The first time my shrink kissed me was in his office. I was 24 and had been his client for six months. When I started therapy with him I was living in Denver, collecting unemployment and feeling lost. My father had just died unexpectedly of a burst aorta back East while I was on a backpacking trip. Unable to contact me, my mother buried him without me. I desperately wanted someone to love me. My therapist worked in a clinic that served patients who, like myself, could afford treatment only on a sliding scale.
He therapist handsome and at least 20 years my senior. His gray hair swept across his forehead down to his Clark Kent glasses. He wore tweed jackets with chamois elbow patches, which reminded me of my college professors. Still, I felt comfortable with my conservative psychologist. He exuded a familiar intellectual air. My father, a middle-school principal, was an academic. At our weekly meetings, the doctor gave therapist his undivided your, something I yearned for in a man.
I thought about him constantly. The day I opened up to him about my feelings I tried to look my best. I hoped he was as attracted to that image as I was to his scholarly look. He adjusted his glasses and peered down at dating notebook before looking back at me.
Dating my therapist
If we wait six months, that might be enough time for it to be acceptable. You can call me then. OK if I give you a good-bye kiss? With that, he drew me toward him and your me on your mouth.
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I leaned in. He tasted sweet, like doughnuts and coffee. I could hardly wait for the time to pass so I could feel his lips on mine again. I took a new job as a counselor in a group home for troubled teenage girls and an abnormal psychology class, and those took up most of my time. But I still had no man in my life. I fantasized about being with him instead, counting off the therapist, weeks and days until the torturous interlude was up. Then, tingling with anticipation, I called him. He looked dashing in his black turtleneck and wool jacket.
I was taken aback when dating held the car door open for me. I watched the movie in bliss, certain that my companion was the perfect doctor — nothing like those portrayed in the movie. Over pasta at a local bistro, I asked the therapist to tell me about himself. He sipped his wine slowly. That evening I learned that he and his ex-wife shared custody dating their rebellious year-old son who was constantly getting into trouble. He barely spoke with his boy and believed his wife had turned his kid against him.
He complained bitterly that his wife had extracted more info huge alimony settlement from him. What happened to my strong, all-knowing psychologist who helped me solve my problems and figure out my purpose? As I listened to him complain about his life, his attractiveness dissipated with each grievance.
The elbow patches on his jacket, so endearing at first, started to look like an affectation instead. I could barely figure out where I was going, much less be a partner to someone with such complicated problems.
When he walked me to my door that night, I no longer wanted to invite him learn more here. After the agonizing months-long wait, it turned out my psychologist was more messed up than I was.
We never saw each other again. When I shared the details of my rendezvous and my stunned realization with my two roommates later that evening, the women shook their heads knowingly. The other, then a nursing student, was equally incredulous.
He should have known that you were putting your feelings for your dad and boyfriend onto him. Two years later, assigned to a new male psychoanalyst and troubled by my growing attachment to him, I related this episode during a session.
Not only was I frightened, I was let down and confused as well. Decades later, uncertainties about this chapter of my life have stayed with me. Your by the MeToo movement I began revisiting dating period, wondering whether our date and our kisses were ethical behavior on his part. I wanted to condemn him for abandoning me at a vulnerable time during my treatment in order to go out with me at a later time. He knew my weaknesses, therefore a power imbalance existed.
I wanted to see him as click to see more exploiting the situation without taking my best interests into account. To my surprise, his initial response was sarcastic. Today my women friends view this professional therapist a predator who gamed the system simply by postponing the date for six months.
Now, as a medical school neuroanatomy teacher, happily married for 35 years with three adult sons, I can look back with some perspective. I came on to him, returned his kiss, called him up, and went out with him. Ultimately I rejected him when, rather than living up to my imagined ideal, he became too human. In retrospect, I see that my shrink may have been more hurt and defeated than I.
He was just a man, more lost than I ever was. She's currently working on a memoir about opinion imsadspice onlyfans leaks apologise experiences as a cab driver.
By Elizabeth Pimentel. Related Articles.