By: Thomas Mondeau
I am sitting on my bedroom floor at 11:30 on a Tuesday night, laptop open, reading about a psychological phenomenon called transference, and I am thinking, “Oh. Oh no. Oh.”
The house is quiet in the certain way that only happens when everyone else is in bed, it’s a silence with texture and heaviness to it. I had meant to go to bed over an hour ago. Instead I am here, cross-legged on my rug, reading the same paragraph for the third time, because it is describing my experience with a precision that’s both relieving and terrifying.
The paragraph says, in clinical language that can’t properly convey the emotional experience, that it is common for therapy clients to develop strong feelings of attachment toward their therapists, and it may feel familial, romantic, platonic, anything. These feelings are not really about the therapist, but that they are a projection of one’s old needs finding a new face, like a ghost finding a fresh wall to haunt. I close the laptop. I sit in the dark for a little.
Her office is on the ground floor of a building that smells faintly of carpet cleaner and other people’s anxieties. There is a white noise machine outside the door, effectively simulating the hum of a fan. The room itself is small, slightly warmer than the hallway, with a chair I never sit on next to the couch that I always choose. Both are upholstered in an oatmeal-colored leather that’s slightly too soft so that I sink into it like a surrender to my environment.
I have been there six times. Six Wednesdays, each one feeling more loaded than the last, each one leaving me quieter on the drive home than I arrived. I noticed, around session three, that I had started saving things for her. Small observations, half-formed feelings, things that happened during the week that I wanted to report. As if I were taking notes for a casual nothing conversation. As if my experiences and emotions had become material.
That’s when I should have known what was going on. But I didn’t know until Tuesday night, on my bedroom floor, reading an article from a well-studied psychologist. What I had been doing without knowing it was using her face as a screen. Projecting onto it something much older, which is the image of a person who would finally, reliably, stay present. The image of someone who would not look away.
In the fourth session, she leaned forward slightly and asked: “When you imagine telling someone how you’re really feeling, what happens in your body?”
I laughed. It came out short and reflexive, the laugh of someone buying time and failing to cut through awkwardness.
“I brace,” I said with a pause. “Like something’s about to land.”
She nodded slowly. Without reaching for her notepad, without filling the space with anything. She just held it. Held me as I was holding it. The silence lasted maybe four seconds, and felt considerably longer.
I had not, until that moment, understood that being waited for was something I wanted. I had always experienced waiting as a precursor to disappointment. Someone taking their time was someone deciding how to let me down gently. Someone waiting for me to speak had the silent expectation of a perfectly-formed and well-communicated thought. But this felt like something else, like she was intentionally making room for honesty and imperfection. I drove home thinking about the ceiling of her office, the particular texture of the plaster and why I had memorized it.
I grew up in a house full of voices and almost no one listening. This feels like a dramatic statement, but it is more like a description of the climate, what the air was like, what you learned to breathe. People loved me, love was not the missing thing. What was missing was the specific experience of saying something and having it caught, or of mattering to someone’s attention the way an object matters to a hand that is really holding it, not just touching it. So I learned to keep the imperfect things inside. I became good at watching and poor at speaking. I developed a whole private life that had nowhere to go. Until, apparently, in a therapy office. Until the oatmeal couch and the white noise machine and the four-second silences that felt like being handed something. It turned out my nervous system had been keeping a list.
I opened up my laptop again. The big thing the bedroom floor taught me is that
transference is not really about the therapist, but it’s a portrait of the client. Every projection is a confession. The things I was directing at her, the need for approval, the anticipation before sessions, the way I had started framing each week around Wednesday appointments, none of it was actually about her. It was just an interior map, and it was rendered visible by the nearest willing surface.
I thought about the fifth session. A friend had canceled plans, and she had asked what my first feeling was when I read the text. “Shame,” I said. The word came out before I chose it.
“Whose voice does that shame sound like?” she asked.
I stared at the light coming through the blinds. Thin horizontal bars across the carpet, sort of deliberate-looking, like something staged. I had no answer, but I knew it was my own voice staying cagey, being ashamed of the shame. She waited with that particular generosity and active stillness, and I felt something old move through me, embarrassing and accurate, the way old things tend to be.
On the bedroom floor, I thought about that moment. About the fact that I had left the
session that day and been inexplicably irritable for a couple hours afterward. Impatient at a yellow light, annoyed by the dogs barking when I got home. I think that was the small ache of having someone look directly at me after a long time of being looked through and looked past.
Transference, I read, is your own history wearing a present-tense costume. It shows you who you have been, and what you have learned to expect from the people who matter to you. It is the template handed to you early, before you could question it, for how relationships work and what it costs to be known. I sat with that on the rug for a while.
Then I thought about love, how I have always loved sort of possessively. How there is
something in me that, when it attaches, tightens, and mistakes holding on desperately for caring. I have manufactured small withdrawals to see if they would be pursued. I have handed people, again and again, the quiet opportunity to confirm what the insecure part of me has always suspected, that I am not quite worth an unconditional effort.
In the fourth session she said, “It sounds like part of you is working very hard to protect
you from something that may have already stopped happening.”
I nodded, “Yeah.” There was the precise sting of being accurately named.
The rug is starting to feel scratchy. I have been sitting here long enough that my right leg is asleep.
Wednesday is only a day away. I don’t know exactly what I’ll say when I get there. I know I will sit in the oatmeal-colored couch and I will sink into it and the light will be doing its thing across the carpet and at some point I will say, carefully, with the slightly formal quality that honest words require, “I’ve been thinking about why I look forward to coming here so much. And I think I’ve had a bit of a realization.”
She will lean forward. She will wait. And I will watch her expression for the thing I have been scared of for as long as I can remember: the flicker of withdrawal, the subtle shift that means I have asked for too much. It won’t come, I am almost certain it won’t come. But I will be watching for it anyway, because that is what my subconscious says to do, and rewiring the whole circuit can’t happen overnight.
I close the laptop. The bedroom is dark except for the lamp in the corner, which casts a
soft orange circle on the vinyl floor. Somewhere outside, a car passes. The house settles into its late-night sounds.
I have been wanting for a long time. I mistook that wanting for my personality. That’s
something, I think, to finally know the difference.