I drove past the house of Jane (my ex-therapist) again last week. It was only a very short detour this time, as I happened to be in the neighbourhood. It was the first time I had driven past since writing ‘Have you googled your therapist?’ and the difference, on this occasion, was that it was the first time I didn’t feel shame or fear at doing so. I didn’t feel I was doing something wrong – and although I think I was still nervous that she might see me, the thought didn’t worry me quite so much.

This happened only a couple of days after I received an email from someone who had read my blog and was wondering whether to tell her therapist about how attached she felt to him, and of how she ‘stalked him online’ (her words). Her email resonated so much with the feelings of guilt I used to experience over such ‘stalking’, and it brought home to me how much had changed over the last few months, in how I view this subject. And that change is due entirely to the way in my therapist has responded, and the conversations we have had about it.

On every occasion on which I have mentioned trying to get close to her outside of session (whether online, or in terms of physical distance), her response has surprised and amazed me. Take a couple of weeks ago, for example, when I told her that in the middle of our summer therapy break, on the day that I knew she was going on holiday, I happened to drive very close to her house and had an enormous urge to turn off the main road and drive right past it. But I didn’t. And instead of saying ‘well done for resisting the urge and not driving past’ (which was the sort of response I was expecting), she implied that it would have been fine, and perfectly reasonable, had I done so. I was completely taken aback and wasn’t sure what to say, until ‘you’re amazing’ slipped out, because that was exactly how I felt.

She had responded in a very similar way when I told her, as few months ago, that I had spent the day with my children in the playground and by the river near her house. I walked them to within fifty metres or so of her house, and then turned back. Her response was to call me ‘creative’ – I had found a way not just of spending special time with the kids, but of bridging the gap between sessions and continuing to feel connected to her. Far from commenting on or being displeased about how close I’d come to her house, she remarked on the fact that I hadn’t closed the gap all the way and walked right past her front door. In her mind, it showed that I was learning to tolerate some distance and I was becoming more able to bridge that gap myself, while still keeping her real.

Her understanding and her tolerance might seem extraordinary (they certainly did to me), but I think it’s easy to forget that not only have our therapists worked with many clients (who no doubt have had similar feelings), they have also been clients themselves. They may well have experienced the same feelings, and acted in similar ways. And so perhaps they don’t feel threatened by our behaviour (as we imagine they may do) and perhaps they understand it better than we think. Although she didn’t tell me of her own experiences, my therapist did mention that she had once had a colleague (another therapist) who took a certain route to get to town in order to drive past her own counsellor’s house on a regular basis. It was a huge relief to hear that – and suddenly I felt as if my behaviour was not so unusual or so unacceptable after all.

Having been clients themselves, our therapists hopefully also understand the process by which dependence and attachment and a need for the therapist’s physical presence, turn, over time, into greater independence and the ability to ‘internalise’ the therapist and carry them within, even when they are not present. This, as I understand it, is where my therapy will eventually lead me; up to the point where I have internalised my therapist and the process sufficiently, that I will be equipped to manage on my own. However, she has pointed out that until this happens, therapy (and the therapist) are strongly tied to the tangible factors that surround them. And so we ‘place’ the therapist in a particular location in which they exist powerfully, with their reality diminishing the further we get from that point. We associate therapy with the room in which it happens; with the objects in that room, the colour of the walls, or the view outside the window. And if any of those things changes it can be incredibly unsettling, even if our therapist is still there, because the person and the process are so bound up in our minds with one particular set of co-ordinates in three-dimensional space. And so it’s natural, when wanting to feel close to our therapists, that we seek out the place where they feel most real.

I found that hearing it explained in this way, went a long way towards enabling my feelings of guilt and shame to melt away. And I think very similar arguments can be applied to trying to stay connected to one’s therapist via ‘virtual’ means as well. In the months after I stopped seeing Jane, I used to find that googling her and seeing her name in print was immensely important in keeping her alive in my mind, in what I had originally assumed was a gap of few months until I could return to therapy with her again.

“But” – you might respond – “there is a big difference between something being understandable and it being right. It feels wrong to violate someone’s privacy in that way – whether that happens in the ‘real world’ or online”. It’s why my discussions with my therapist on this topic have felt so much like ‘confessions’ – I felt I had ‘morally transgressed’; that I had ‘sinned against her’. But in response to this, my therapist made a very valuable observation which really struck home and provided a great deal of food for thought. She said that it was almost as though I was placing something ‘out of bounds’ – even though it wasn’t – in order to recreate an old dynamic in which I wanted desperately to reach out for something that was inaccessible or forbidden. By making something forbidden that was not in fact so, I was guaranteeing that if I did reach out for it, I would be hurt by the burden of guilt and self-reproach that I would then feel.

This made immediate sense – but why would I recreate such a situation, and why would I invent a moral imperative for myself that I then felt bound to transgress? I realised that the guilt and shame I felt was not so much about driving past my therapist’s house, or googling her; but about the overwhelming desire to be close, which itself led to those behaviours. In many ways, it is easier to deal with punishing ourselves for violating someone else’s boundary (as we see it) than to deal with the neediness, dependence and desire for connection that we may feel for our therapists. Perhaps there is even a sense in which that neediness feels self-violating – it impinges on our solitariness and the sense that we should manage life alone, without the fear of being hurt. It seems easier to try and replace that sense of self-violation (which we may feel we have no defences against, or any idea how to handle) with the more familiar sense of ‘doing the wrong thing’. It makes the problem an external one – we have defined the line that has been crossed; and there is a difficult but obvious solution – confession and the hoped for absolution.

I don’t fully understand this yet – and I’m not sure what exactly the dynamic is that I am recreating from my past. However, this is one area in which I am incredibly grateful to my therapist for helping me to see things in a way which enables me to be kinder to myself. The challenge for me now, I think, is to apply this to other areas of my life. I suspect that there are a number of ways in which I needlessly place things ‘out of bounds’ or in some sort of ‘moral category’, which just enables me to criticize or punish myself if I ‘reach for things I shouldn’t’ or act in ways I perceive as ‘wrong’. I also suspect there are a number of circumstances in which my feelings (for example, shame or anger) relate to the underlying motivations driving my actions, rather than to the actions themselves. But if there is one thing that continues to inspire me to try and be kind to myself, it is her own kindness to me, and her openness to the ways in which I express my needs and my desire to stay connected. And for that, I will always be grateful.