Why Loving or Resenting a Therapist Can Be Part of the Work

Artwork by Lisa Nelson

Strong feelings toward a therapist have been recognised in psychotherapy since its earliest days. We call them transference when your feelings are shaped by earlier relationships, and countertransference when my own feelings are stirred by you. These patterns aren't mistakes. They're a natural part of working in a space where deep emotions and attachment are present.

For some of you, transference feels like warmth, trust, or even falling in love. For others, it feels like irritation, mistrust, or anger, especially if I've said or done something that has landed as hurtful. Sometimes both experiences happen within the same relationship, sometimes within the same session. In either case, talking about what is happening between us will reveal something important.

Why it arises here, specifically

The therapy room has a strange shape. One person is paid to attend fully, to remember, to hold what the other says without flinching or changing the subject. Almost nowhere else in adult life does that kind of sustained, undivided attention exist. If you grew up starved of it, or only ever received it with conditions attached, this can register as something closer to a homecoming than a professional service.

That is the seed of transference. Your attachment system does not distinguish neatly between "this is a paid, boundaried relationship" and "this is a person who sees me." It responds to the pattern: someone attentive, someone attuned, someone who does not look away. Early relational templates, what Bowlby called internal working models, get activated because the conditions here resemble the conditions in which those templates were formed. You are not confused about who I am. Your body is simply doing what bodies do: matching present experience to the nearest available blueprint.

This is why transference so often carries the exact flavour of an old wound. If you learned early that love had to be earned through performance, you might find yourself anxiously trying to be the "good client," reading my face for approval. If you learned that closeness was followed by abandonment, you might feel a surge of dread the moment warmth arrives, because your system has learned that this is precisely the point where things tend to fall apart. The feeling isn't really about me. It's the old wound, meeting a context safe enough to finally speak.

When the feeling is love

When you tell me you're developing feelings for me, my first response is not to reassure you that it isn't real, and it isn't to accept the story at face value either. It's curiosity. What does it mean to you to feel this? What shape does love take in your body right now? What is it asking for?

Falling for a therapist tends to bring two things into the room at once: a feeling and a set of inherited constructs about what that feeling must mean. Most of us were handed a fairly narrow idea of love before we ever chose one: love means wanting to be chosen back, love means exclusivity, love means this has to go somewhere, or it was never real, love means if I feel it this strongly, it must be fate rather than pattern. None of that is wrong to feel. It's worth holding loosely enough to look at.

So we get to ask, together: what does falling in love actually feel like in your body, right now, today? Where do you notice it? What old fear does it stir alongside the warmth, fear of wanting too much, fear of being laughed at, fear that naming it will end the very thing that produced it? And underneath the fear, what is the feeling actually reaching for? Very often, it isn't me specifically. It's the experience of being met, of mattering to someone who is paying full attention, of being seen without having to perform for it. That is a real and legitimate longing. It deserves to be explored on its own terms rather than folded automatically into a story about romance or destiny.

This is also an opening to look at the shape of love itself, not just this instance of it. What have you been taught love has to look like to count? Where did that definition come from, and who benefited from you believing it? Does love have to be reciprocated in the exact form it arrives to be real? Can a feeling be true and important without needing to be acted on? These aren't rhetorical questions I already have the answer to. They're genuinely open, and unpacking them with you, rather than for you, is where the growth tends to live.

None of this means the feeling gets dismissed or pathologised. It means we get curious about it together, the same way we'd get curious about anger or grief that showed up in the room. The feeling is data. What it's pointing to, and what you decide to do with that information, is the work.

The test

Anger and mistrust in our relationship often carry a different, closely related function: the test.

You may have arrived with a working hypothesis about people, formed honestly from experience: closeness is unsafe, my needs are too much, if I show my real reaction I will be punished or abandoned. That hypothesis rarely gets stated outright. Instead, it gets tested. You might push a boundary, express doubt about my competence, go quiet after a session that touched something raw, or become sharp with me over something small. Underneath, the real question is rarely about the surface complaint. It's closer to: will you do what everyone else did? Will you punish me, disappear, or get defensive, the way the people who were supposed to keep me safe once did?

This is not manipulation. It's your nervous system doing its job, gathering evidence about whether this relationship is going to behave like the ones that hurt it before. If I get defensive, minimise, or quietly withdraw my warmth in response, your hypothesis is confirmed, and the old wound closes back over, having learned yet again that it was right to protect itself. If I stay present, curious, and non-punitive, something different becomes possible. Not because I've said the right words, but because your body has just lived through an interaction that didn't follow the old script. That experienced update is worth more than any explanation I could offer.

This is also why rupture, done well, tends to deepen trust faster than a relationship with no friction at all. A therapy that is only ever smooth gives your nervous system nothing to test. It is in the moment of friction, and what happens next, that your system gathers its most convincing data.

What repair with a therapist is actually doing

We live in a world without one fixed, objective truth. Your experience is your truth, shaped by your history and perception. That means there will be times when I am perceived as having hurt or failed you. When that happens, I want to take responsibility for my part and understand how it was for you. I don't want to fall into the ego trap of believing I only have value when I am right. The work is about staying in conversation, owning what is mine, and being open to what your truth can teach me.

Polyvagal theory gives language for what is happening physiologically in these moments. When you feel hurt, dismissed, or unseen, your autonomic nervous system reads it as a small-scale threat and shifts state accordingly: sympathetic activation (fight, sharpness, confrontation), or a dorsal shift into numbness, withdrawal, appeasement. Discomfort in therapy can pull you toward these old survival strategies. If we can slow down instead of stepping away, that shift itself becomes something to work with directly, in real time, rather than as a story told about it later.

Repair is not simply an apology. It's a co-regulation event. When I stay present through your anger or hurt without retaliating or collapsing, your nervous system gets direct, embodied evidence that connection can survive rupture. That evidence lands differently than reassurance offered in the absence of any real friction. It is one thing to be told a relationship is safe. It is another to feel your own system stay intact after telling someone the truth about how they hurt you, and watching them not leave.

I know how powerful this can be because I've lived the opposite. Years ago, I told a psychologist that something she had said hurt me. She shrugged and replied, "Some people can't handle how direct I am." That was the end of it, and I didn't go back. I still wonder how different things might have felt if she had been curious about my experience, acknowledged it, and helped me find a way forward that worked for my nervous system. That moment taught me what not to do, and it's why I work the way I do now.

In couples' work

In couples' work, I've seen this clearly. One of you feels hurt by the other, and later in the session, feels hurt by me, too. The very pattern you came in to talk about is right there in the room, live, without either of you needing to recall or reconstruct it. This gives us a rare kind of access: the relational wound stops being a story about last Tuesday and becomes something we can work with as it happens, in real time, with both your nervous systems still activated and available to something new.

A different frame of authority

Feminist and queer psychology value this kind of engagement. Challenging me or expressing dissatisfaction shifts therapy from a hierarchy into a collaborative process. Decolonising therapy means creating a space where both our voices matter, even when it's uncomfortable. A model where the therapist is never wrong, never questioned, never affected, tends to recreate exactly the power dynamics many people are trying to heal from: dynamics where one person's experience counted and the other's didn't.

When you bring frustration, anger, longing, or affection into the room, there is always value in working with it. These moments can strengthen trust, widen the space for honesty, and show that relationships can hold complexity. I see every person I work with as one of my wise teachers.

In the animist traditions I work with, rupture and repair are like the cycles of the earth: the fire that clears, the rain that softens, the seeds that grow in freshly opened ground. Without the clearing, renewal cannot happen.

This is why I make repair a central part of my practice. If discomfort arises between us, I will make space for it and will not charge for that conversation. These exchanges are the work itself.

Repair can be tender and tiring. It can also be transformative. Meeting these moments together builds the knowing that truth can be spoken without losing connection, and that even conflict can bring medicine.

Reflection: If you notice strong feelings toward me or any guide, what might that feeling be testing? What old hypothesis about closeness or safety might be quietly waiting for new evidence? And if the feeling is love, what shape has love been taught to take, and what is it actually reaching for?