This is about love.
Within this blog you will read how I fell in love with him.
How I hid my love for over a year, and what happened after I told him how I felt.
I write this account because he was my therapist; and the pain of my experience, especially the depth of powerlessness I felt, made our sessions about as un-therapeutic as it is possible to be.
As a result of my privileged view of being a therapist myself; and out of the desire to prevent the harm that came to me coming to anyone else, I passionately believe that we, as therapists, must do better. And to do better begins by respecting the power of love - including Eros - with its risk of chaos and potential for enabling transformation through engagement and sublimation, negotiation and conscious decision making.
With this as my aim I chose to return to the source material, to engage fully with it, aware that theory and ideals are only a part of the landscape I pass through. As I re-experience each hour I hope to create a map of clear definitions, a guide towards deciding what better actually means.
Most importantly I hope to answer the question; how will we know that our choices are the best for the situation we are in, as opposed to the one we think we are in. And I hope to have at the end of this journey, a description of actions and protocols written for people who find themselves in a similar position to he and I, when Eros is the third presence in the therapy room.
I begin by stepping backwards. In 2020 I was a trainee therapist, and therapy was a requirement for the first two years of our course, and mandatory to the end of our three years. Though I could have waited until the course began in September, I made the first appointment to speak with him less than a month after my husband had left me, for I was not in a good state of mind. I chose him as my therapist because he said that he liked to use music in his sessions. I liked the idea of that. More importantly, in his use of language he wrote as if he was a Buddhist.
I speak that language.
Compassion is important.
I trusted that talking to someone who knows how to listen would help me regain my trust in humanity, I believe open, compassionate listening always helps. It reminds us that there are kind people in this world and that there is space for grief. When pain is so raw, even the best friends are on the outside of it. No one can take the pain away, but a therapist provides an emotionally warm and safe space and acceptance, daring to come close to the wound.
But therapy is more than this, a therapist will also help a person to make sense of their experiences in the light of the past. This is a necessary part of how we understand ourselves and who we wish to be. But this certainly was not my need at that time, nor was I in any state of mind to do that work. Then as now I didn't think that the four years leading up to my husband’s leaving were difficult to understand; I wasn't trapped within a repeating pattern. I’d certainly never experienced anything like the years of increasing stress and despair that tore my life apart in June 2020, before.
Through my experience of therapy I really got to understand exactly how important it is that therapy has been chosen by the person entering it; that it must be a cooperative and collaborative undertaking. And, I would have ended therapy with him after 6 to 8 weeks...but, therapy was mandatory and I didn't want to start from the beginning again with another therapist.
6 to 8 weeks was enough for me.
Already some of the developmental, TA questions about injunctions had been asked.
I simply didn't have the resources or desire to go there!
And then things started to become weird.
My pattern recognition - unconscious mind was in overdrive after years of stress. One of the effects of chronic stress on me is something Erik Davis calls, Emergent numinous phenomenon (ENP). Suddenly an object or occurrence assumes high significance; signifying something, a resonance or intrusion more than coincidence. ENPs are more than flashes of inspiration, they are far weirder, and in December of 2020 I felt that I’d stepped into something with him.
My chronically stressed state of mind located me within a border world, I had access to a liminal space from which I viewed the intertwining of conscious and unconscious thought. Unconscious thought spoke in images and sensations, these would resonate or intrude, and I welcomed them. I assume this is something Jung experienced after his catastrophic break with Freud, which brought the loss of friends and status. His process, his mode of engagement was a fearless taking seriously of the cascade of images and dialogue the less conscious parts of the mind produce. These were recorded in the Black Books, which he condensed down into The Red Book.
My edge of awareness impressions, and external, real world confirmations gave me the feeling that there was an invitation, or an opportunity, or the existence of a synergy enough for us to do something together. For me, the cross over from impression to actual, real world correspondences were too strange, and compelling to ignore. It was a problem that I couldn’t ask him if he had stepped into weirdness too.
What language could I use for that?
Worse, our dialogue was confined by the rules of therapy.
Yet those sacrosanct rules had been breached almost immediately at the beginning. In a therapeutic relationship emails are for cancellations or to reschedule sessions, but he had broken that rule after our first session. I was confused. Did I know the rules better than him? Or did this show that he was thinking of me, and wanted me to know that?
The seed had been planted that would grow into this blog.
Once I became fully aware of my feelings for him - about 5 or 6 months after beginning therapy - I didn’t know what to do. I felt that the feelings were mutual because we seemed to genuinely get on well together. But, as a trainee I know that this ability to just get on isn’t as significant as it is in ‘normal’ life. But in body language, and some things he said. I simply couldn’t tell what was happening. So I stopped thinking of him as my therapist, and stopped defining myself as a client from the first intimations that I was falling for him. I asked to shift our sessions into a different, less restrictive format. Mentor and mentee - of course similar prohibitions remain in that relationship, but I wanted to give him a 'heads-up' that I value our contact for more than his therapeutic support.
But the doubt and ambiguity was just too difficult for me.
When therapy was over, and I'd ended it by accident - as I thought we could end therapy after our second year - and I needed to save money. I requested that he remained my mentor, or again shift the relationship sideways into something that would fit both of us.
His reply was curt and a resounding no!
I left it a while and then wrote to explain how the absence of any recognition from him of the impact of the ending on me, needed resolving. He made it clear that he never wanted me to contact him again.
So the unfinished business is a mess, a heap of rubble, a mess of conflicting emotions. I'm absolutely not over it. I had been honest with him, and he had been what? I'd requested honesty and received lectures on my moral shortcomings.
This blog is my view of our sessions.
I've avoided any details that might reveal his identity.
I re-name him in this blog as Kit Marlowe.
Thank you for joining me on this journey...
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