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If you suffer from an eating disorder now or have in the past, please email Joanna for a free telephone consultation.

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Eating Disorder Recovery
Joanna Poppink, MFT
Eating Disorder Recovery Psychotherapist
serving Arizona, California, Florida and Oregon.
All appointments are virtual.

 

Joanna I said I would come back to you on the types of stories that I felt might serve to encourage women to open up about sexual stuff in therapy...but it is hard... ..as I think (okay, I don't know a subtle way of saying this, so it is what it is)...if by disclosing details or telling a story, there are elements of promiscuity, or behaviours that could be taken as "whore-ishness"...the potential for those to make the client feel kind of "why is she telling me this - does she think I'm some kind of whore?" and then the whole shut down, pulling away from your therapist, relationship going backwards not forwards thing, kicking in. So I'm really not sure I'm trying to think how my relationship evolved with my therapist, to get to a point where I could talk openly about the sexual things... ...and I think the answer to that is tied up in erotic transference. Because I guess if you are the type of person who uses sexual behaviours as part of your ED, then you are the type of person who ends up in the erotic transference situation ...and once you've disclosed that to your therapist and explored it and talked it through ...then I guess talking about anything else is not such a vbig deal, at worst it is on par, but usually easier. The difficult point is raising the erotic transference feelings in therapy. I reached a point where I felt I had to raise it because it was eating away at me and just too confusing. But I was lucky because I asked a therapist friend and I asked you too, and you both told me that I needed to talk about it in therapy. And I remember having a session where I kind of said that I'd felt so confused that I'd talked to a therapist friend about how I felt about my T, and that my therapist friend had said I needed to raise it in therapy, but couldn't get any further...and my therapist just said "I think it's too uncomfortable for you to talk about those kinds of things yet, with me"... ...and I remember feeling like, "why am I being so stupid, I can seduce any man, I can talk sex with anyone, why can't I do it?" And I did, a few weeks later, force myself to talk about it with her, and in the weeks and months that followed I disclosed everything else, that I needed to disclose I don't know if any of that helps...it's not about stories...but I think a lot of people do suffer the anguish of erotic transference, but never find the guts to raise it. So maybe that is the answer...maybe talk about transference with clients, different kinds of transference, maybe use anger as a starting point and gradually get to the eroticised stuff?

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