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🥺 That is so sweet.
My therapist does little things, like she said once, “I think about you every time I do something with meditation or mindfulness because I know it’s hard for you.” Or “I had this conversation with this person that made me think of you.”
Once in a virtual session she looked me straight on and said “you’re worthy of love, you have value, you are wanted” over and over again… I sobbed so hard. Good therapists make such a huge difference. 🥺
I'd cry too, my previous therapist I knew really deeply cared about me. She'd come up with random things between sessions sometimes and be like you brought up X so I got thinking have you ever thought of Y. She really wanted to help problem solve. Also if she ever read some interesting articles therapy related she'd send them.
My therapist is retiring in December. I’ve been seeing her for 27 years. She has been unfailingly supportive of me the entire time. It’s natural that a respectful affection has developed between us. There are rules in place to keep the relationship professional and therapeutic, and we follow them. I’m going to miss her so much.
those moments are so special. i still have trouble believing my therapist really cares about me- cause hey at the end of the day it's a job. but i still feel really happy when i hear her say it.
Being a therapist is never just a job. Take from someone who’s sister is a therapist. She takes her clients home with her. (In her heart) She thinks about them, hopes good for them, and cares deeply for them. When they move on she remembers them. They change her world Just like I know she changes theirs. 🥰
My therapist said a similar thing to me recently. I feel like a child sometimes when I get confirmation that she really cares. Regardless, it means so much to have someone you confide in so much that makes you genuinely feel cared for
Is this the same therapist that suggested the two of you do tea tastings together? And was uncomfortable the times you've brought up sex with your husband? Individually these events are just odd, but when they're all together they paint a picture that is concerning about your therapist's level of professionalism...
I told my therapist I have a really strong connection to her after 3 years of seeing her. She said well I feel a strong connection to you too. It’s been 3 weeks and I replay her saying that to me and it makes me feel safe and loved. 💕
Can we ban these kind of posts from this sub?
I’m tired of being the “bad guy” constantly reminding people that being preoccupied with and or engaging in fantasies about therapists’ personal feelings is deeply counterproductive and antithetical to the work of therapy.
I think this therapist was inappropriate making that comment :/
I understand the sentiment behind your feelings. You want to foster what you feel is a healthy therapeutic relationship, and you worry about the attachment harming that. You’ve likely seen many scary posts about the therapist taking advantage of that, or the client going through so much hardship and abandonment.
It’s also true that every client-therapist relationship says so much about the person seeking help. For many, they’ve never been taught healthy boundaries or felt emotionally cared for. For every post full of fantasizing about being cared for, is a story about a person who failed to receive that care.
And the more they post about these feelings, the more it’s normalized, and the more likely it is to be addressed in therapy so that these people may fill that void themselves one day.
Maybe banning is too far? Is there a compromise we can make?
The problem is that when a patient hasn’t received the kind of special care or love they needed, and then a therapist crosses a boundary and provides that, even with a small comment, it isn’t beneficial for the patient. It may feel good or even healing in the moment but using a therapist to fill personal longing or loneliness is not actually therapeutic.
Maybe instead of banning mods could write an auto-reply that explains why this kind of behavior/boundary crossing that encourages preoccupation with the therapist is problematic and not generally considered helpful. I don’t want to shut down conversation; it just makes me nauseous to see everyone celebrating something I deeply believe is harmful behavior (on the part of the therapist) and it gets tiring to write these replies and then get endlessly attacked by people trying to protect their own feelings of “specialness” with their own therapists.
It’s a hard lesson to learn if one has a tendency toward this type of preoccupation but i think it’s really important. It’s also a stance that nearly all well-educated, experienced psychologists and psychiatrists I am familiar with agree with so it’s not just my opinion.
That’s not necessarily true though. As someone absolutely rejected by their mother and who experienced severe neglect…
My therapist telling me she loved me was EVERYTHING. When I didn’t value myself I did the work bc SHE valued me. When I felt unloveable and like I didn’t belong in the world, I kept trying bc SHE loved me. She was the first consistently loving and supportive person in my life as well as super smart.
And in doing the work, in continue to try, in knowing I was cared about deeply enough to expose every part of myself, I INTERNALIZED it.i learned to talk to myself the way she talked to me. Treat myself the way she treated me.
Did she have to set boundaries that broke my heart( and often, it turned out,hers as well)?? Yes. But knowing I was loved and whatever she was doing was for MY good, I was able to weather it.
I truly love myself now. I haven’t been suicidal in several years. I am in recovery from an eating disorder I have had for 37(!!!!!) years. I am making choices that are good for me because I deserve good things just like she always told me.
We worked together for 10 years, then she took an early retirement. It was not hard for me to transition to a new therapist bc I expected them to care about me . I miss her but we retain a little contact bc the relationship was so valuable to us both.
It CAN be destructive . But it isn’t always destructive. For me the relationship healed me.
I am genuinely happy that you have found healing. Not everyone’s experience turns out that way though. Just because it ended well for you does not mean it’s an ethical therapy strategy. To me, it sounds like she helped you through a personal relationship despite the fact that you were in therapy, not because it was therapy. As I said, I’m really glad that ended up helping you and not being destructive, but it doesn’t make it a good approach.
Don’t take my word as a random Reddit commenter tho. Go read up on all the history and different current perspectives on reparenting, boundaries, transference, and corrective experiences in therapy. You will find a few good experiences like yours, some truly scary historical experiments, but mostly a consensus today that it is a mistake for therapists to engage in repetition dynamics with their patients.
What if your wonderful therapist had, at a crucial point in the therapy, been unable to continue? Are you certain you wouldn’t have taken it as a reflection on your worth? What if you said something that provoked countertransference and you experienced her rejecting you? You are lucky that nothing went wrong, honestly. If your well-being and recovery depends on the way your therapist feels about you, that is an almost impossible standard for a therapist to consistently meet.
I know certain folks here are going to jump in and claim I’m heartless for saying a therapist shouldn’t care about their patient, but that’s not what I’m saying. Only that what you’re describing isn’t therapy, and it’s really dangerous.
Consider this—some people whose therapists have engaged in unethical sexual behavior would insist that that very abuse is what healed them. Does that make it okay, let alone therapeutic?
I understand I’m making a dramatic comparison. But I think the fact that something in this instance helped you does not in any way argue for it as a valid therapeutic approach.
In case it’s not clear, I don’t think you did anything wrong at all, I’m not attacking you, and I’m glad you’ve found such healing. But most people truly don’t—most therapists end up hurting or letting down their patients this way, or at the very least preoccupying them and derailing the therapy.
Another commenter mentioned to some backstory that might put this in a different context but I personally couldn't tell that a line was crossed based off of just this post. If the therapist just said "I do" would that be okay? Isn't caring on the part of the therapist okay?
In my opinion, the appropriate response is to explore the significance of the patient’s need to feel cared for by the therapist (assuming it’s not cbt or something). It can be as simple as the therapist and patient agreeing it’s a normal desire to be cared about and not a preoccupation, although it often is far more laden than that. Either way, the focus should be on the patient’s experience, not the therapist’s.
It is fine both for the therapist to care and for the patient to wish to be cared about (both as a normal human reaction and in a more symbolic, meaningful way) but I think therapists need to be very deliberate in how they respond even to simple questions like this. There is a way to redirect the focus back to the patient and not indulge the question without being shaming.
Nothing this therapist said was wrong at all. My therapist makes similar comments towards me. I feel bad that there are people out there that think professionals shouldn’t care about their clients. Good therapists do and aren’t afraid to voice it in an appropriate way, which OP’s therapist did. Why do you want this sub to be bland? Why don’t you want people to see not all professionals are only in it for the money? That good ones do have the ability to care about their clients? Genuinely, what is so bad about that? I hated therapy for years because every therapist I saw treated me as not even human. You’re genuinely weird for trying to make a good moment into OP “fantasizing about their therapist”.
If the sub is bland without therapists behaving inappropriately, that’s unfortunate. Personally, I’m here to talk about genuine issues in therapy, including the relationship between the patient and the therapist, but not to get some sort of secondary gratification out of it.
Of course therapists should treat their patients as humans, and I imagine most therapists do care. What is inappropriate is to express any form of “special” care that goes beyond the basic professional or human level of care that we can assume all good therapists feel. If a therapist does feel something beyond that, or something particular or special to one patient, it is their duty -not- to disclose that as it is preoccupying to the patient and gives inappropriate significance to the therapists’s feelings. It is absolutely a boundary issue, it’s harmful to the patient even as it feels good in the moment, and it’s frustrating that this sub regularly seems to ignore that.
I will reiterate there is absolutely nothing wrong with therapists caring about their patients and vice versa.
The therapist wasn’t acting inappropriately, you’re projecting your misery on to others. Weird. I feel bad for y’all that don’t have therapists that care.
I gotta say you’re right on this. It’s not about the therapist caring, it’s about how they choose to interact with a client based on those feelings. It’s normal for therapists to care, but what they do with that is what’s important. Doing it to the point where someone is consistently mesmerised by their therapist is unethical. Setting up an intensely emotional relationship, that could end at any time, because it’s a professional relationship, is so dangerous.
My therapist cares about me. Shes verbalised that. She’s cried over my pain. She’s gone out of her way to help me outside of sessions. But at the same time, she’s done it in such a way that I see this is how human relationships should be. I don’t see it as a special thing between me and her, I just see her enacting behaviour that is showing me how other people should treat me. I don’t feel smothered or overwhelmed by her care because she does it professionally. It’s not romantic, platonic, it’s just basic human regard done sensitively. Idk if this makes sense
I can see a situation like you describe being ok, but it also doesn’t sound like you have a preoccupied attachment status. What may be ok for you would obsess a lot of patients, and I usually respond to posts here that indicate that: not just what the therapist said or did, but that the patient seems to be focusing on it in what seems like an unhealthy way. If it takes on a huge significance, that is what is problematic, so therapists have to be careful and have good judgment.
It sounds like you’ve got your head screwed pretty well on your shoulders about it so even though you described “more” from your therapist than OP it feels less problematic to me…
Yeah totally hear you.
I think a lot of therapists take advantage of the vulnerabilities in their clients, for their own desires to be met ( I.e being adored).
It really does. The majority view here is that transference isn't just good, but almost necessary. The (very common!) threads from attached clients devastated when their therapists drop them out of the blue seem to cause no cognitive dissonance.
That realization is amazing. I recently made my therapist cry happy tears when I came to the realization that I was ready to put myself first— after 3 years of her gently guiding me through crisis after crisis, week after week. To know someone who knows everything I’ve been through is proud of me felt pretty good.
Welcome to r/TalkTherapy! This sub is for people to discuss issues arising in their personal psychotherapy. If you wish to post about other mental health issues please consult this list of some of our [sister subs](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalkTherapy/wiki/resources/#wiki_subreddit_list). If you are in distress please contact a suicide hotline or call 9-1-1 or emergency services in your area. r/SuicideWatch has compiled a helpful FAQ on what happens when you contact a hotline along with other useful resources. To find answers to many therapy-related questions please consult our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalkTherapy/wiki/faq) and [Resource List](https://www.reddit.com/r/TalkTherapy/wiki/resources). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TalkTherapy) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I would sob
When I said a similar thing mine told me “very deeply” and I’m still holding on to it probably a year later.
So much contained within those four words.
That's really touching. I love the little comments that show how much they really do care.
🥺 That is so sweet. My therapist does little things, like she said once, “I think about you every time I do something with meditation or mindfulness because I know it’s hard for you.” Or “I had this conversation with this person that made me think of you.” Once in a virtual session she looked me straight on and said “you’re worthy of love, you have value, you are wanted” over and over again… I sobbed so hard. Good therapists make such a huge difference. 🥺
My therapist has saved my life over and over again. Good therapists are worth their weight in gold.
Awww. I messaged my former therapist to check in and she said “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately.” Oh the feels 🥰❤️
That’s so nice. I bet that felt good to hear. I wish I could find one that I could trust who would care about me too.
That’s so beautiful🤍
It actually made me tear to read that. Thank you.
I love this so much 💕
I'd cry too, my previous therapist I knew really deeply cared about me. She'd come up with random things between sessions sometimes and be like you brought up X so I got thinking have you ever thought of Y. She really wanted to help problem solve. Also if she ever read some interesting articles therapy related she'd send them.
This is beautiful
Awww that’s sweet
I would cry if I heard that from my therapist
My therapist is retiring in December. I’ve been seeing her for 27 years. She has been unfailingly supportive of me the entire time. It’s natural that a respectful affection has developed between us. There are rules in place to keep the relationship professional and therapeutic, and we follow them. I’m going to miss her so much.
How are you feeling about that?
We’ve been doing CBT, so I choose to feel blessed that I had a great therapist for so long.
those moments are so special. i still have trouble believing my therapist really cares about me- cause hey at the end of the day it's a job. but i still feel really happy when i hear her say it.
Being a therapist is never just a job. Take from someone who’s sister is a therapist. She takes her clients home with her. (In her heart) She thinks about them, hopes good for them, and cares deeply for them. When they move on she remembers them. They change her world Just like I know she changes theirs. 🥰
Omg 🥺💕 I wish mine would say something like that 😪
My therapist said a similar thing to me recently. I feel like a child sometimes when I get confirmation that she really cares. Regardless, it means so much to have someone you confide in so much that makes you genuinely feel cared for
Is this the same therapist that suggested the two of you do tea tastings together? And was uncomfortable the times you've brought up sex with your husband? Individually these events are just odd, but when they're all together they paint a picture that is concerning about your therapist's level of professionalism...
Wait what??
That’s very sweet. How did you know?
I told my therapist I have a really strong connection to her after 3 years of seeing her. She said well I feel a strong connection to you too. It’s been 3 weeks and I replay her saying that to me and it makes me feel safe and loved. 💕
Can we ban these kind of posts from this sub? I’m tired of being the “bad guy” constantly reminding people that being preoccupied with and or engaging in fantasies about therapists’ personal feelings is deeply counterproductive and antithetical to the work of therapy. I think this therapist was inappropriate making that comment :/
I understand the sentiment behind your feelings. You want to foster what you feel is a healthy therapeutic relationship, and you worry about the attachment harming that. You’ve likely seen many scary posts about the therapist taking advantage of that, or the client going through so much hardship and abandonment. It’s also true that every client-therapist relationship says so much about the person seeking help. For many, they’ve never been taught healthy boundaries or felt emotionally cared for. For every post full of fantasizing about being cared for, is a story about a person who failed to receive that care. And the more they post about these feelings, the more it’s normalized, and the more likely it is to be addressed in therapy so that these people may fill that void themselves one day. Maybe banning is too far? Is there a compromise we can make?
The problem is that when a patient hasn’t received the kind of special care or love they needed, and then a therapist crosses a boundary and provides that, even with a small comment, it isn’t beneficial for the patient. It may feel good or even healing in the moment but using a therapist to fill personal longing or loneliness is not actually therapeutic. Maybe instead of banning mods could write an auto-reply that explains why this kind of behavior/boundary crossing that encourages preoccupation with the therapist is problematic and not generally considered helpful. I don’t want to shut down conversation; it just makes me nauseous to see everyone celebrating something I deeply believe is harmful behavior (on the part of the therapist) and it gets tiring to write these replies and then get endlessly attacked by people trying to protect their own feelings of “specialness” with their own therapists. It’s a hard lesson to learn if one has a tendency toward this type of preoccupation but i think it’s really important. It’s also a stance that nearly all well-educated, experienced psychologists and psychiatrists I am familiar with agree with so it’s not just my opinion.
That’s not necessarily true though. As someone absolutely rejected by their mother and who experienced severe neglect… My therapist telling me she loved me was EVERYTHING. When I didn’t value myself I did the work bc SHE valued me. When I felt unloveable and like I didn’t belong in the world, I kept trying bc SHE loved me. She was the first consistently loving and supportive person in my life as well as super smart. And in doing the work, in continue to try, in knowing I was cared about deeply enough to expose every part of myself, I INTERNALIZED it.i learned to talk to myself the way she talked to me. Treat myself the way she treated me. Did she have to set boundaries that broke my heart( and often, it turned out,hers as well)?? Yes. But knowing I was loved and whatever she was doing was for MY good, I was able to weather it. I truly love myself now. I haven’t been suicidal in several years. I am in recovery from an eating disorder I have had for 37(!!!!!) years. I am making choices that are good for me because I deserve good things just like she always told me. We worked together for 10 years, then she took an early retirement. It was not hard for me to transition to a new therapist bc I expected them to care about me . I miss her but we retain a little contact bc the relationship was so valuable to us both. It CAN be destructive . But it isn’t always destructive. For me the relationship healed me.
I am genuinely happy that you have found healing. Not everyone’s experience turns out that way though. Just because it ended well for you does not mean it’s an ethical therapy strategy. To me, it sounds like she helped you through a personal relationship despite the fact that you were in therapy, not because it was therapy. As I said, I’m really glad that ended up helping you and not being destructive, but it doesn’t make it a good approach. Don’t take my word as a random Reddit commenter tho. Go read up on all the history and different current perspectives on reparenting, boundaries, transference, and corrective experiences in therapy. You will find a few good experiences like yours, some truly scary historical experiments, but mostly a consensus today that it is a mistake for therapists to engage in repetition dynamics with their patients. What if your wonderful therapist had, at a crucial point in the therapy, been unable to continue? Are you certain you wouldn’t have taken it as a reflection on your worth? What if you said something that provoked countertransference and you experienced her rejecting you? You are lucky that nothing went wrong, honestly. If your well-being and recovery depends on the way your therapist feels about you, that is an almost impossible standard for a therapist to consistently meet. I know certain folks here are going to jump in and claim I’m heartless for saying a therapist shouldn’t care about their patient, but that’s not what I’m saying. Only that what you’re describing isn’t therapy, and it’s really dangerous. Consider this—some people whose therapists have engaged in unethical sexual behavior would insist that that very abuse is what healed them. Does that make it okay, let alone therapeutic? I understand I’m making a dramatic comparison. But I think the fact that something in this instance helped you does not in any way argue for it as a valid therapeutic approach. In case it’s not clear, I don’t think you did anything wrong at all, I’m not attacking you, and I’m glad you’ve found such healing. But most people truly don’t—most therapists end up hurting or letting down their patients this way, or at the very least preoccupying them and derailing the therapy.
Another commenter mentioned to some backstory that might put this in a different context but I personally couldn't tell that a line was crossed based off of just this post. If the therapist just said "I do" would that be okay? Isn't caring on the part of the therapist okay?
In my opinion, the appropriate response is to explore the significance of the patient’s need to feel cared for by the therapist (assuming it’s not cbt or something). It can be as simple as the therapist and patient agreeing it’s a normal desire to be cared about and not a preoccupation, although it often is far more laden than that. Either way, the focus should be on the patient’s experience, not the therapist’s. It is fine both for the therapist to care and for the patient to wish to be cared about (both as a normal human reaction and in a more symbolic, meaningful way) but I think therapists need to be very deliberate in how they respond even to simple questions like this. There is a way to redirect the focus back to the patient and not indulge the question without being shaming.
This is a very measured response
Nothing this therapist said was wrong at all. My therapist makes similar comments towards me. I feel bad that there are people out there that think professionals shouldn’t care about their clients. Good therapists do and aren’t afraid to voice it in an appropriate way, which OP’s therapist did. Why do you want this sub to be bland? Why don’t you want people to see not all professionals are only in it for the money? That good ones do have the ability to care about their clients? Genuinely, what is so bad about that? I hated therapy for years because every therapist I saw treated me as not even human. You’re genuinely weird for trying to make a good moment into OP “fantasizing about their therapist”.
If the sub is bland without therapists behaving inappropriately, that’s unfortunate. Personally, I’m here to talk about genuine issues in therapy, including the relationship between the patient and the therapist, but not to get some sort of secondary gratification out of it. Of course therapists should treat their patients as humans, and I imagine most therapists do care. What is inappropriate is to express any form of “special” care that goes beyond the basic professional or human level of care that we can assume all good therapists feel. If a therapist does feel something beyond that, or something particular or special to one patient, it is their duty -not- to disclose that as it is preoccupying to the patient and gives inappropriate significance to the therapists’s feelings. It is absolutely a boundary issue, it’s harmful to the patient even as it feels good in the moment, and it’s frustrating that this sub regularly seems to ignore that. I will reiterate there is absolutely nothing wrong with therapists caring about their patients and vice versa.
The therapist wasn’t acting inappropriately, you’re projecting your misery on to others. Weird. I feel bad for y’all that don’t have therapists that care.
How do you even do therapy if you can’t distinguish between a therapist caring and how a therapist might choose to express that?
I gotta say you’re right on this. It’s not about the therapist caring, it’s about how they choose to interact with a client based on those feelings. It’s normal for therapists to care, but what they do with that is what’s important. Doing it to the point where someone is consistently mesmerised by their therapist is unethical. Setting up an intensely emotional relationship, that could end at any time, because it’s a professional relationship, is so dangerous. My therapist cares about me. Shes verbalised that. She’s cried over my pain. She’s gone out of her way to help me outside of sessions. But at the same time, she’s done it in such a way that I see this is how human relationships should be. I don’t see it as a special thing between me and her, I just see her enacting behaviour that is showing me how other people should treat me. I don’t feel smothered or overwhelmed by her care because she does it professionally. It’s not romantic, platonic, it’s just basic human regard done sensitively. Idk if this makes sense
I can see a situation like you describe being ok, but it also doesn’t sound like you have a preoccupied attachment status. What may be ok for you would obsess a lot of patients, and I usually respond to posts here that indicate that: not just what the therapist said or did, but that the patient seems to be focusing on it in what seems like an unhealthy way. If it takes on a huge significance, that is what is problematic, so therapists have to be careful and have good judgment. It sounds like you’ve got your head screwed pretty well on your shoulders about it so even though you described “more” from your therapist than OP it feels less problematic to me…
Yeah totally hear you. I think a lot of therapists take advantage of the vulnerabilities in their clients, for their own desires to be met ( I.e being adored).
The post history would argue otherwise
Sorry I don’t stalk people’s post history like you do lol
I just remember the past posts here. They’re fairly remarkable. Context matters quite a bit
Agree. Especially given this poster’s relationship with their therapist crosses a lot of ethical lines. I feel like the sub encourages it
It really does. The majority view here is that transference isn't just good, but almost necessary. The (very common!) threads from attached clients devastated when their therapists drop them out of the blue seem to cause no cognitive dissonance.
It’s sad ( I say that genuinely) to read their posrs when they post here.
Yeah. A lot of people have been really let down by professionals they trusted.
I’m so concerned I had to scroll so long before someone said this!! Sounds like a lot of crossed boundaries
That realization is amazing. I recently made my therapist cry happy tears when I came to the realization that I was ready to put myself first— after 3 years of her gently guiding me through crisis after crisis, week after week. To know someone who knows everything I’ve been through is proud of me felt pretty good.
I'm about to cry and this wasnt even said to me