My unspoken crushes in session

The training literature treats my attraction to a client like a radioactive spill. The manuals suggest I should contain the feeling, report it to a supervisor, and wait for the half-life to decay before I continue the work. This approach assumes that my desire is a failure of my professional stance. I find this perspective lazy and technically incorrect. I am talking about the specific experience where I sit across from a client and feel a distinct, unmistakable pull. This is not the erotic transference we studied in graduate school. In erotic transference, the client projects a romantic or sexual need onto the therapist. I can handle that. I can interpret that. I can put that on a slide at a conference and talk about the client’s developmental deficits. The field permits me to talk about the client’s feelings because the client is the one under the microscope. My own attraction is different. It puts me under the microscope. It suggests that I am a person with a pulse and a history of preferences.

The profession prefers a version of me that is a blank screen. If I find a client attractive, I have allegedly compromised my objectivity. I argue that the opposite is true. My attraction is a high-fidelity signal. It provides data that a standard intake form cannot capture. When I feel that specific spark, I am experiencing the exact interpersonal currency the client uses to survive in the world. If I ignore that signal, I am ignoring the most potent tool the client possesses. The silence on this topic makes the work harder to manage. It forces practitioners to bury a primary clinical variable under a layer of shame. I refuse to do that. I want to talk about how this attraction functions as a technical element in the room.

I worked with a woman three years ago who presented with chronic relationship instability. She was successful in her career. She possessed a sharp, biting wit. Within twenty minutes of our first session, I felt the familiar tightening in my chest. I liked her. I liked the way she challenged my questions. I liked the specific way she used humor to deflect from her anxiety. My attraction to her was immediate and undeniable. A younger version of me would have felt guilty about this. I would have worried that my judgment was clouded. I would have spent the next hour trying to prove to myself that I could remain neutral.

I chose a different strategy. I acknowledged the attraction to myself as a piece of evidence. I recognized that if I felt this way, most of the men in her life felt this way. Her attractiveness was not just a physical trait. It was an active social strategy. She used her charm to create an alliance that protected her from scrutiny. I felt myself wanting to be the therapist who finally got her. I wanted to be the one she didn’t have to perform for. That desire was the trap. If I succumbed to the crush, I would become just another person in her life who accepted her charm in exchange for her avoiding the hard work of change.

The attraction shaped my quality of attention. I found myself listening for her brilliance rather than her pain. I noticed that I was more reluctant to interrupt her. I wanted her to keep talking because her voice pleased me. This is the part the textbooks avoid. My investment in the work became colored by my desire for her approval. I had to monitor my own interventions to ensure I was not performing for her. I had to ask myself if a specific confrontation would make her like me less. If the answer was yes, I knew I had to deliver that confrontation immediately. The crush gave me a map of where I was likely to fail her.

Most supervisors treat this topic with a mixture of panic and moralism. They hear an admission of attraction and immediately think about the ethics board. They assume that attraction leads to misconduct. This assumption is an insult to the discipline. I can find a client attractive without wanting to touch them. I can feel a crush and still maintain the frame of the session. The problem arises when I pretend the feeling does not exist. When I deny the attraction, it becomes an unmanaged variable. It leaks into my tone. It influences my choice of metaphors. It makes me soft where I need to be firm.

I remember a session where this client described a conflict with her partner. She had been cruel to him. She had used her wit to dismantle his confidence. As she told the story, she looked at me with a specific, seeking expression. She wanted me to laugh with her. She wanted me to validate her cruelty as a form of intellectual superiority. Because I felt that pull to join her, I knew I had to move in the opposite direction. I told her that she was using her intelligence as a weapon to avoid intimacy. I told her that her charm was a wall.

The expression on her face shifted. The alliance we had built on mutual admiration cracked. She felt the sting of the observation because it came from someone she knew was affected by her. If I had been the cold, objective observer, the comment would have lacked power. It worked because the tension was present in the room. I was able to say, in effect, that I see what you are doing because I am also susceptible to it. I did not say those words out loud. I did not need to. The technical application of my attraction allowed me to hit the target with precision.

The profession’s silence on this topic creates a technical vacuum. We spend hours in Continuing Education Units talking about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy protocols and trauma-informed care. We talk about the brain. We talk about the nervous system. We rarely talk about the fact that we are animals in a room with other animals. We are biological entities responding to pheromones and social cues. When I ignore my own attraction, I am pretending that my biology stops at the office door. This pretense is a lie. It is a lie that costs us clinical efficacy.

The attraction reveals my own relational wiring. It shows me what I value. It shows me where I am vulnerable. If I find myself attracted to a client who is helpless, I need to know that about myself. If I am drawn to the high-power, high-functioning executive, that tells me something about my own need for status. These are not just personal quirks. These are the filters through which I process every word the client says. My attraction is a diagnostic tool for my own counter-transference. It allows me to see the shape of my own biases in real time.

I suspect many practitioners spend a significant amount of energy suppressing these feelings. They feel a spark and they immediately pivot to a more clinical, detached stance. They overcompensate by becoming overly formal. This shift in the therapist’s presence is palpable to the client. The client feels the withdrawal. They feel the sudden coldness. They often interpret this as a rejection of their core self. The therapist thinks they are being professional. In reality, they are being defensive. They are protecting themselves from their own feelings at the expense of the therapeutic relationship.

I prefer to stay in the tension. I want to feel the attraction and use it to fuel my curiosity. Why this person? Why now? What is the specific flavor of this desire? If I can answer those questions, I can understand the client’s internal world with more clarity. I can see the ways they use their desirability to manage their environment. I can see the loneliness that often sits behind that desirability. People who are highly attractive or charming are often starved for honest feedback. Most people in their lives are too busy being charmed to tell them the truth. If I am also being charmed, I am useless to them.

The distinction I am making is about the direction of the gaze. Erotic transference is about the client’s gaze on me. My attraction is about my gaze on the client. The first is a symptom. The second is a response. Both are part of the field. I argue that we must train therapists to analyze their own attraction with the same rigor they apply to any other clinical phenomenon. We must move past the fear of the ethics board and into the reality of the human encounter.

I do not talk to my clients about these feelings. I do not believe disclosure is helpful in this context. Disclosure often serves the therapist’s need for catharsis rather than the client’s need for growth. The power of the attraction lies in its use as an internal compass. It tells me where the landmines are buried. It tells me when I am being seduced into a false alliance. It tells me when I am becoming a co-conspirator in the client’s self-deception.

My work with the woman I mentioned ended after four months. We did good work. She stopped destroying her relationships. She learned to sit with her own vulnerability without using her wit as a shield. The attraction I felt never fully disappeared. It remained a low-level hum in the background of our sessions. I used that hum to stay alert. I used it to remind myself that she was a person who could easily manipulate me if I let her. The fact that I liked her made me a better therapist for her, because it forced me to be more rigorous with myself.

The profession needs to stop treating therapist attraction as a dirty secret. It is a variable. It is a data point. It is a common occurrence in a room where two people are engaged in the most intimate form of conversation. I am not a machine. I am a senior strategic therapist with fifteen years of practice, and I still get crushes in session. Those crushes have taught me more about the mechanics of human connection than any textbook ever could. I will continue to use them. I will continue to scrutinize them. I will continue to argue that they are a necessary part of the work. The silence ends here.