After 12 weeks of counselling, I felt strong. We’d done some brilliant work together. You asked me how I felt about approaching the end of our time together. I said I felt capable.

But the question stayed with me. You had brought out a side of me I didn’t know I had; you made me feel captivating and inspirational and extraordinary; you knew more about me than anyone else – and you were about to leave my life permanently. How could I say goodbye to someone like that?

Unable to sleep, I Googled “falling in love with your therapist”. I discovered that it is a common phenomenon called transference. I was projecting my baggage on to you: gratitude, longing for an emotional relationship with my father, craving respect from the opposite sex. I understood that what I felt wasn’t real.

And what did I really know about you, beyond the way you made me feel about myself? You had given away next to nothing about yourself. I didn’t know you at all, but you knew everything about me, all of my darkest and most pathetic impulses, and still you treated me with respect and admiration. Knowing that my feelings were nothing more than a figment of my imagination was like rubbing salt in the wound. I felt a fool.

A letter to… my mid-life lover Read more

Telling you I loved you was brutal. I hunted desperately and unsuccessfully for words that would soften the humiliation. I said I knew it wasn’t real, I knew about transference. I asked, hating myself, if we could continue our sessions, feeling it would bring me as much harm as it would good, but unable to let you go. I felt as damaged as I ever had in that moment.

You were so kind. You said words that soothed me, that made me feel anything but stupid and broken; you also said it was as real as any other feeling I had brought to you.

When the end finally came, I was equipped to cope with the absence of therapy, but not the absence of you. You hugged me goodbye, the first and only time we would ever touch, and kissed me on the head. I had no words, but it didn’t matter; you knew.

It was like a bereavement, losing you. Life goes on, with its trials and tribulations; and when I wonder, as I always do, what you would say, what emotion I would read in those brown eyes, the pain takes my breath away, even now. It no longer matters whether what I felt was real, or transference, or both. I just miss you, and that’s all.

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