Dissociated after therapist’s self-disclosure and blurred boundaries
I have been working with my therapist for 8 months and have developed strong maternal transference due to severe childhood emotional neglect from my mom. Overall, she is incredibly warm, deeply empathetic, and well-meaning, and she has helped me a lot. However, a major shift happened a few sessions ago when I finally gathered the courage to open up to her about how much I think about her, how badly I want to write to her outside of session, how much I long to hug her and how much shame i feel around this.
This disclosure made her very teary-eyed. I expressed my deep sadness that she can never truly be my mom and that this relationship will eventually have to end. She told me our relationship doesn't have to end, that it will still exist and we can always communicate if i want to. She said she wanted me to experience things "in the playground." Right after this conversation, our professional boundaries became very loose and porous. She started telling me to text her anytime when i feel these longing aches or difficult emotions, meeting outside for walks and hugging me. She frequently gets teary-eyed during my stories, which initially felt deeply validating. But while those hugs and meetings feel very good in the moment, I feel a constant sense of impending doom. I feel like this real-world care is only a temporary painkiller, and when it inevitably ends, the rupture is going to hurt so much more. I go through these strong waves of emotional shifts that first feel like i’m high from love and care and then it shifts to grief and deep pain.
Despite this deep longing, I have never actually cried around her. Even after 8 months, my body's involuntary response to vulnerability in the room is always to shake, laugh, or completely dissociate. I just cannot let my guard down enough to weep in front of her. Instead, I go through these deep, aching longings in my chest and intense, solitary crying sessions at home where it feels like the tears will never stop.
Last week, I entered the session feeling great and full of energy. During the hour, I brought up how triggered and sad I was by a recent event involving discrimination and systemic hate. My therapist got visibly irritated, used an authoritative tone, and ordered me to "calm down." This comment made me freeze, especially because she had made a similar biased comment during one of our recent walks outside.
Right after that, when I mentioned that I wish I had been more of a "fighter" in life to let things out, to be more angry like she told me she was, she completely lost her professional role and dropped a massive personal trauma. She quickly, flatly shared a graphic and violent story from her childhood involving severe abuse and a weapon. (basically saying that i shouldn’t wish that, because that took her being exposed to a lot of physical violence)
I instantly went numb, my mind blanked, and I completely dissociated for the remaining 30 minutes of the session, unable to form new thoughts. It was very distressing because i couldn’t just snap my fingers and get out of it. When I spoke up and told her I "just went somewhere," she looked concerned, asked if the story was "too hard to follow," and told me, "Well now, don't run away, let's stay here." Everything after that is a blur.
Since then, she has checked in over text, but her tone flipped to being cold and mechanical, asking for physical tracking checklists ("pulse? breathing? tension?"). When I replied that my heart was aching hard like someone stepped on it and my stomach was flaring up from stress, she suggested I go to a doctor for a battery of physical tests to rule out medical issues (even though I told her I have a clear medical history and doctors cleared me recently). Her final response to my vulnerable text about my physical pain was just reacting to it with a single shocked emoji. I felt angry that i even wrote her like she asked, because it left me feeling worse.
I am cycling rapidly between deep longing, intense guilt (feeling like I couldn’t hear her out, unable to empathise without collapsing), and sharp anger/hatred at her sudden coldness and avoidance. I am devastated because I realized I truly believed the fantasy that she would be a permanent maternal figure in my life. Now, I feel like I am the one who has to control things.
I don't want to terminate therapy because I care about her deeply and she has been a source of genuine warmth, but I am deeply confused. Is this normal? How do I navigate this?