TRANSCRIPT
In my first year as a therapy intern, there was a therapist who worked at the clinic I was at. She was about 20 years older than me. She’d been a therapist for quite a long time, and I used to go and sit in her office and talk with her when she had free time. It wasn’t exactly supervision, but it was sort of like supervision. It was really my opportunity to talk with another therapist who had experience because I desperately wanted to learn. I felt I needed help. I needed insight. I didn’t really know what was right and what wasn’t right if the therapist, and I wanted her input.
Well, it’s over 20 years now since I did that, and when I look back at it, I can’t actually remember anything she said except for one thing. And that one thing I’d like to talk about now. The one thing that she said that really sticks with me all these years later is that when these three things happen to you as a therapist, you will know that you are now an experienced therapist. These are the three markers of an experienced therapist. I remember my ears opened up because I was like, what are they?
What she told me is the first one is, which is that you will know you’re an experienced therapist when a client falls in love with you. Number two, when you fall in love with the client. And number three, when a client of yours kills himself or herself. I remember thinking, oh god, I had none of these three things happen, and I wondered what would that be like.
Well, now it’s 20 years later. It’s been 10 years since I was a therapist. I started doing other work, but for 10 years I was a therapist. I think I did—I counted 15,000 psychotherapy sessions, worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different clients. So I would like to analyze those three things and see what I make of them.
1. Client Falling in Love
Well, the first, and the first is a problem. Would the one that’s closest to something that actually happened—a client falling in love with me? Well, what I learned as a therapist is that it’s not uncommon for clients to be attracted to their therapist, to be romantically or sexually, and sometimes sexually attracted to their therapist. This is a normal process, and there’s even a word for it in the psychology field. It’s called erotic transference or maybe even romantic transference. That the client is transferring some unresolved, unconscious, buried feelings of their past onto the therapist. And in a way, it kind of makes sense why they would feel some of these things for a therapist. Here is someone who is older, wiser, who really cares about them, who’s showing a lot of attention and hopefully empathy toward a client. Perhaps someone who doesn’t have anybody in their life who’s really paying really good, really focused attention to them.
Also, it’s a safe place for a client to have their feelings. There are boundaries in this relationship. They are allowed to openly explore how they feel without fear of getting rejected. And if the therapist has done their job well, they set up the dynamics so that the client can feel their feelings. So my experience as a therapist is yes, I did have quite a lot of clients over the years, both men and women, tell me that they were attracted to me, that they had sexual feelings for me, that they had romantic feelings for me. But does that actually mean that they fell in love with me? I think falling in love is the next step.
And for me, the reason I don’t really feel that any of my clients fell in love with me is that I worked with their feelings. I helped them with their feelings, and I did not encourage them to fall in love with me. I didn’t feel it was to the benefit of the therapy for them to fall in love with me. Also, that erotic transference, or any transference, because clients can transfer all sorts of feelings onto a therapist. They can transfer rage, they can transfer hatred, they can transfer jealousy, they can transfer fear, they can transfer paranoia—all sorts of things from their past, unresolved feelings from their past that they can project onto the therapist. And from a point of view of a therapist, it can actually be very interesting to see what they are transferring.
But for me, the key was to try to minimize the transference. I don’t want people having a relationship with me as a therapist based on projection. I much preferred that people had a relationship with me that was based on what’s really going on. So what would happen is if someone was transferring feelings onto me, putting all these different feelings onto me, whatever the feelings were, I much prefer to talk about what is this connected to from your past? What of your buried history? What of your unconscious, often unresolved traumatic feelings from your childhood do these feelings connect with? What can we learn from these feelings?
As opposed to what a lot of therapists do, and that is nurture the transference, want the client to feel more and more of these projected feelings onto the therapist. Not infrequently, what I’ve seen, having been a client myself—and I have, by the way, had romantic feelings, even sexual feelings for a therapist myself—and notice how did my therapist handle it? The therapist who I had those feelings for, well, what I noticed is that she pulled back. She said nothing. She did nothing to connect my feelings to my history, not even to point me in the direction to looking at my history. And she became more silent, more withdrawn.
And for me, considering my history of abandonment and rejection, especially by my mom, my primary love object, as it were, my therapist doing that actually enhanced some of the feelings. And to some degree, I wondered if she liked them more. It was like she was making me more and more addicted to her, literally addicted. And the more I was addicted, the less likely I was ever going to be to abandon her. I was getting hooked on her, and it was harder for me to break out and to understand where are these feelings coming from.
And as the therapist myself, I didn’t want clients to get addicted to me. Yes, of course, as a therapist, it’s nice to have a business. It’s nice to have clients who return. But for me, the returning clients, the money that I was getting from it, the security I was getting, the comfort that I was getting from knowing that clients would return again and again, was not nearly as important to me as the idea that actually I’m doing all that I can to help them grow, to make sense of their unconscious, to make sense of their history, to make sense of their feelings toward me—not to nurture this transference.
And then what I’ve seen also as the results of that—and it happened again and again and again and again, especially as people connected more to their history, more to their past, more to their root traumas than the feelings that were buried as the result of those root traumas—is their romantic feelings went down. Their sexual feelings for me went down, and eventually they were much more able to focus on where they came from, why they would have those feelings in the first place. And the more that they were able to do that, the less that they actually felt romantic or sexual for me, and therefore it did not progress into them falling in love with me.
So that’s the first one that this therapist once upon a time, twenty-something years ago, told me: “Oh, you’ll know you’re a seasoned therapist when a client falls in love with you.” And I think, well, no, I don’t think so. I think that might be a sign of a therapist who has a lot of experience being a not very good therapist.
2. Falling in Love with a Client
Then comes the second one: me falling in love with a client. You’ll know you’re a seasoned, experienced therapist when you have fallen in love with a client. Well, this is an interesting one to me because this one is much more clear. Over my years of being a therapist, I worked with a lot of clients. I’m a heterosexual guy, and I worked with a lot of female clients, many in my age range as well. And did I fall in love with any of them? What I found is that it never happened. And what I also noticed is that I wasn’t attracted to any.
Of these women, it wasn’t something that I felt. It wasn’t something that I was putting on them or even projecting on them, one might say. Because also, there is such a thing as therapeutic counter-transference, where therapists have their unconscious buried feelings from their past, their unresolved issues, their unresolved post-traumatic feelings, and they project those onto the client. This is a definitely known phenomenon.
And sometimes I did feel some of those feelings. It just didn’t happen to be sexual or romantic. But what I noticed is in my relationship with my clients, I just didn’t look at them as sexual objects. I saw them more, if you’re going to use sort of a conventional way of looking at therapists and clients, a conventional metaphor. It wasn’t that I looked at them as potential romantic partners; rather, I think I looked at them more like my children in a way, like I was more of a parent figure and they were more of a child figure. And so for me, romantic and sexual feelings just did not fit in this relationship. I didn’t have that at all.
And so I never even went to the next level where I fell in love with the client, meaning I had some sort of obsession with them or had like feelings where I couldn’t get them out of my mind or I looked at them as someone who could potentially save me and make me happy, look at them as a potential life partner.
And so when I think of this therapist telling me that that’s when you know you’re an experienced therapist, that’s a marker of you being a seasoned therapist, I think, you know, I think she was absolutely completely wrong. And I think if a therapist does go down that road and starts projecting those feelings onto a client, it’s a sign that that therapist really has not done a lot of inner work and has a very, very confused sense of the boundaries of what their job in therapy is. And it’s actually really taking advantage of the client.
And what I’ve seen also, if this does happen a lot, this happens with a lot of therapists. And historically, it happened a lot more. Actually, what’s even really sick about this is my grandfather was a therapist. My mom’s dad was a therapist, a really pervy guy. And you know what? At least one that I know of, and I think there are more, he had an affair with one of his clients. And I knew this former client of his. He had an affair with her for years. I saw it throughout my childhood, and maybe this is part of the reason why I knew this is disgusting. There’s something very, very wrong about this because there was something very wrong with it.
Now, that’s not to say he didn’t just fall in love with the client because he took it to the next level and even had a relationship with her. But I’ve seen this with other therapists—therapists falling in love with former clients after the allotted number of years in which you’re not allowed to be in a relationship with them. Happens. The therapists do or can fall in love and get into a relationship with their clients.
In New York State, where I was a therapist, you can’t ever do it. Not after seven years, not after ten years. Once someone becomes a therapy client of yours, you can never, ever have a romantic relationship with. And I think that’s good because I think that puts a really good and healthy frame around the therapy relationship. This is a place where romance and sex does not happen. This relationship is a sacred relationship where those feelings, if they do even start slightly, cannot manifest. It’s not okay.
And for me, what I think also is if a therapist does start to feel those feelings, starts heading down the path of, “Oh my god, I might be falling in love with a client,” aka they keep feeling attracted to a client romantically or sexually, that is a time for the therapist to really get help. And if they can’t help themselves, to go find someone that they need to talk to to figure out where is this coming from, what is going on in their unconscious, what’s going on in their history, what’s going on in their past that is allowing them to counter-transfer these feelings onto a client, onto someone who is looking to them for help, who is in a less powerful position, a more vulnerable position.
And I think when a therapist who has more power in the relationship, who is getting paid for it, who is with someone who is less vulnerable, is putting those feelings onto a client, there’s something very troubling about it. It’s something unhealthy, and it’s something I think inherently that the therapist has to work out. And it is something from their past.
So that one for me is one that I thought now didn’t happen. And then there comes to the third one, this thing that a marker for being a seasoned therapist is when a client kills him or herself. And when I think about it, that also never happens for me. I never had one of the clients that I worked with while I was working with them that I know of kill himself or herself. And what I have to say about that is I’m incredibly grateful. I’m incredibly grateful that that did not happen because, to be honest, it could have happened. It could have happened by no fault of my own, as just a chance thing in therapy. Sometimes clients do just kill themselves.
Therapy clients, I’ve had friends who were great therapists who were doing a really good job with some clients, struggling to work with some client who was suicidal or maybe wasn’t even suicidal, or the therapist had no idea that the person was suicidal because even though they may have asked, the person never told them, and the person killed themself.
And when I saw four therapists, every single time I’ve ever heard of it happening or known therapists—it’s happened—it’s a horrible, devastating experience. I have known, I can think of three, four times at least where therapists I’ve heard of or have known have had a client kill himself, and they literally just quit being a therapist right after that. They just couldn’t do it anymore. It was too overwhelming, it was too terrifying, horrible. It was traumatizing to the therapist.
And so what I also see, and I guess I would say this in humility, is it could have happened to me. I could have had a client that I was working with, Kemp, kill himself or herself. I did everything I possibly could on an emotional level to stop people from killing themselves. I didn’t send people to the hospital against their will. I don’t believe in that. I didn’t force people to go see a psychiatrist and take medications because I don’t believe in that either. I don’t believe forcing people to do anything is necessarily for their own good.
But I do know that I had people who I worked with many, many, many times. Probably at any given time, I always had somebody I was working with who, to some degree or other, was suicidal. And quite a lot of the time, I had multiple clients who had varying levels of suicidality. And what I found is it was very stressful as a therapist.
I actually recently made a whole video on it of how I think at least a therapist can do the optimal job at stopping a client from killing him or herself. And for me, just to recap it, the simplest thing is to really give myself emotionally in a bonding way—the relationship with this client, really make a strong bond with someone, care for them, love them, respect them, empathize with them, listen to their history, respect their rights, not force them to do anything, push them to do anything, acknowledge their pain, acknowledge how they’re feeling, and really show up again and again and again.
And I will say in my case, I had the good fortune of, to some really good degree, this worked out. Nobody killed himself while they were working with me. So I guess I failed all three of her marker tests for what makes an experienced, seasoned therapist. But in all sorts of other ways, I gained my experience as a therapist.