Yeah, I said it.
Sometimes it feels like it would be a really good idea to give my middle-aged therapist a blow job. Not that I would ever tell him, not that he would ever let me, and not that I wouldn’t be completely destroyed if I did.
And yet…
It’s a Saturday night. The kids are in bed, no looming deadlines, and the husband is playing some video game about zombies and gardening. I start with an innocent Google search — “types of therapy” — and before I know it, I’m twelve searches deep, reading about psychoanalysis, thinking of my shrink, and wondering if maybe Jung wasn’t so wrong to, you know, with his patient.
Transference. I hate the term — it’s so dismissive of what you really, really feel. And as someone who often doesn’t feel much, I am convinced that when I do feel something, it must be real. The concept, as I understand it (with absolutely no relevant education), is that we develop frameworks to make sense of and navigate external people and situations based off of our previous experiences, with all of the desires, disappointments, and insight we carry with us from those earlier interactions. When we don’t know a person or their reactions that well, or if something aligns in just the right way, we apply one of these frameworks, allowing us to plug in and react to an expected, feared, or desired response based on the knowledge we bring with us. And despite all of the negatives it seems get applied to it, I think it helps to keep us safe too.
Since R — like any halfway competent therapist — doesn’t talk about himself and his feelings much, it makes the ground ripe for the application of these frameworks. So, for example, when he raises his eyebrows in a certain way at something I say, I assume it means that he is judging me negatively because, apparently, that’s how I’ve learned to interpret that sort of gesture (even though, objectively, he’s never been particularly judgmental toward me), and I end up feeling embarrassed about what I expressed. Or if he asks me a follow-up question to something I’ve said and it doesn’t seem on point, I will feel deeply misunderstood and hopeless; I become upset and sullen, even though (logically) I probably just didn’t express myself clearly and he would have been happy to listen to me explain better.
So, back to my painfully strong, mixed-up feelings toward R. I get angry with him, sometimes when I know why and sometimes when I don’t. I will hate him for months at a time without understanding it. Then when I do have a reason to be angry with him — like when he completely forgets to call in a needed med refill for the eighth time — I blow it out of proportion, because it gives me something concrete to turn my anger toward, but also because I take it as evidence that he doesn’t care about me at all. Which, while obviously true, still hurts in my tangled mind because of….
The dad thing. I have so much built into my father frameworks, and there he is, appearing in my mind like the sort of father I wish I had — kind, smart, articulate, funny, paying attention to my feelings — and of course he’s the one I want to be sending a Father’s Day card to (but I don’t because I am only partially insane!).
Then, uh, the blow job. I admit I have a crush, and I desperately want him to care about me, inside and outside of his office. I don’t like to think too much about the why of those feelings since I will never let it come up in therapy, and I think it gets a little too Freud-y anyway, which kind of makes me want to vomit. But, it’s interesting those types of fantasies aren’t about making love fucking him, but rather a submissive act, the kind of thing (that my framework tells me) men will stick around for… or that men will be willing to accept instead of other, more vulnerable things.
Oh, and he’s so freaking hot.
Umm, right?