What to do when you fall in love with your therapist

I have a history of long years of therapy. Losing my mom at the age of 11, sliding into anorexia in my teenage years and dealing with a strong self harm part has lead me to many years of therapy.

While it always felt like a relief to have someone listening that doesn’t judge, at some point I felt the lack of help through therapy and discovered mediation as much more helpful for my system.

I felt this was my method of really getting along with all the waves that life puts you in. But in 2019 it seemed like the wave was too high and my usual mediation practice didn’t felt helpful anymore. Everything just crashed. The years went by and in 2022 I discovered IFS therapy thanks to the goop podcast. At this point I felt my body was just in a constant fight or flight mode and trust seemed to be a word that was almost not existing in my language anymore.

So I reached out to an IFS therapist and started a very intense year of therapy. From the first session on I felt this is something different. It felt so deep, so grounding and most important: SO helpful.

But what I also realized quite quickly was: I have a huge crush on my therapist.

First I just tried to push it away. It felt strange, I felt ashamed, it made things complicated in my head. Like can’t this just be easy - finally I found a therapist I’m trusting and I feel things are getting better and then this?

I thought maybe it just goes away, maybe it’s just some sort of phase, but the longer the therapy sessions continued the heavier the crush got. To a point where I basically just got orgasms by thinking of my therapist, which didn’t helped with the shame part at all as you maybe can imagine.

What I wish now is, that I would have had the courage to tell her much earlier. Because it would have made things so much easier. I feel speaking things out loud is always a relief In a way. As if the shame can only survive when we silence ourselves. But it seemed this being in love was somehow a protection for me. A protection not to dive deeper to parts of me that are very scary to my system, especially parts that fear abandonment and parts that are kind of scared of men. But that is a whole different topic. Why I’m sharing this is because I have desperately wished that there was some kind of resource or podcast or anything in the internet where someone else experienced this too.

I remember how I listend to a podcast episode where someone spoke quite judgmental about how some people fall in love with their therapists and that made it all worse.

So this is my little attempt to share my story and in case it resonates just with one person I already feel happy.

My biggest learning in all of that was that I discovered that I have parts that feel ashamed of being in love. That there was some kind of protective layer between my heart and sharing this feeling of love. Because why should it actually be scary to be in love? I mean what a huge compliment for the other person, even if the other person isn’t sharing your feelings, no matter if it’s your therapist or someone else.

But I guess it reinforced that part in me that is so scared of abandonment, it reinforced a part of me that is scared to be not good enough, a part of me I call „expectation part“ because that part felt the need to fulfill my moms expectations in my early childhood so deeply. That part tried to overcover the fear of losing my mom as it thought it could have saved her by fulfilling her expectations. So what being in love with my therapist uncovered for me, was the relationship I have with my expecation part. That there is something inside of me which feels like it doesn’t belong when I don’t fulfill someones expectations. That I’m fundamentally wrong and have to proof so hard to be right, so I’m not being abandoned. To get to the point that my parts would slowly trust me that they could have never saved my mom, that you can never ever safe anyone but yourself and that my moms death meant not that she abandoned me, meant that I had to have the courage to open up to the fear about my mom’s death. To be able to fully feel my fear, to be able to feel my moms fears, my dad’s fear when I saw my mom dead with him, and let go off what didn’t belong to me. A process that is still ongoing for me, because the pattern of hiding from that fear was so strong. And connected with so many disbeliefes, the strongest one: I don’t deserve closeness.

To really feel into that loneliness of that young child again, that had just lost its mom, is so incredibly uncomfortable and yet so incredibly tender and healing.

So what has really helped me in understanding this strong crush and love I developed for my therapist is: therapy. And then a very long chat with my expectation part.

And even though my heart felt pretty broken when I ended therapy, it felt never as open as after that experience. Because I could finally let go of the thinking that my worth is depended on the reaction of others and really feel with my whole body that love is something so strong and beautiful that even just the energy of being in love is radiant. And uplifting. And absolutely wonderful.

So if your in love with your therapist I fully encourage you to share it as soon as possible and dive deeper what lies underneath that. Because it can lead to some beautiful healing and open your heart - and I’m not saying that makes it less painful. Going that way put me in waves of sadness that were incredibly strong. I feel working with fear of abandonment gets existential quite quickly.

The most precious moment for me was to realize that my broken heart healed through my own love. That my self love just grew so strongly through this.

And even though I do understand now why this all happened I still feel that love. Not in this intense obsessive way, but just as a beautiful energy coming from my heart when I think of my former therapist. And that is something we can never lose, should cherish and celebrate and just feels so special to be able to feel so deeply.