Having a Crush on Your Therapist
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us. You're sitting in your therapist chair working on your relationship problems and then all of a sudden it happens. You realize you've developed a crush on the person you're paying to understand you. You've got a crush on your therapist and then all of a sudden you feel shame, anxiety, there's secrets. What happens next and how common is this? Well, that's what we're about to discuss with Laurel Vander Torn, a licensed therapist who runs Laurel Therapy Collective serving California and Florida. Laurel, what a topic. Welcome to the show. I know.
What is the common experience of having a crush on your therapist?
I loved it. I have had a close friend of mine admit to his therapist that he had a crush on her. And what followed was this. She handled it incredibly professionally, told him it does happen, and then talked it through and the reasons for it. It's not as scary as you think if you find yourself in this situation, I guess is what I learned from my friend. Yeah. It's super common. I've had it happen where a client disclosed to me that they had a crush on me. And I wasn't even licensed at the time I was in training. And I was kind of like, oh, yeah, this is what they prepared me for. Because it is so common that it's talked about a lot in therapist training programs and in consultation and supervision. So any therapist worth their salt is absolutely ready to handle it.
How do feelings of shame and anxiety arise in therapy?
And it makes sense, right? Like even it could be you don't actually have a crush on them. They're not your type. They're obviously not someone you would date. Maybe your therapist is married with kids and the relationship has been very professional. But when you get close to someone, sometimes those wires can get crossed. Is there a fancy term in therapy called transference? And if there is, do you want to maybe define it for me? Yeah. Transference is when you kind of superimpose something onto your therapist. So let's say I'll use an example from my life. My therapist, because all therapists should have a therapist, my therapist has the same haircut as my mom. Yeah. And so all of a sudden you feel like some maternal connection that isn't there.
Yeah. So like stuff with my mom, like we can work on in a slightly different way because of that. And that's like a very kind of superficial example. But, you know, not knowing much about her life, I should actually tell her this when I see her tomorrow. Yeah. We often superimpose our experiences onto people that we just met or people that we don't know much about. You know, I have a coach at my gym who looks so much like the person I was in my first relationship with. And, like, I'm having feelings about this coach, complicated feelings that, like, they don't deserve. They're just there to, like, coach me through my workout, you know? So super common to happen in therapy, particularly because... Therapy is built on a bedrock of positive regard, unconditional positive regard.
And that feels really good to receive, particularly for people that have never had it. So I think that there's something in there that's a little bit similar to what we see happening with AI chatbots, that the constant validation and the kind of soothing that they get emotionally happens in a more complex, subtle way in the therapeutic relationships. in addition to a million other things that AI can't do. Of course, AI aside, it may well be attraction. Maybe your therapist is your quote unquote type. But I think a lot of times it isn't. It's kind of like that support and you get those wires crossed. How often does this happen? Because I think when it happens to you, like you're sitting in the chair and all of a sudden it pops into your head and you feel like it's a secret and you feel like if you disclose it to your therapist, somehow it's going to go badly.
Side note, it probably won't. Because like you say, therapists are trained for this. Yeah. But I think when it happens to somebody, it feels like it's happening to the first time in the history of humanity. And it's this huge secret and there's shame.
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