I never had a therapist boyfriend before, and it turns out that I didn’t know I had one until he left me.
The tricky thing for some people with therapist boyfriends is knowing where one ends and the other begins. I never cared about that, I just thought he was great and I liked him.
Some boyfriends don’t want to talk about the relationship, and my therapist boyfriend got like that towards the end. I felt very frustrated about that, and my frustration made him more frustrated.
Then he left me. He gets credit for not straight up ghosting or dumping me via text. He wasn’t the worst boyfriend. I expected better communication from him because of him being a therapist, but therapist boyfriends are just boyfriends at the end of the day. Now that I understand that, I feel a bit better about it. Therapist boyfriends still do all the regular potential dumb things that boyfriends sometimes do, like fumbling a nice woman. If you have a therapist boyfriend, allow for the possibility that sometimes he’s going to act more like a therapist, while at other times he might behave more like a boyfriend.
I made mistakes as his client girlfriend because I read about therapy and bought into their misguided notion that it needed to be clear it. I kept trying to figure out which one he was being at any given moment and trying to use that to know if it was better to be in client mode or friend or girlfriend mode. I was new to this and I got it wrong sometimes. I’m sure I hurt and frustrated him sometimes when I got it wrong. I don’t hold it against me or against him, because we didn’t know. He is very smart and I’m not dumb, and if we knew better both of us would’ve navigated it better.
A relationship with a therapist friend or therapist boyfriend is a relationship with a friend or a boyfriend. The therapist community are the only ones who consciously try to separate them, but for people like me that doesn’t help very much. If I get close to someone then I’m close to them for reasons. If you want me to not be close to them at that point, then you’re way too late. I cared about my therapist boyfriend whether or not he was a therapist, and shutting it down or separating me from him like we’re Romeo and Juliet is not the least bit helpful. It creates unnecessary drama, confusion, and frustration. Therapists really want to be able to control the emotional connection side of therapy, but it isn’t always within their control. In that regard, I can see why they might not like me as a client. If I connect with someone as a friend, they have effectively lost control of that. Trying to force me to mold into their ideal only makes me hurt and angry.
If I think of my therapist giving me a crummy termination as my therapist, he sucks. If I think of him giving me a half-ass avoidant breakup as my boyfriend, it makes more sense. We’ve all had boyfriends who take the dumb and easy way out instead of doing things the brave and uncomfortable way. It’s not okay, it’s just easier to understand. A therapist really doesn’t need to be overly dramatic and emotional and shut down, why would they? But boyfriends are people and they fuck up and hurt girlfriends who don’t deserve it.
My therapist boyfriend has blocked me. He might hate me or find me disgusting in the way that people sometimes do when they break up with someone. I have gross exes.
My therapist boyfriend is not gross. I think he’s amazing. I’m really hurt that he didn’t think I was worth working for, because I thought he was worth working for. It’s painful to value someone you care about and then learn they don’t value you as much. Breakups hurt.
Being dumped by a therapist boyfriends sometimes feels like I got dumped by a boyfriend and by a therapist. It’s like failing at a relationship you care about and failing at therapy too. Ouch. Massive pain, more than other breakups I’ve had. Embarrassing too, because now I have to tell people that I flunked out of therapy! I don’t know anyone else who has done that. I’m not used to failing at something when I put in that much effort. It felt like a spectacular, stupid failure. There are total dipshits who haven’t failed out of therapy, but I did. Saying that without pain is still hard, but I’m getting there.
I didn’t try to have a therapist boyfriend, but I somehow did and now that I know it I can work on getting through it.
My ex-therapist boyfriend is not bad. He messed up and should’ve treated me more kindly, but I don’t think he’s bad. If I think of him as just a therapist it’s confusing and I hate him. If I think of him as my ex boyfriend, it feels painful but I hate him a lot less. I hate how he hurt me, but I don’t hate him.
I don’t pretend that he cares about me now, because he ignores me which probably means he doesn’t. I don’t know if he despises me because he cut me out of his life. But I know I still care about him. He was a wonderful therapist boyfriend after all, and a girl doesn’t get a cool one of those every day.