, but he was attractive, we had many things in common, I believe he admired me, and I had a lot of free-floating longing that I was trying to deal with, partly because my marriage was in bad shape. So often there was a sense of a 'spark' in our sessions.

And then he began to stretch the boundaries here and there, which was kind of flattering at times, and then just intrusive and upsetting and confusing. He told me stuff about himself that he needn't have shared, he asked for my professional advice during session time, he involved me in a very complicated professional crisis he was having that required him to switch practices, he asked me to lie about that to my husband and to mislead his practice manager....

All while I was trying to deal with my own personal crises and traumas, and I felt too much in the thick of my own stuff and too dependent on him to just break free. It was painful, frightening and expensive. It cost me money and time in my life that I was trying to dedicate to healing. The stress and chaos disrupted my relationship and my work.

**edited**

So, these are the personal experiences that inform my view of these situations. I will delete the stuff about my friend after you've read it. The point is not that you are the same as anyone else, or that your situation will end up the same, or that this fits some abstract psych theory, but that the pressures of certain circumstances tend to generate common outcomes. For what it's worth. Regardless, you will negotiate your own path through this, and I wish you very, very well with that.

** A couple of postscripts: Neither my friend nor I ever took the relationship to physical/sexual place. The harm was done by boundary breaking that was verbal and emotional. Also, my current therapist shares a lot of stuff about her life with me. But I know she'd share this stuff with any client where it was appropriate - and it's always in the service of the therapy and the health our relationship, never about her personal needs.