My Thoughts

Thanks for this really interesting and thought-provoking question. While the lifestyle elements of this may not be applicable to everyone, there are some broader topics about therapy that I think are really good to cover here as well.

So, let’s first try to summarize what you are asking here. You are pursuing nonmonogamy as a way to explore your bisexuality and to feel more fulfilled in general. You have a good therapist that you have been able to connect with. You realized that you find your therapist attractive and brought it up in therapy. It was dealt with well. She also treated your desire to have a non-traditional relationship well. Eventually, you saw your therapist on a lifestyle dating app. You have felt like the attraction between you was mutual, but when you brought up the presence of her on this app, she did not want to discuss it. You felt like this was disingenuous and pursued it further to which she had somewhat of an emotional reaction. Now you are concerned that you may have a rupture in this therapeutic relationship that was otherwise very beneficial for exploring deep topics that you haven’t been able to explore with other therapists.

There is a lot going on here, so I’ll to my best to tease this apart and address the most important topics.

The nature of dual relationships

First off, what you have going on here is what we in the field would refer to as a dual relationship. Dual relationships are something that we talk a lot about in our training as therapists or psychologists. It’s often an essential part of our training in ethics, and you will find questions about dual relationships on most licensure exams. A dual relationship is very much what it sounds like. When you are a therapist to someone and also have some other capacity of relationship to them. There are many examples of this. One common dual relationship would be to be someone’s therapist when their kid goes to the same school as yours. Or you might live in a small town where your mechanic or dentist is also a patient of yours. You could find out that you have a dual relationship with a client during the course of therapy when you hear them make reference to someone that you definitely know as well and discover that some aspect of your social or familial life overlaps with theirs. If you are active in a community organization, such as a political or social organization, you might also see the client within that context, which would be considered a dual relationship.

In smaller towns, dual relationships tend to be more common simply due to statistics. If I were to do therapy with primarily people in my own city that I live in now, there’s a good chance that I would see them working at a local restaurant or shop as well. Dual relationships are something that are not forbidden in therapy, but they are something that requires care and attention. Sometimes they cannot be avoided, especially if you are in a situation where there are a limited number of people in a given community and it is simply hard to avoid running into one another. Typically, the best course of action is to bring possible dual relationships to the forefront and proactively address them. This will involve boundaries and expectation setting. For example, when I worked in clinics at my graduate school, I needed to discuss the dual relationship of seeing clients that are also students at my school. So, when I see them around campus, what is the protocol? There are also patients that I see currently around town at the coffee shop or at dinner. It’s important to discuss the expectations for this.

There is not a one-size-fits all approach to dealing with these types of dual relationships, but there are obviously some things that you cannot do. You can’t go hang out and drink with your client. You can’t go chill at their house and have dinner just because. Weddings, funerals, and graduations are somewhat of a grayer area. Even in some circumstances that feel as if they are hardlines, there might be some circumstances where it would be appropriate. In general, you don’t want to be going to clients’ houses, but what if they are non-ambulatory and they require a home visit? In my role as a neuropsychologist, I am often doing home visits and will sometimes need to do things that might seem odd to build rapport and get the client to cooperate. Things like touring their property or having a meal with them at their table. Of course, there are cultural elements here as well that are relevant. There are a lot of things that we are supposed to consider ethically when it comes to dual relationships, such as whether there is a potential for harm, whether it improves treatment in some way, and whether there are any possible laws that will be violated. Again, it’s usually best practice to address these things as soon as possible and work together as a team. We’ll come back to this.

Attraction in therapy

Another important element of your question is the fact that you are attracted to your therapist. I’ve addressed this in a previous show before, but this is pretty common. We are all human. We can’t help who we are attracted to. You also need to consider what a therapist represents. They are someone that listens to you intently. They care about you. They empathize with your experience. And they hold a degree of authority or expertise. These can be attractive qualities to many people regardless of the physical appearance of the therapist. An attraction to your therapist or your therapist having an attraction to you is not inherently a bad thing. As I said, we are all human. It’s what is DONE with those feelings that matter. As part of the therapy process, it is often required that you give your client a handout or have them review a document called professional therapy never involves sex. This document is easy to search for online. But you are not allowed to have a romantic relationship with the clients that you work with.

In the course of therapy, it is sometimes the case that you need to talk through and process issues of attraction. If it’s something that will get in the way of treatment and potentially cause harm to the client, it is the responsibility of the therapist to either do the work on their own to prevent it from being an issue or to refer to another provider. It sounds like for the first part of your question, where you described the conversations following your revelation that you found your therapist attractive, they did a good job of bringing it to light and discussing it candidly. That’s awesome. These issues are not always easy for the therapist to address either. Remember, we are human too.

Now, what you described about seeing her on an app is something that definitely can happen. As I said earlier, when you have a smaller community, the possibility of running into someone increases. For instance, if you are in a small town and a member of the BDSM community in the area, you might see a client of yours at a play party. Again, in these cases, it’s super important to talk about the protocol, boundaries, and expectations for situations like this. When you brought up the topic to your therapist, they do have the right to not divulge information about their personal life. As I’ve mentioned on the show before, self-disclosure is a tool that can be used, but it does not have to be used in every circumstance. So, their boundary about not wanting to talk about their personal life is totally valid and that is something that you could be expected to respect. However, the way in which they went about it suggests that maybe they were taken aback or have not had a lot of similar experiences before. There is nothing technically wrong with them saying they do not want to confirm or deny what they are involved with in their personal life. However, given the circumstances, I think it would probably be more appropriate to not play dumb and instead assert the boundary in a more straightforward way. She could have said something like, “Thank you for bringing this up. It’s really important for the health of our therapeutic relationship that we do not blend the line between personal and professional. If you see me online anywhere in a personal capacity, I would ask that you just move along and do not engage. Is that agreeable to you?”

The part of this that I think is a bit on you is the re-visiting of the topic after she outlined a boundary to you. She is not a friend or family member. You are not owed information about her personal life. It’s not necessarily a sign that she is unwilling to discuss difficult topics. It means that she does not want to talk about that particular aspect of her personal life. That is something that you should respect.

When you brought it up a second time, you said that she made the statement that you don’t always need to “blow things up.” If those are truly the words that she used, I wouldn’t say that is the most appropriate. That is not a very therapeutic way of addressing the situation. It would be more appropriate for her to reassert her boundary and determine whether you are able to respect that or not. I can understand being somewhat hurt by that statement, but you do also need to understand that she is a human, and you may have backed her into a bit of a corner that made her respond in a way that was not the best. This isn’t a prompt for you to feel guilty (or proud, depending on your personality). Rather, you just need to understand that the therapeutic relationship is somewhat one-sided by nature. You don’t have a right to all of your therapist’s personal information.

Another element that you may not be considering here is that by admitting or directly addressing what you have seen from her in non-therapeutic contexts, she could be implicating other people like her partner. That could be something that she is very sensitive to. Again, I think she should probably have addressed this directly rather than making you feel stone-walled, but we are all human and it may be that you need to have some grace with her in the way that she has had grace with you as well.

Moving forward with the therapeutic relationship

Now, where to go from here. It sounds like you have definitely had a unique and possibly awkward few moments with your therapist. This could go a number of ways. There is a world where this is something that is addressed further, boundaries are clarified, and you two work toward a deeper working relationship with one another that feels appropriate and safe to both of you. There is also a version where you feel less safe and heard because of what happened. There is also a version where your therapist feels that given the personally charged nature of the situation, they cannot provide you the high standard of care that they want to and would like to refer you elsewhere. In this last case, that would not be a punishment. As I said, we have really strict ethical standards and guidelines that we are held to in order to keep the field as a whole in good standing. If for personal reasons, your therapist is unable to provide you good care, it is their responsibility to either work on that or get you better care.

I think that the best course is to address it again and directly talk about the concerns you have. To explain to your therapist that you did not mean to cross any boundaries, that you have benefitted significantly from your work together, and to ask if she thinks that you will still be able to work together in a constructive way. This could lead to a really interesting and beneficial conversation between the two of you about the therapeutic relationship and some of the issues that I have outlined here. Interestingly, in the therapeutic literature, talking about the relationship with your therapist WITH your therapist is something that is generally associated with positive outcomes.

So hopefully that gives you some more context about what happened, what is probably playing out on your therapist’s side of the equation, and some ideas about moving forward. Thank you for the awesome question!