December 3, 2024 • 65 mins
Hey, Fellow Travelers. This week we’re in session with Emma, who wants to break her pattern of being drawn to older, unavailable men. We help her to see how her fear of rejection and loss after her father’s death serves to keep her safe but actually leaves her quite lonely.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lari Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist advice column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid,
and I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted.
And this is Dear Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Each week we invite you into a session so you
can learn more about yourself by hearing how we help
other people come to understand themselves better and make changes
in their lives.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
So sit back and welcome to today's session. This week,
a young woman tries to break her pattern of seeking
out relationships with older, unavailable men.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah. I was dependent on him because of my dad
and his illness and him dying, and so I came
to rely on him, and I told him how much
I cared about him, and how I grew to love him.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I guess I think I said first. A quick note,
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only. It does not
constitute medical or psychological advice and is not a substitute
for professional health care advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek
the advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other
qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding
a medical or psychological condition. By submitting a letter, you
(01:17):
are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in partwor and full,
and we may edit it for length and clarity. In
the sessions you'll hear, all names have been changed for
the privacy of our fellow travelers.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi Guy, Hi Laurie. So what do we have in
a mailbox today?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
We have a letter about someone who is stuck in
a relationship pattern that isn't serving her, And it goes
like this, Dear therapists. I'm single. My career could not
be going better, but I keep falling in love with
men who are at least twenty years older than me,
sometimes married with kids. It's a painful cycle that I
(01:56):
keep repeating, and I'm exhausted by it. I started in
my senior year of college when I fell in love
with my professor, who was over thirty years older than me.
We'd get dinner every week and have the most intimate
and intense conversations about anything and everything. Our conversations were
raw and vulnerable and felt like an honest exchange. At
(02:16):
the same time, my father was dying of cancer, and
this older professor comforted me throughout the harrowing experience. At
least he was single, so not totally unavailable. Now, three
years later, I find myself in a similar predicament. I'm
completely smitten with a man that I work with who
is twenty years older than me and married with children.
I feel seriously head over heels in love with him.
(02:39):
Our relationship is different than the one with my professor.
Instead of being vulnerable and intimate, it's light hearted and
fueled by mutual admiration for the work we do. He
flatters me, constantly, flirts consistently, and all I want to
do is please him. I would do close to anything
for him. I haven't felt this way since my professor
three years ago. I can't stop thinking about him, and
(03:00):
all my friends are, of course, sick of hearing about him,
and sick of my typical trajectory towards self destruction with
older men. I tried to get over this guy by
dating a different guy who was ten years older. After
all of the loss and grief I've dealt with, anyone
remotely in my age range doesn't seem to have the
depth of understanding or feeling that I have, and I
can't stand the thought of being with someone my age.
(03:21):
I don't feel like I'm looking for a father figure,
but the idea of an older man just feels comforting
and alluring. How do I get over this man in particular,
but even more importantly, how do I break this habit?
Thanks Emma.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
The research tells us that we tend to go for
similar patterns of relationship, even if not with exactly similar people.
It's actually quite common that when you lose a parent,
you tend to seek out someone to give you that
kind of comfort that you've lost. And I've heard a
(03:57):
lot of stories over the years of people who fell
in love with people who are much older than them
coincidentally around the time their parent passed away, And it
can really form a certain pattern and a certain kind
of imprinting, especially when you're young. That then sets you
up to be into the older person, and that of
course has its dynamics and complications of its own.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I think you're right, guy, and I think there are
two things going on here. One, of course, is that
she started dating this much older professor around the same
time that she was going through this huge loss with
her father. But I think even for people who haven't
gone through that loss. There is something that happens to people,
which is that they tend to date someone that feels
familiar to them in some way that hasn't been resolved
(04:42):
in the past. So even if you haven't literally lost
a parent, if you had a parent who maybe wasn't
available to you or maybe didn't see you or understand
you in a certain way, we tend to go after
partners who will replicate that dynamic until we're aware of it.
There's this saying we marry our unfinished business, and it
(05:03):
sounds like Emma maybe has some unfinished business that is
causing her to again and again go after men who
are much older than her. And she has this idea
that it's because she's experienced loss and grief that people
her own age can't understand her. But I think it's
more complicated than that.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, I agree that it's more complicated than that, because
she seems to dismiss younger men as being literally incapable
of having the level of maturity that she does at
twenty five. And by younger men, she's saying men who
are even ten years older. And when you hear a
blanket statement like that, it sounds like it's a little
bit defensive that there's an agenda there, even if she's
not aware of it. So I'll be very curious to
(05:45):
hear a little bit more from her.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, let's go meet her. You're listening to Dear Therapists
for my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a short break.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I'm Laur Gottlieb and I'm Guy Winch and this is Geotherapists.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So, hi, Emma, Hey, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Of course, so we read about your dilemma, and we
want to start off by learning a little bit more
about your relationships prior to the one with your professor.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Can you tell us a little bit about those.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I was in one romantic relationship, but it was kind
of short and really intense, and it was my sophomore
year of college. We met at the end of our
first semester, and then the school that I went to
has a very long winter break, and so we started
(06:52):
texting a lot, which turned into like texting every day
for like six weeks until we got back to campus.
And then when we did get back, we started dating immediately,
really intensely, and because it started so soon and so
intensely it kind of like imploded on itself. And so
we dated for a few months, and that was kind
of the only relationship I had been in prior. And
(07:13):
then I had other like short term things or flings
or whatever, but nothing really serious other than that.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
So this person was your age. He was a fellow student.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah, he was a FELLO student who was two or
three years older than me.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And did you have that feeling with him that you
described in your letter, that somebody your age couldn't possibly
understand the depth of your feelings or had this sort
of emotional maturity that I think you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
He was very empathetic and really smart. I felt connected
to him in a lot of ways. And he was
like a good listener and empathetic, but wasn't as open
or as emotionally intelligent, I guess as other people.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
With the professor, you said that that happened around the
time that your dad was dying. I think could you
tell us a little bit about that period, what was
happening on the dad front and how things about with him.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah. I mean that's another thing too, Like when I
was dating that other person, my dad was still sick
and was kind of slowly dying, but it wasn't the same.
So then my senior year of college, the treatments that
my dad had been undergoing, like radiation therapy and immunotherapy
stopped working, which we found out like on September fourteenth
(08:41):
of my senior year of college. And then a few
weeks or maybe a month later, he started hospice care
and that's when he really started to decline. And that's
also when I met that professor as well.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I would love to hear more about your relationship with
your father. Can you tell us more about him and
what it was like between the two of you growing up,
and then also at the time when he got sick.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I think we kind of went in and out
of being close. So it was hard because he became
sick like my freshman or sophomore year of high school.
So I kind of lost like a huge part of
my dad when I was in high school. But prior
to that, he was always like the really goofy one
(09:31):
and was super smart and I don't know, like we
played sports together. He taught me how to play baseball,
He taught me how to ride a bike. We did
a lot of like candy things, together too, and then
it was also kind of hard, like slowly losing him
while I was also going through the classic teenage years
(09:51):
of when I was supposed to be kind of pulling
away from my family and becoming more and more independent.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Who told you and how did they tell you that
your dad was sick? And and how clear was it
to you at the time that this was serious?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Well, my mom, I'm sure told me. And then throughout
high school and even college, there was always kind of
a negotiation and battle between I having an older brothers
five years older, and so there's always a negotiation between
us and my parents of like how much they would
tell us and how much we wanted to know, and
we always wanted to know as much information as possible,
(10:24):
but my mom kind of wanted to protect us. But
also throughout the years, like my dad never wanted to
know his prognosis, so that wasn't anything that him or
his doctor or my mom would know or talk about.
And it became more serious probably my sophomore year of college,
because I guess that's when it became stage three, where
(10:47):
it had spread to his lymph nodes and it had
become more serious, and my mom would kind of make
like a fan somewhat like hysterical remarks about him dying.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
What did those sound like? Those reks?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I just remember this one time, my mom saying like,
this is the last thing that we can do, and
if this doesn't work, then like this is it, He's
going to die.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
And that felt hysterical to you because on the one hand,
you were saying, my brother and I really wanted to
know the truth of what was happening. And on the
other hand, when she says, this is the last thing.
If this doesn't work, he's going to die, that felt
hysterical to you.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It felt a circle in the moment because it was
like incredibly passionate and high pitch and had a specific
tone with it. And at that time it wasn't true either.
This was three years before he died, and he underwent
countless treatments in those next three years, so it wasn't
(11:51):
quite true, and it wasn't really what the doctors were saying.
It was felt more of just like I'm totally understandable,
like a moment of weakness, kind of just like breaking down.
I mean, she had to deal with this for the
longest and most intensely out of all of us.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
How did you support one another in the family because
your older brother and you were not privy to all
the information, so you didn't know everything. They didn't know
everything because they didn't want to know everything. But how
did the support go? Who was the person that was
trying to be more supported? Did that flip around? Who
supported you? Who supported your mom?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Your dad?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Your brother?
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah? I think it changed over the years. I mean
I was a teenager and just like very far removed
from anything that was happening. I just wanted to be
a kid, and so we were all kind of in
our own planes. I guess later on my brother really
supported my dad in a lot of ways. They were
(12:49):
really really close.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
In what ways did your brother support your dad?
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Well, my brother ended up in the last year or
two of my dad's life, my brother working, He lived
with my parents off and on, like a few days
a week to just kind of be there and hang
out with my dad and spend time with him throughout
the whole time. Like, my dad definitely had a lot
of trouble, like talking about his feelings, and he was
(13:15):
suppressed in a lot of ways, and my brother would
always kind of push him and push him as much
as possible to talk about those things.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Who did you talk to, Emma? Your brother was there
for your dad, and they were talking to each other,
But who were you talking to?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
In high school, I didn't tell anyone about it or
talk to anyone about it. Actually the first the first
person that I told was my high school english teacher
because I had to write a college essay and I
used to play ping pong with my dad all the time,
and I wrote about the first time that I beat him,
(13:51):
and he would always play me lefty because he was
a lot better than me, and I could never beat him,
but I won because he was sick and he just
couldn't play as well as he used to. And then
one of my friends from high school found out because
(14:13):
she went to my house looking for me and I
wasn't there, but my dad was there and he just
got back from maybe the hospital or something, and so
he told her what was happening. So that was the
first person I guess that I talked to about it,
which was this summer after my senior year of high school. Yeah,
(14:36):
and then when things started getting worse my sophomore year
of college, I started just valing my friends about it
and the person I was dating at that time. I
would talk to him about it too, whenever my dad
looked like a scan and we were waiting for insults.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And I was worried when your friend in high school
found out and reached out to you. What was that
like for you, for somebody to know, and what were
those conversations like?
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I guess it was a relief, but it was really
hard for me to talk about it. Yeah. I remember
we just like drove around in her car and she
was trying to talk to me about it, and yeah,
it was kind of a relief to know that she knew.
(15:22):
But I I was pretty emotional in crying and yeah,
it's really hard for me to process it. And at
that time, also at that time, his illness was getting
visibly worse, so things were also becoming a lot more
real and right in front of me. And it was
(15:42):
also when I was like getting ready to leave for college,
but now it kind of felt like his life was
a lot more fragile, so it was tough to leaving
during that time too.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
It sounds like you were very close with your dad
in some ways, and clearly it's a affecting you. Yet
I'm not hearing that you were reaching out to friends
to get support, and I ask.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Why I was, I don't know, kind of similar to
my dad in a lot of ways and like very stoic,
and I guess I didn't think that I needed help,
and I kind of just coped with it in the
ways that I knew how. I guess I wasn't ready
to talk about it either, because I mean it more real,
(16:28):
I just started running a lot and biking a lot,
and that was kind of like my way of dealing
with it.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I'm wondering about what was going on between you and
your brother, because you said your brother, at least in
that last year, was able to really talk with your
dad and be close with your dad. Were you able
to talk with your brother about what was happening and
how you were feeling.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, we I think became a lot closer because of it.
Later on, when I was in college that summer this
summer after my senior year of high school, we didn't
really talk about it. We were kind of in two
different worlds at the time, and I think because I
(17:14):
suppressed a lot of it. When I got to college
my freshman year, I had a lot of trouble integrating,
and I was like very homesick and sad, and my
brother kind of talked me through a lot of that
and we became a lot closer because of that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So in your sophomore year, your dad is now apparently
quite ill and you start dating this person at school,
and you said that it kind of imploded, I think
is how you described it. Can you tell us about
the implosion?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, So when we first started dating, we were in
a relationship. I like essentially moved into his dorm room,
and for me, I was going really well, but it
was really really fast. It just too fast, and that
really freaked him out because he had been in a
relationship that started too quickly and then ended really badly,
(18:09):
and he didn't want to do that again. So he
kind of hit the brakes on us and wanted to
kind of pause and go back and take it slow
and just kind of date and not sort of be
in this like intense relationship from the get go. And
I didn't want to do that, and I felt like
he was just kind of like moving slower and slower
(18:29):
away for me, and by the end of the semester,
I just like couldn't really deal with it anymore. The
previous semester, I was just like a total mess and
a nightmare and all over the place and failed in
my classes. Then this semester I bit off more than
I could chew.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I was wait, hold on, I want to step you there.
So you said it. You kind of threw that off,
like you kind of tossed that off. You know. I
failed all my classes and I was a mess.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
No, No, I just failed one class, just.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
One, okay. But was that related to what was going
on for you in motion around your father's illness or
what was happening for you? I mean, was that unusual
for you?
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Yeah? I was definitely unusual. I was a really good student.
Freshman year of college was fine, but I was like
very very unhappy. But I did okay. And then sophomore
year of college, I was just kind of consumed with
getting as many friends as I could so I could
be happier, and like, my dad was doing worse and
I wasn't handling it particularly well. And I also kind
(19:30):
of just stopped talking to my parents that semester, to
both of them, both of them. Yeah, why, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So what was the circumstance in which you just speaking
to them, Like, how did that come about?
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I just like wouldn't call them, I wouldn't really pick
up their calls. I kind of felt like I was
like trying on this personality that was like much more
outgoing and fun, and that didn't align with time my
parents a lot.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It also didn't delign with the fact that your dad
was doing very badly, And I'm wondering if that was
a real attempt to run away from that reality.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Probably, Yeah, it all kind of felt like an escape.
For sure. My parents were not happy about it.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
How did those conversations go where they told you that
they weren't happy about the fact that you weren't communicating
with them.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I think I would hear it from my brother. Probably.
They were definitely like very disappointed when I ended up
feeling one of my classes, and I remember my dad saying, like,
we're not sending you to college just to like drink
and party. But I don't really remember much more than that.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You Know, what comes to mind in that conversation with
your dad is that it's almost like sometimes when we're
losing someone that we care so much about, it's almost
like you can't fire me. I quit you failed the class,
which you knew would be disappointing, and it's almost like
(21:08):
it might have even been a relief to have your
father be disappointed in you, that you could at least
have that barrier between the two of you. And I
think it's hard to see those things when they're happening
in the moment, But in hindsight, I wonder if now,
when you look at that period in your life, there's
a flavor of it's so hard for me to move
(21:29):
closer to the pain of this, that I'm going to
move as far away as I can and I'm going
to recreate my personality and I'm going to drink and
I'm going to party, and I'm going to not talk
to my parents, and I'm going to fail a class.
Not that you consciously did any of that, but as
you look at it now and you try to understand
that period in your life which was so out of
character for you, does any of that resonate now?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, I think it does. I mean, the first thing
that comes to mind, like, I wonder if it was
also just kind of like a cry for help. But yeah,
I definitely think it does. And I think that's kind
of an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
The other part of that that stands out is that
it's during this time that your dad was getting sicker,
you were pulling away from them more, and you were
also trying to attach more intensely to other people. In
the first case, that guy that you were dating that
you said it was very intense and very fast, And
(22:29):
again it strikes me that you were really trying to
create your life elsewhere to run away from it as
much as possible because it was just too painful to
deal with that reality. So you were living these two lives.
On the one hand, at home, things were going poorly
with your dad's health. You might have had a sense
that you're losing him soon, and yet you're trying to
(22:51):
create this party life or this fun life and romance
and friends and all that college and it just seems
that there were really two different worlds where you aware
of that at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
No, not really, I haven't really thought about it that way,
but that also does definitely resonates.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Can we actually move on to how you met the professor?
I mean, you think he was your professor, but how
did you meet him? How did that relationship again?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, so a little bit of backstory, just going into
my senior year of college. So when I was dating
that person that was really intense for a few months
my sophomore year, he ended up not really wanting to
be in a relationship with me, and then I kind
of fell apart and I withdrew from all my classes
(23:39):
I could finish them. When I went home and I
was really depressed, and then I took like a year
off from college.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
What did you do that year at home with your
ailing father and you're probably very sad and anxious mother.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
And sad and anxious brother.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah. My brother was, Oh yeah, I graduated from college.
He was living in the city and was working. I
came home and was like severely depressed, like stay in
my room for probably like two months.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
What did your parents think when you came home severely depressed?
What were those conversations like in your family?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
They were really concerned and worried.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Did they suggest that maybe you go talk to someone
or see a therapist?
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah? Yeah, I was talking to someone like twice a
week when I first came home, and then eventually once
a week, and then eventually not so much.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
What were you talking about? If I may ask, Because
there was so much going on.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I was like prepherally talking about my dad, but it
wasn't at this like forefront of what was happening. I
think then I was probably most concerned with and talking
about this person that I had been dating. And then
I was also like consumed with feeling like a failure
for leaving college, and so those were the most pressed
(25:00):
in issues that I was dealing with, just trying to
figure out how to get back on my feet and
feel like a normal person again.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I'm hearing so much loss in what you were experiencing,
and maybe you didn't think of it that way at
the time, but to me, you were grieving, and you
were grieving the end of that relationship with the guy
you were dating, and that at first you felt incredibly
attached to, and then you saw him move farther and
farther away from you, just like your dad was doing
(25:31):
because he was sick and he was going to die.
And so you had these two men in your life
who you couldn't quite reach because they were both going
to move away from you, both for reasons out of
your control. And then you were grieving the loss of
your life as a student that you had never been
that kind of student before you had always done well
(25:51):
in school, you failed a class, and you withdrew from
your classes, and so everything that was familiar to you,
that was comforting to you had gone away or was
going away. I think for all of us, it can
be so much easier to deal with the thing that
feels the most concrete, which is there's this guy. We
(26:15):
were in a relationship. He was pulling back. I'm deeply
wounded by this, and that might have been the focus
of your therapy at the time, but I think that
whether you realized that or not, you were grieving these
other losses too.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I've definitely drawn that connection before, and I think the
reason why that breakup was so painful was because it
felt so similar to kind of that slow loss that
I was dealing with my dad. Yeah, So I ended up.
Then I took a full year off from college. I
worked at home, and then I went abroad for about
(26:51):
six months, and then I went back to school. And
then there was this class that I really wanted to
take with this professor who was like pretty wellcomplished in
his field, and I knew that I wanted to try
and build like a professional relationship with him because I
thought it would help me in my career. I was
doing that over the summer and I would go to
(27:13):
hospital appointments with him. And so then I got back
to school and I started that class and our first
assignment in the class was to write about someone you
really cared about and someone who you were really close to,
(27:34):
and the assignment was to render them in words. I
wrote about this story about my dad. Me and my
family had gone on in vacation that summer in the
Berkshires and my dad was really really not doing well.
He was pretty sick that summer, so we spent most
of his time pretty weak in bed. But there was
(27:55):
this one day that we went into town and we
met up with my brother's girlfriend and her mom and
they had a house up there, and my brother's girlfriend's
dad had just died like a few months before that
from patriotic cancer was really quick, and my dad walked
into the store with my mom and he found this
(28:17):
little stuffed animal. My dad was like so frugal, he
never bought anything. He like hated buying things, but he
saw this little stuffed animal and pointed it out to
my mom and said, like, I really want that, And
so my mom bought it for him and he had
it with him in bed. It was kind of like
it felt like this protector of him, And so I
(28:41):
wrote about that for this assignment, and I wrote about
my dad being sick and this little stuffed animal that
gave him comfort. It was almost this like for a
full circle story of when you get older and sick
and dying and you kind of become childlike again you
just want your stuffed animal. And the professor read each
(29:02):
one of our stories out loud to the class. I
remember after my professor read my story out loud, it
was just kind of silent, but he kind of filled
that silence with a story about his own dad being
really sick, and he was like empathizing understanding my story.
(29:22):
So that's why I met him.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
How did it move from him being your professor to
him being your boyfriend?
Speaker 3 (29:31):
He wasn't ever my boyfriend, and nothing ever happened like
physically between us. We had like a really intimate emotional relationship,
but it wasn't physical.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
That you had feelings for him.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, I did develop feelings for him.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, And when did that happen? Did he know?
Speaker 3 (29:54):
The way things changed was I was seeing him out
for after a class and he was like, yeah, but
I'm about to leave, like I'm hungry, I'm gonna go
get a bye to eat, Like do you want to
join me? And I was like sure, yeah, I just
have to call my mom back and he was like okay.
And then I got a meal with him and we
(30:14):
were talking and he asked me about my family and
my parents and how they met, and about my dad
and how he was doing. And then that kind of
turned into this like almost ritual where we would get
dinner every week and have these contents and intimate conversations,
and then over time I just kind of developed feelings
(30:34):
for him because of that.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Did he know that you had feelings for him?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think he must have because of how I acted.
I think he also did things to kind of egg
me on, and by the end, our friendship or whatever
it was or relationship or whatever just kind of ended strangely.
And so I of him this letter and left it
(31:02):
at his house before I left college after I graduated,
and I basically told him in that letter. I think
it was kind of clear.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
When you said he did things that egged you on.
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (31:17):
He would talk about like his ex girlfriends pretty frequently
and like, tell me about that history when I wouldn't
like ask him about it or tell him about my
own dating history.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
So when that ended, you said, it ended in a
weird way.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
Yeah, I had considerate After I graduated, I considered staying
in my college town and working for him. I could
stay there, and he was going to be away for
the summer, but potentially I could stay in his house
and take care of his dog while he was away
and work for him. But then right after I graduated,
(31:54):
we had this barbecue in my backyard. He came and
like other like a bunch of friends and family, other
professors there too, and we had this talk where he
was like, you know, we need boundaries in our relationship
and you can't stay in my house over the summer.
And I kind of asked him what he meant or
what he was talking about, but he had to leave
(32:14):
and then he just kind of ignored me and was like,
hang in there, and that was it. So I decided
that I was going to leave, and when I did,
I wrote him an email saying like, hey, I'm not
going to work for you. I decided I'm leaving, and
then I wrote this page long letter and delivered it
(32:37):
to his house and then I left, like a day
or two later.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
What did the letter say?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Oh, I remember too when we had that talk and
he said we needed boundaries. He was like, y're two
dependent on me, And so in this letter, I guess
I was explaining why I was dependent on him because
of my dad and his illness and him dying, and
so I came to rely on him, and I think
I apologized for that. I think I like told him
(33:05):
how much I cared about him and how I grew
to love him. I guess I think I said and
that maybe I had become dependent on him, but also
like the way he acted and treated me like he
was dependent on me too, and it wasn't just a
one sided thing, and I wanted him to take responsibility
(33:26):
for that.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Did he respond to the letter.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
He did respond to the letter, but it took him
a few weeks. Then it was very professional and buttoned up,
and it was the email he basically said, like, you know,
I'm so glad you took these classes with me. I
wish you all the best.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
But he didn't address the fact that you said you
grew to love him, or that you felt he had
also crossed some boundaries with you.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
No, not at all. He basically kind of invalidated or
just ignored it, like I was any other student who
took classes with him and wished me all the best
or whatever. And I confronted him again, probably a year later,
and so I asked him to meet up, and I
(34:15):
was like, do you know what I want to talk
to you about? And he was like, I think you
feel like I let you down in some way, and
I was like, yeah, I guess so, but it was
more than that. I said, I also feel like you
made sexual advances towards me, and we're kind of inappropriate,
and it was really confusing, and he like very defensively
(34:38):
and firmly denied that and got like pretty upset.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Did you give him examples of what you felt were
sexual advances?
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah? I said. I was like, you told me about
all of your ex girlfriends, you talked about your sex life,
You told me that you thought it was okay for
professors and students to date as long as students were seniors.
And he just fought out denied it.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Okay, what's happening with your dad at this time? Is
he still alive when this is going on?
Speaker 3 (35:04):
So he had died a couple of months before I
wrote that letter, and when I confronted him it was
like a year and months afterwards.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
It just sounds like it was dealing with a lot
of loss. It sounds like you got closer with your
dad again and spent a lot of time with him,
and that makes it really difficult when he passes away.
And that's around the time that you were with this
professor that you know he was perhaps pulling away. I mean,
(35:35):
it just sounds like you had those losses truly back
to back at that point.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, it was hard too, because he was someone who
encouraged me to talk about my dad, and other people
wouldn't really ask me about him because they were didn't
know what to say, or they didn't know if they
should ask about it. But he always did and wanted
me to talk about it and was really supportive. And
(36:04):
so then to like a couple of months after my
dad died, to have him then just like completely what
felt like kind of like completely breaking ties was. Yeah,
it was really hard.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
It just seems like such a painful double when me
to go through losing these you know, your dad obviously,
and then this person who seemed so significant to seem
like the person who would be there to help you
through it.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, definitely, that summer was so hard because like, not
only had I lost my dad, but also my mom
was just like kind of a wreck, like totally understandable,
but I didn't really know how to deal with it,
and it felt kind of like losing two parents. And
I think I emailed him. I reached out to him
(36:54):
and said something to that effect. Did he respond He
responded that. I think he expressed some empathy or more
sort of I think he asked me if I had
a therapist.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Emma. In your letter, you indicated that one of the
reasons that you are attracted to older men is because
the maturity and stability and they get things. And I
can see in the relationship with a professor why you
would feel that way, because he actually asked and he
was curious about what was going on with your dad,
and he seemed very supportive for the time that he
(37:29):
was there. But then the way it ended didn't sound
like the most mature way to end that situation, and
it was very disappointing and hurtful for you. With that
in mind, I do want to hear about this current
relationship that you have that you wrote about, can you
tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Sure, the professor was like over thirty years older than me.
This other person is so only twenty years old, and
I met him through work and I just like developed
(38:11):
these really intense feelings for him. And the nature of
it is so different, Like it's super lighthearted, it's like
really fun and easy. But he's also married and has children.
But he also like leaves me a lot of attention
and showers me with compliments and it feels amazing. But
(38:32):
it's super different, and it's not burdened by my dad
dying or some really dark thing happening in my life.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Does he know that you have these feelings for him?
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I think on some level, when someone has a crush
on you, you always know.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
It's funny that you say that, because it sounds like
in your family there was a lot of assuming what
was going on with other people, but not directly talking
about it, And so for you that might seem like, well,
that's the norm that people into it what you're feeling,
even if you don't say it directly, because that's what
you grew up with.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
I want to open you up to the idea that
maybe if you don't communicate directly with people, they don't
know exactly what you're feeling. So when you say he
showers you with compliments, I assume those are professional compliments.
They're not romantic compliments. Is that right? Yeah? And so
(39:38):
it's almost like a lot of these relationships are taking
place in your head. And I don't mean that you're
making them up. I mean they're very real to you,
but that the other person isn't involved in the sense
of you have sat down and been vulnerable with this person.
You talk a lot about being vulnerable with the Professor
(39:58):
about what was going on with your dad, but you
weren't vulnerable with him in terms of what was going
on between the two of you until the very end.
And with this guy, it sounds like he doesn't really
know what happened with your dad because you probably haven't
opened up to him about it and it's not happening
at this moment. And I really wonder whether he has
(40:24):
any idea that you feel the way you do about.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Him he does know what happened with my dad, And
maybe he doesn't know, but he might know. The reason
I think he might know is because I mean he
also like flirted with me a little bit.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
One of the reasons that you seem to believe that
you're attracted to older men is that they have more
life experience and therefore are emotionally deeper and can understand
you on a deeper level. And yet you haven't really
engaged in any kind of deep I thou reallylationship with
either of them, And by I thou we use this
(41:03):
term in therapy, meaning how I relate to you, how
you relate to me. And you said that you did
try to date someone who was about ten years older,
and that you felt like this person didn't have that
level of emotional depth, and so I don't really hear
a lot of emotional depth happening with the current person.
(41:26):
It sounds like you joke around a lot that you
have a fondness for each other, but I don't really
hear anything romantic going on necessarily from his end. You
know what draws you to him more than maybe the
person who was ten years older.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
The person I was ten years older actually was really
great and it was going super well, and I didn't
think that he couldn't relate to me. I felt like
we could relate to each other super well. But it
turned out he had just gotten out of a relationship
and wasn't ready to enter into a new one, and
that's why it ended. It was pretty brief.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Interesting is that to me, the relationship that sounds like
you were most in it is the one in your
sophomore year with the guy who was your age. That's
the one where you entered into it very quickly. The
two of you kind of moved into his dorm room
(42:20):
right away. That he felt it was a little too
quick and he was putting on the brakes, But you
were in it, you were interested in it, you were
going for it, and that was your first real relationship.
And then since then it's been real safe choices for you.
In the sense that you know the professor, he's thirty
years older. There was a lot of disclosure going on,
(42:43):
and that felt very intimate. But nothing happened between the
two of you and the guy at work. He's married.
He doesn't even know that you have these feelings. The
guy who was ten years older was right out of
a relationship and not ready for a new one. And
I have this feeling that there's a part of you
that really wants to just actually be in a relationship,
(43:05):
to have that part of your life because you're almost
you're entire of that life was taken up with your
dad's illness. And then you meet the guy who's ten
years older. Even that felt good for a while. What
doesn't feel good is that when you're with the older guys,
with the professor, with this guy from work, you are
pining for someone who's older, but it's almost collegial or mentorish.
(43:29):
It doesn't feel or seem romantic, but it does feel safe.
And I wonder if that early experience and all the
turbulence of your adolescent years, after all the losses you've had,
you're playing it safe.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah, I think that's definitely makes sense too. There is
also there's something a warring about someone who's unavailable and
kind of unapproachable, and it's easier that way because there's
not really in the realm of possibility, and therefore there's
also not a lot of room to get hurt or
(44:06):
be rejected or left or whatever.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
But they occupy that emotional space in a way that
doesn't leave you free for someone else perhaps who might
be there, who might have something to give back.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Yeah. Probably true.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I've noticed that even in our conversation with you today,
you haven't really looked at us very much. That when
you start talking about something that feels very tender or delicate,
you look down, and when we're talking like right now,
you'll look right up at us. But then when you're
responding to us about something that feels maybe vulnerable to you,
(44:47):
not once in this conversation have you looked at us.
And you think that there's something about getting close to
people or really being seen that feels terrifying to you.
And part of it might have to do with the
fact that, starting when you were in high school, you
(45:08):
were dealing with potential imminent loss with your dad. But
part of it might also have to do with the
style of communication in your family, where things weren't really
directly talked about. Everybody seemed to love one another, but
they didn't really talk about the things that needed to
be talked about in a direct way. And so part
(45:29):
of it is that you went through this experience of
losing someone that you were very close with. But the
other part is that I don't think that you ever
really learned how to get close in a way that
felt safe, that speaking up felt terrifying in your family.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yeah, that definitely resonates. I was also like a very
quiet kid, and I didn't really start talking a lot
until Honestly, like even in high school, I was pretty shy,
and I didn't really start being more open and vocal
and putting myself out there until I was in college,
(46:07):
until like my sophomore year of college, when I kind
of just let everything go in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
You might be shy, or you might have been shy,
but that doesn't mean that you don't have a circus
going on in your head. Okay, it's very loud in there.
There's a lot going on there. It's not as though
there's an absence of intense feeling of lots of things
swirling around there all the time. This relationship that you
(46:36):
have right now to the person that you work with
is very alive and very active in your mind, even
though you haven't vocalized anything to him.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
To echo Lorre's point, you mentioned that I think in
your letter that your friends are like, you know, roll
their eyes a bit or something like that, oh you
and your older men kind of fixation kind of thing.
But I think that that's also that maybe you're not
opening up to them, to really talk about how you're feeling,
(47:06):
what your needs are, what your hopes are, what it
would be like to be in a relationship with someone
who could reciprocate. And I think it's easier to talk about, oh,
the professor and the married guy than talking about and
yet I'm really lonely and I really want someone, and
I don't know how to go about it because it's very,
(47:27):
very scary out there in the dating world. Do you
have those kinds of conversations with your friends where you
talk about that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
I mean we talk about dating and stuff, But.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Do you hear the difference between talking about dating and
having the kind of conversation with your friends about you
not dating in general and the kinds of general stories
people talk about about being in the trenches, but about
something specific to you, which is I really struggle with
putting myself out there emotionally. I really struggle with with
(48:00):
getting close to someone and risking having that go away.
I really struggle with the possibility of rejection. I really
struggle with the fact that my dad died and I
haven't quite dealt with it in a way that I
think would be helpful for me. Did you ever talk
to them about that? Not so much.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
I really struggle with the fact that not only did
my dad die, but then my mom was really dealing
with this, and I felt very alone. I didn't feel
like I had a parent anymore.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, not really.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
How much emotional real estate goes toward thinking about the
different men that you have been really interested in, and
particularly right now with the current person, what do you
think would replace that if you weren't thinking about him?
(48:58):
And it sounds like you think about him quite a bit,
You talk about him quite a bit, to the point
that your friends are saying enough already. What do you
think you'd be thinking about if you weren't thinking about him?
Speaker 3 (49:09):
I know that when I was thinking about the professor
a lot, and I would stop doing that. I would
think about my dad a lot, and now I would
probably think about my brother who's been having a really
(49:30):
hard time.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
And so when you hear yourself say that, can you
hear that these distractions conserve is almost like a drug,
like I'm going to put the needle in because I
don't want to think about these other things. I'm going
to numb myself with thoughts about people I don't have
(49:54):
to get that close to. But it feels good to
fantasize about it or imagine it. When you take the
needle out, you start to say, oh, what's there that's
about my dad or my brother? And I think underneath
that even is this intense loneliness. And we don't want
you to have to feel so lonely. So, Emma, we
(50:21):
have some advice for you, and what we'd like you
to do is we would like you to call your
mom and we would like you to start a conversation
with her by saying, you know what, Mom, there's this
guy that I can't stop thinking about. And I realized
that if I stop thinking about him, what I would
(50:42):
be thinking about would be Dad. And I would like
to be able to talk with you about what this
experience has been like for our family. And I'd like
to be able to share with you a little bit
about what has been like for me. I know you've
(51:03):
certainly struggled with it, understandably so, and so do you
think that I could share a little bit with you
about what this has been like for me to go
through Dad's illness and to lose Dad. Could we start
maybe opening up those conversations and I want to be
clear that it's not like you're going to go through
(51:24):
the last ten years in that one conversation. It will
probably be dipping your toe in and letting your mom
acclimate to what it's like to have these kinds of
conversations in the family, because your family wasn't a family
who had these kinds of conversations even before your dad
became ill, and just sort of gauge her reaction and
(51:47):
be able to tell her maybe a little bit about
you know, I realized that I haven't really dealt with it,
and it would feel so good to be able to
talk about it with you because we've been through it
sort of in the family together, and see what that's like,
see what happens for her when you open it up
(52:07):
in that way. And we'd like you to have a
similar conversation with your brother, and you might open it
up with him and say, you know what, there's this
guy that I think about a lot. And I realized
that if I were to stop thinking about him, I
would be thinking about Dad, and I would also be
(52:28):
worried about you, because I know that you're struggling a
lot too, and I would love to be able to
talk the two of us as siblings about what we're
struggling with and what we're going through, and maybe have
more direct conversations about that, because I think it would
be really helpful for both of us and see what
(52:48):
that conversation is like with him. And we also feel
like that would help you do some of your grief
work that hasn't been done yet. How does that sound
to you?
Speaker 3 (53:00):
Sounds hard but manageable.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Okay, good Emma. There's the second part you wrote to
us about dating, and we have some advice for you
there as well. You probably spend many hours a day
thinking about the guide from work, and those are in
essence a bit wasted hours because there's nothing that's going
to really happen there. Would like you to convert at
(53:24):
least an hour of that time where you would be
thinking about him, to thinking about more likely suspects for dating.
And are you on any dating apps?
Speaker 3 (53:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Great. We would like you to spend at least an
hour a day talking with age appropriate people. Now, we
had a debate about what that is for you, and
I suggested be cappy with thirty. Laurie said thirty five.
We're going to agree on thirty five. We would like
(53:58):
you to try if you can within this week set
up a FaceTime date or a socially distanced one with
somebody within that age range. You've spent so many years
dealing with loss and grief and illness and not being
(54:19):
able to really have that young adulthood that you really
want to have in part, and we don't want you
to waste too many more years on the unavailable older
guys who can't give you that, So we would like
you to spend this time trying to get at least one,
and just to remind yourself of those options and that
(54:43):
there are people out there and that age range who
are mature enough and open enough for you that you
can have a relationship with.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Potentially, And we want you to make sure that the
age range really is twenty five to thirty five. You
are considering people who are your own age because I
think there's a story that you're telling yourself, particularly about
the person that is the object of your affection right now,
that somehow he's deeper and can to understand you better
(55:14):
than someone in your own age range. And yet nothing
deep has transpired between the two of you. There has
not been one hint of the depth of his inner
life in anything that has transpired between the two of
you other than that you admire his work. So we
also are giving you the ticking clock of the week
(55:35):
because you have all kinds of excuses for you know why,
nobody is appropriate. We are forcing the issue, and we
are making you choose someone. We're not looking for perfect.
We're making you choose someone that you think you might
have a nice conversation with. That is the extent of it.
As part of this exercise, we would like you to
(55:57):
tell your friends, who are so tired of hearing you
talk about this other guy, Hey, I am really making
a concerted effort to meet someone my own age. Is
there anyone you can think about introducing me to. Just
making it clear to your friends that, hey, I want
you to know that instead of spending all that time
(56:18):
talking to them about Oh my gosh, and here's what happened,
and we had this interchange and he looked at me
this way, and here's what happened at work. To say,
you know what, I'm not going to spend my time
talking about him with you anymore. So we want you
to stop talking about him with your friends. We want
you to talk about the things that you would be
talking about if you weren't talking about him. Talk about
your dad, talk about your fear, talk about this new
(56:41):
idea of I'm going to be open to meeting people
in my age range. Talk about movies that you saw,
talk about books that you read, talk about the things
you would be talking about if you weren't on the drug. Okay,
all right, all right. So we look forward to hearing
how the conversations go and how the dating goes, and
(57:04):
we will hear back from you shortly.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
Thank you. What became clear to me in this conversation
with Emma was the extent to which these infatuations with
the older men are truly distractions from dealing both with
(57:27):
the pain of losing her dad and with a fear
of finding someone whose age appropriate, of entering into her
own relationships, of dealing with loneliness, of dealing with the
risk of rejection. And I hope that our homework for
her will help her break out of that.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
Yeah, I think we're trying to redirect her and help
her to deal with what's really going on. When people
ruminate like that, when they sort of ruminate and obsessed.
She said she thinks about him all the time, that's
all she can think about. Studies show that in order
to break that, you need to focus on something concrete
(58:08):
for a specific amount of time, just to kind of
reset your brain. And so I think giving her that
hour where we're saying, Okay, you want to obsess eight
hours a day, that's fine, do what you need to do,
but on this ninth hour, we're going to have you
do this task. It will give her the opportunity to
(58:29):
take the needle out for an hour and to access
all that she is trying to distract herself from, because
I think what she will find is that her fear
of her feelings is a lot scarier than the feelings themselves.
Speaker 2 (58:48):
You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio. We'll be back after
a quick break. We did not receive a voicemail from Emma.
This is the first time that we haven't received a
(59:10):
voicemail from one of our guests, one of our fellow travelers.
We asked our producer to reach out to Emma and
inquire about it and remind her, and she did and
to ask if there was any reason that Emma didn't
send the voicemail. And Emma actually said no, that she
just was busy and didn't have a chance to get
(59:32):
to it that she would, but again she did not.
Even after she said that, we still didn't get a voicemail.
And so we're going to discuss a little bit about
what that might be and why that might be going on.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Right, and so something like that happens when we have
that happen in the therapy room, for example, and somebody
says they're going to do something and then they don't
follow through, and then we talk about it and they
say they're going to follow through and they don't. We
didn't have the opportunity with Emma to really understand more
about what was going on for her, but based on
(01:00:06):
our conversation with her, it did seem like there was
a lot of avoidance going on of really dealing with
the impact that her father's long illness and death had
on her all through her teen years and then through
her college years. And what we were asking her to
do was to really go to places that maybe she
(01:00:28):
wasn't ready to go to.
Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
What happens often is that when somebody comes and tells
us their story, and here the story was I get
into these relationships with older men. It doesn't work well
for me with the younger men my age, and we
as therapists, our job is to tell them, often a
different story than their story, and in this case, the
(01:00:52):
story was you had a lot of trauma and loss
with losing your dad, and you had a lot of
hesitation about getting hurt, and so it was safer to
go with older men who didn't really have a relationship
with you had crushes on than to deal with the
fear and the anxiety and the hurt and the potential
(01:01:13):
loss of somebody more in your age bracket than somebody
who's twenty or thirty years older. And that is what
she then had to confront And I think that it
wasn't just the task she wasn't ready for, but it
was the narrative that we were proposing that she was
struggling to accept.
Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
I think you're right about really embracing this other part
of the narrative, and maybe she's having some trouble with that,
But I also think that those relationships served as an
escape for her from really dealing with the grief and
the loss. And when we talked to her about what
would you be thinking about if you weren't obsessing about
(01:01:57):
the current guy, and if you hadn't been obsessing up
about the professor, and she said, I'd be thinking about
my dad. And I think that when we asked her
to talk to her mom and talk to her brother
about maybe opening up these conversations in the family about
the impact that this experience has had on all of them,
(01:02:19):
that maybe that was something that she's not ready to
do yet. That it feels so good in a certain
way to hold on to Well, let me think about
the guy at work and what does that mean that
he said that, and was he flirting with me? And
is he ever going to leave his wife for me?
Then to say, hey, mom, hey brother, we have a
(01:02:42):
lot of stuff that maybe we should talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
I agree. And I think the other part of that
is it also was safer to think about the married
guy at work than it is to deal with the
potential hurt and disappointment of taking someone that actually reciprocate
and have a real relationship with all the fears that
go with entering into that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
Yeah, And I have a lot of compassion for Emma
because I think by not reporting back to us on
how these tasks went, and I think that means that
she didn't do them that she was sending us a message.
But again there's that avoidance of instead of saying to
our producer, you know what I thought about it, but
I just I'm not really ready to do these things yet.
(01:03:31):
I'm so sorry, and just being direct about it, she
just said, oh, yeah, I'm going to have it by tomorrow.
I'm going to have it by this day, and then
radio silence. We just never heard. So I think there's
that question about you know what makes it hard for
her to actually be direct instead of avoiding something that
might be difficult.
Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
And we know from our practices that people have to
be ready to make the changes that we try and
help them make. And I hope that when Emma feels ready,
she'll know the path that she has to take.
Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Next week, we'll get updates from last season sessions to
find out how our advice worked out a year later.
Speaker 5 (01:04:18):
I was always taught that your parents will live with
you and you take care of them for the rest
of your life. There's no other option. So when you
both presented something else to me and gave me permission
of a sort, that that was life changing.
Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Hey, fellow travelers, if you're enjoying our podcast each week,
don't forget to subscribe for free so that you don't
miss any episodes, and please help support Dear Therapists by
telling your friends about it and leaving a review on
Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really help people to find the show.
Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
Bigel Smooth, email us at Lorian Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Mike Johns, Josh Fisher, and Chris Childs. Our interns
are Dorit Corwin and Silver Lifton. Special thanks to Alison
Wright and to our podcast fairy Godmother Katie Couric.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
We can't wait to see you at next week's session.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Dear Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lari Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist advice column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid,
and I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted.
And this is Dear Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Each week we invite you into a session so you
can learn more about yourself by hearing how we help
other people come to understand themselves better and make changes
in their lives.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
So sit back and welcome to today's session. This week,
a young woman tries to break her pattern of seeking
out relationships with older, unavailable men.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah. I was dependent on him because of my dad
and his illness and him dying, and so I came
to rely on him, and I told him how much
I cared about him, and how I grew to love him.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
I guess I think I said first. A quick note,
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only. It does not
constitute medical or psychological advice and is not a substitute
for professional health care advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek
the advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other
qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding
a medical or psychological condition. By submitting a letter, you
(01:17):
are agreeing to let iHeartMedia use it in partwor and full,
and we may edit it for length and clarity. In
the sessions you'll hear, all names have been changed for
the privacy of our fellow travelers.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi Guy, Hi Laurie. So what do we have in
a mailbox today?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
We have a letter about someone who is stuck in
a relationship pattern that isn't serving her, And it goes
like this, Dear therapists. I'm single. My career could not
be going better, but I keep falling in love with
men who are at least twenty years older than me,
sometimes married with kids. It's a painful cycle that I
(01:56):
keep repeating, and I'm exhausted by it. I started in
my senior year of college when I fell in love
with my professor, who was over thirty years older than me.
We'd get dinner every week and have the most intimate
and intense conversations about anything and everything. Our conversations were
raw and vulnerable and felt like an honest exchange. At
(02:16):
the same time, my father was dying of cancer, and
this older professor comforted me throughout the harrowing experience. At
least he was single, so not totally unavailable. Now, three
years later, I find myself in a similar predicament. I'm
completely smitten with a man that I work with who
is twenty years older than me and married with children.
I feel seriously head over heels in love with him.
(02:39):
Our relationship is different than the one with my professor.
Instead of being vulnerable and intimate, it's light hearted and
fueled by mutual admiration for the work we do. He
flatters me, constantly, flirts consistently, and all I want to
do is please him. I would do close to anything
for him. I haven't felt this way since my professor
three years ago. I can't stop thinking about him, and
(03:00):
all my friends are, of course, sick of hearing about him,
and sick of my typical trajectory towards self destruction with
older men. I tried to get over this guy by
dating a different guy who was ten years older. After
all of the loss and grief I've dealt with, anyone
remotely in my age range doesn't seem to have the
depth of understanding or feeling that I have, and I
can't stand the thought of being with someone my age.
(03:21):
I don't feel like I'm looking for a father figure,
but the idea of an older man just feels comforting
and alluring. How do I get over this man in particular,
but even more importantly, how do I break this habit?
Thanks Emma.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
The research tells us that we tend to go for
similar patterns of relationship, even if not with exactly similar people.
It's actually quite common that when you lose a parent,
you tend to seek out someone to give you that
kind of comfort that you've lost. And I've heard a
(03:57):
lot of stories over the years of people who fell
in love with people who are much older than them
coincidentally around the time their parent passed away, And it
can really form a certain pattern and a certain kind
of imprinting, especially when you're young. That then sets you
up to be into the older person, and that of
course has its dynamics and complications of its own.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I think you're right, guy, and I think there are
two things going on here. One, of course, is that
she started dating this much older professor around the same
time that she was going through this huge loss with
her father. But I think even for people who haven't
gone through that loss. There is something that happens to people,
which is that they tend to date someone that feels
familiar to them in some way that hasn't been resolved
(04:42):
in the past. So even if you haven't literally lost
a parent, if you had a parent who maybe wasn't
available to you or maybe didn't see you or understand
you in a certain way, we tend to go after
partners who will replicate that dynamic until we're aware of it.
There's this saying we marry our unfinished business, and it
(05:03):
sounds like Emma maybe has some unfinished business that is
causing her to again and again go after men who
are much older than her. And she has this idea
that it's because she's experienced loss and grief that people
her own age can't understand her. But I think it's
more complicated than that.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, I agree that it's more complicated than that, because
she seems to dismiss younger men as being literally incapable
of having the level of maturity that she does at
twenty five. And by younger men, she's saying men who
are even ten years older. And when you hear a
blanket statement like that, it sounds like it's a little
bit defensive that there's an agenda there, even if she's
not aware of it. So I'll be very curious to
(05:45):
hear a little bit more from her.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, let's go meet her. You're listening to Dear Therapists
for my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a short break.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I'm Laur Gottlieb and I'm Guy Winch and this is Geotherapists.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So, hi, Emma, Hey, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Of course, so we read about your dilemma, and we
want to start off by learning a little bit more
about your relationships prior to the one with your professor.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Can you tell us a little bit about those.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I was in one romantic relationship, but it was kind
of short and really intense, and it was my sophomore
year of college. We met at the end of our
first semester, and then the school that I went to
has a very long winter break, and so we started
(06:52):
texting a lot, which turned into like texting every day
for like six weeks until we got back to campus.
And then when we did get back, we started dating immediately,
really intensely, and because it started so soon and so
intensely it kind of like imploded on itself. And so
we dated for a few months, and that was kind
of the only relationship I had been in prior. And
(07:13):
then I had other like short term things or flings
or whatever, but nothing really serious other than that.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
So this person was your age. He was a fellow student.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah, he was a FELLO student who was two or
three years older than me.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
And did you have that feeling with him that you
described in your letter, that somebody your age couldn't possibly
understand the depth of your feelings or had this sort
of emotional maturity that I think you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
He was very empathetic and really smart. I felt connected
to him in a lot of ways. And he was
like a good listener and empathetic, but wasn't as open
or as emotionally intelligent, I guess as other people.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
With the professor, you said that that happened around the
time that your dad was dying. I think could you
tell us a little bit about that period, what was
happening on the dad front and how things about with him.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
Yeah. I mean that's another thing too, Like when I
was dating that other person, my dad was still sick
and was kind of slowly dying, but it wasn't the same.
So then my senior year of college, the treatments that
my dad had been undergoing, like radiation therapy and immunotherapy
stopped working, which we found out like on September fourteenth
(08:41):
of my senior year of college. And then a few
weeks or maybe a month later, he started hospice care
and that's when he really started to decline. And that's
also when I met that professor as well.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I would love to hear more about your relationship with
your father. Can you tell us more about him and
what it was like between the two of you growing up,
and then also at the time when he got sick.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I think we kind of went in and out
of being close. So it was hard because he became
sick like my freshman or sophomore year of high school.
So I kind of lost like a huge part of
my dad when I was in high school. But prior
to that, he was always like the really goofy one
(09:31):
and was super smart and I don't know, like we
played sports together. He taught me how to play baseball,
He taught me how to ride a bike. We did
a lot of like candy things, together too, and then
it was also kind of hard, like slowly losing him
while I was also going through the classic teenage years
(09:51):
of when I was supposed to be kind of pulling
away from my family and becoming more and more independent.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Who told you and how did they tell you that
your dad was sick? And and how clear was it
to you at the time that this was serious?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Well, my mom, I'm sure told me. And then throughout
high school and even college, there was always kind of
a negotiation and battle between I having an older brothers
five years older, and so there's always a negotiation between
us and my parents of like how much they would
tell us and how much we wanted to know, and
we always wanted to know as much information as possible,
(10:24):
but my mom kind of wanted to protect us. But
also throughout the years, like my dad never wanted to
know his prognosis, so that wasn't anything that him or
his doctor or my mom would know or talk about.
And it became more serious probably my sophomore year of college,
because I guess that's when it became stage three, where
(10:47):
it had spread to his lymph nodes and it had
become more serious, and my mom would kind of make
like a fan somewhat like hysterical remarks about him dying.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
What did those sound like? Those reks?
Speaker 3 (11:02):
I just remember this one time, my mom saying like,
this is the last thing that we can do, and
if this doesn't work, then like this is it, He's
going to die.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
And that felt hysterical to you because on the one hand,
you were saying, my brother and I really wanted to
know the truth of what was happening. And on the
other hand, when she says, this is the last thing.
If this doesn't work, he's going to die, that felt
hysterical to you.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
It felt a circle in the moment because it was
like incredibly passionate and high pitch and had a specific
tone with it. And at that time it wasn't true either.
This was three years before he died, and he underwent
countless treatments in those next three years, so it wasn't
(11:51):
quite true, and it wasn't really what the doctors were saying.
It was felt more of just like I'm totally understandable,
like a moment of weakness, kind of just like breaking down.
I mean, she had to deal with this for the
longest and most intensely out of all of us.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
How did you support one another in the family because
your older brother and you were not privy to all
the information, so you didn't know everything. They didn't know
everything because they didn't want to know everything. But how
did the support go? Who was the person that was
trying to be more supported? Did that flip around? Who
supported you? Who supported your mom?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Your dad?
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Your brother?
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah? I think it changed over the years. I mean
I was a teenager and just like very far removed
from anything that was happening. I just wanted to be
a kid, and so we were all kind of in
our own planes. I guess later on my brother really
supported my dad in a lot of ways. They were
(12:49):
really really close.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
In what ways did your brother support your dad?
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Well, my brother ended up in the last year or
two of my dad's life, my brother working, He lived
with my parents off and on, like a few days
a week to just kind of be there and hang
out with my dad and spend time with him throughout
the whole time. Like, my dad definitely had a lot
of trouble, like talking about his feelings, and he was
(13:15):
suppressed in a lot of ways, and my brother would
always kind of push him and push him as much
as possible to talk about those things.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Who did you talk to, Emma? Your brother was there
for your dad, and they were talking to each other,
But who were you talking to?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
In high school, I didn't tell anyone about it or
talk to anyone about it. Actually the first the first
person that I told was my high school english teacher
because I had to write a college essay and I
used to play ping pong with my dad all the time,
and I wrote about the first time that I beat him,
(13:51):
and he would always play me lefty because he was
a lot better than me, and I could never beat him,
but I won because he was sick and he just
couldn't play as well as he used to. And then
one of my friends from high school found out because
(14:13):
she went to my house looking for me and I
wasn't there, but my dad was there and he just
got back from maybe the hospital or something, and so
he told her what was happening. So that was the
first person I guess that I talked to about it,
which was this summer after my senior year of high school. Yeah,
(14:36):
and then when things started getting worse my sophomore year
of college, I started just valing my friends about it
and the person I was dating at that time. I
would talk to him about it too, whenever my dad
looked like a scan and we were waiting for insults.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And I was worried when your friend in high school
found out and reached out to you. What was that
like for you, for somebody to know, and what were
those conversations like?
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I guess it was a relief, but it was really
hard for me to talk about it. Yeah. I remember
we just like drove around in her car and she
was trying to talk to me about it, and yeah,
it was kind of a relief to know that she knew.
(15:22):
But I I was pretty emotional in crying and yeah,
it's really hard for me to process it. And at
that time, also at that time, his illness was getting
visibly worse, so things were also becoming a lot more
real and right in front of me. And it was
(15:42):
also when I was like getting ready to leave for college,
but now it kind of felt like his life was
a lot more fragile, so it was tough to leaving
during that time too.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
It sounds like you were very close with your dad
in some ways, and clearly it's a affecting you. Yet
I'm not hearing that you were reaching out to friends
to get support, and I ask.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Why I was, I don't know, kind of similar to
my dad in a lot of ways and like very stoic,
and I guess I didn't think that I needed help,
and I kind of just coped with it in the
ways that I knew how. I guess I wasn't ready
to talk about it either, because I mean it more real,
(16:28):
I just started running a lot and biking a lot,
and that was kind of like my way of dealing
with it.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I'm wondering about what was going on between you and
your brother, because you said your brother, at least in
that last year, was able to really talk with your
dad and be close with your dad. Were you able
to talk with your brother about what was happening and
how you were feeling.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Yeah, we I think became a lot closer because of it.
Later on, when I was in college that summer this
summer after my senior year of high school, we didn't
really talk about it. We were kind of in two
different worlds at the time, and I think because I
(17:14):
suppressed a lot of it. When I got to college
my freshman year, I had a lot of trouble integrating,
and I was like very homesick and sad, and my
brother kind of talked me through a lot of that
and we became a lot closer because of that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So in your sophomore year, your dad is now apparently
quite ill and you start dating this person at school,
and you said that it kind of imploded, I think
is how you described it. Can you tell us about
the implosion?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, So when we first started dating, we were in
a relationship. I like essentially moved into his dorm room,
and for me, I was going really well, but it
was really really fast. It just too fast, and that
really freaked him out because he had been in a
relationship that started too quickly and then ended really badly,
(18:09):
and he didn't want to do that again. So he
kind of hit the brakes on us and wanted to
kind of pause and go back and take it slow
and just kind of date and not sort of be
in this like intense relationship from the get go. And
I didn't want to do that, and I felt like
he was just kind of like moving slower and slower
(18:29):
away for me, and by the end of the semester,
I just like couldn't really deal with it anymore. The
previous semester, I was just like a total mess and
a nightmare and all over the place and failed in
my classes. Then this semester I bit off more than
I could chew.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I was wait, hold on, I want to step you there.
So you said it. You kind of threw that off,
like you kind of tossed that off. You know. I
failed all my classes and I was a mess.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
No, No, I just failed one class, just.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
One, okay. But was that related to what was going
on for you in motion around your father's illness or
what was happening for you? I mean, was that unusual
for you?
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Yeah? I was definitely unusual. I was a really good student.
Freshman year of college was fine, but I was like
very very unhappy. But I did okay. And then sophomore
year of college, I was just kind of consumed with
getting as many friends as I could so I could
be happier, and like, my dad was doing worse and
I wasn't handling it particularly well. And I also kind
(19:30):
of just stopped talking to my parents that semester, to
both of them, both of them. Yeah, why, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
So what was the circumstance in which you just speaking
to them, Like, how did that come about?
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I just like wouldn't call them, I wouldn't really pick
up their calls. I kind of felt like I was
like trying on this personality that was like much more
outgoing and fun, and that didn't align with time my
parents a lot.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It also didn't delign with the fact that your dad
was doing very badly, And I'm wondering if that was
a real attempt to run away from that reality.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Probably, Yeah, it all kind of felt like an escape.
For sure. My parents were not happy about it.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
How did those conversations go where they told you that
they weren't happy about the fact that you weren't communicating
with them.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I think I would hear it from my brother. Probably.
They were definitely like very disappointed when I ended up
feeling one of my classes, and I remember my dad saying, like,
we're not sending you to college just to like drink
and party. But I don't really remember much more than that.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
You Know, what comes to mind in that conversation with
your dad is that it's almost like sometimes when we're
losing someone that we care so much about, it's almost
like you can't fire me. I quit you failed the class,
which you knew would be disappointing, and it's almost like
(21:08):
it might have even been a relief to have your
father be disappointed in you, that you could at least
have that barrier between the two of you. And I
think it's hard to see those things when they're happening
in the moment, But in hindsight, I wonder if now,
when you look at that period in your life, there's
a flavor of it's so hard for me to move
(21:29):
closer to the pain of this, that I'm going to
move as far away as I can and I'm going
to recreate my personality and I'm going to drink and
I'm going to party, and I'm going to not talk
to my parents, and I'm going to fail a class.
Not that you consciously did any of that, but as
you look at it now and you try to understand
that period in your life which was so out of
character for you, does any of that resonate now?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Yeah, I think it does. I mean, the first thing
that comes to mind, like, I wonder if it was
also just kind of like a cry for help. But yeah,
I definitely think it does. And I think that's kind
of an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
The other part of that that stands out is that
it's during this time that your dad was getting sicker,
you were pulling away from them more, and you were
also trying to attach more intensely to other people. In
the first case, that guy that you were dating that
you said it was very intense and very fast, And
(22:29):
again it strikes me that you were really trying to
create your life elsewhere to run away from it as
much as possible because it was just too painful to
deal with that reality. So you were living these two lives.
On the one hand, at home, things were going poorly
with your dad's health. You might have had a sense
that you're losing him soon, and yet you're trying to
(22:51):
create this party life or this fun life and romance
and friends and all that college and it just seems
that there were really two different worlds where you aware
of that at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
No, not really, I haven't really thought about it that way,
but that also does definitely resonates.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Can we actually move on to how you met the professor?
I mean, you think he was your professor, but how
did you meet him? How did that relationship again?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, so a little bit of backstory, just going into
my senior year of college. So when I was dating
that person that was really intense for a few months
my sophomore year, he ended up not really wanting to
be in a relationship with me, and then I kind
of fell apart and I withdrew from all my classes
(23:39):
I could finish them. When I went home and I
was really depressed, and then I took like a year
off from college.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
What did you do that year at home with your
ailing father and you're probably very sad and anxious mother.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
And sad and anxious brother.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah. My brother was, Oh yeah, I graduated from college.
He was living in the city and was working. I
came home and was like severely depressed, like stay in
my room for probably like two months.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
What did your parents think when you came home severely depressed?
What were those conversations like in your family?
Speaker 3 (24:17):
They were really concerned and worried.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Did they suggest that maybe you go talk to someone
or see a therapist?
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah? Yeah, I was talking to someone like twice a
week when I first came home, and then eventually once
a week, and then eventually not so much.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
What were you talking about? If I may ask, Because
there was so much going on.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
I was like prepherally talking about my dad, but it
wasn't at this like forefront of what was happening. I
think then I was probably most concerned with and talking
about this person that I had been dating. And then
I was also like consumed with feeling like a failure
for leaving college, and so those were the most pressed
(25:00):
in issues that I was dealing with, just trying to
figure out how to get back on my feet and
feel like a normal person again.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I'm hearing so much loss in what you were experiencing,
and maybe you didn't think of it that way at
the time, but to me, you were grieving, and you
were grieving the end of that relationship with the guy
you were dating, and that at first you felt incredibly
attached to, and then you saw him move farther and
farther away from you, just like your dad was doing
(25:31):
because he was sick and he was going to die.
And so you had these two men in your life
who you couldn't quite reach because they were both going
to move away from you, both for reasons out of
your control. And then you were grieving the loss of
your life as a student that you had never been
that kind of student before you had always done well
(25:51):
in school, you failed a class, and you withdrew from
your classes, and so everything that was familiar to you,
that was comforting to you had gone away or was
going away. I think for all of us, it can
be so much easier to deal with the thing that
feels the most concrete, which is there's this guy. We
(26:15):
were in a relationship. He was pulling back. I'm deeply
wounded by this, and that might have been the focus
of your therapy at the time, but I think that
whether you realized that or not, you were grieving these
other losses too.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I've definitely drawn that connection before, and I think the
reason why that breakup was so painful was because it
felt so similar to kind of that slow loss that
I was dealing with my dad. Yeah, So I ended up.
Then I took a full year off from college. I
worked at home, and then I went abroad for about
(26:51):
six months, and then I went back to school. And
then there was this class that I really wanted to
take with this professor who was like pretty wellcomplished in
his field, and I knew that I wanted to try
and build like a professional relationship with him because I
thought it would help me in my career. I was
doing that over the summer and I would go to
(27:13):
hospital appointments with him. And so then I got back
to school and I started that class and our first
assignment in the class was to write about someone you
really cared about and someone who you were really close to,
(27:34):
and the assignment was to render them in words. I
wrote about this story about my dad. Me and my
family had gone on in vacation that summer in the
Berkshires and my dad was really really not doing well.
He was pretty sick that summer, so we spent most
of his time pretty weak in bed. But there was
(27:55):
this one day that we went into town and we
met up with my brother's girlfriend and her mom and
they had a house up there, and my brother's girlfriend's
dad had just died like a few months before that
from patriotic cancer was really quick, and my dad walked
into the store with my mom and he found this
(28:17):
little stuffed animal. My dad was like so frugal, he
never bought anything. He like hated buying things, but he
saw this little stuffed animal and pointed it out to
my mom and said, like, I really want that, And
so my mom bought it for him and he had
it with him in bed. It was kind of like
it felt like this protector of him, And so I
(28:41):
wrote about that for this assignment, and I wrote about
my dad being sick and this little stuffed animal that
gave him comfort. It was almost this like for a
full circle story of when you get older and sick
and dying and you kind of become childlike again you
just want your stuffed animal. And the professor read each
(29:02):
one of our stories out loud to the class. I
remember after my professor read my story out loud, it
was just kind of silent, but he kind of filled
that silence with a story about his own dad being
really sick, and he was like empathizing understanding my story.
(29:22):
So that's why I met him.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
How did it move from him being your professor to
him being your boyfriend?
Speaker 3 (29:31):
He wasn't ever my boyfriend, and nothing ever happened like
physically between us. We had like a really intimate emotional relationship,
but it wasn't physical.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
That you had feelings for him.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, I did develop feelings for him.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, And when did that happen? Did he know?
Speaker 3 (29:54):
The way things changed was I was seeing him out
for after a class and he was like, yeah, but
I'm about to leave, like I'm hungry, I'm gonna go
get a bye to eat, Like do you want to
join me? And I was like sure, yeah, I just
have to call my mom back and he was like okay.
And then I got a meal with him and we
(30:14):
were talking and he asked me about my family and
my parents and how they met, and about my dad
and how he was doing. And then that kind of
turned into this like almost ritual where we would get
dinner every week and have these contents and intimate conversations,
and then over time I just kind of developed feelings
(30:34):
for him because of that.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Did he know that you had feelings for him?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think he must have because of how I acted.
I think he also did things to kind of egg
me on, and by the end, our friendship or whatever
it was or relationship or whatever just kind of ended strangely.
And so I of him this letter and left it
(31:02):
at his house before I left college after I graduated,
and I basically told him in that letter. I think
it was kind of clear.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
When you said he did things that egged you on.
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (31:17):
He would talk about like his ex girlfriends pretty frequently
and like, tell me about that history when I wouldn't
like ask him about it or tell him about my
own dating history.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
So when that ended, you said, it ended in a
weird way.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
Yeah, I had considerate After I graduated, I considered staying
in my college town and working for him. I could
stay there, and he was going to be away for
the summer, but potentially I could stay in his house
and take care of his dog while he was away
and work for him. But then right after I graduated,
(31:54):
we had this barbecue in my backyard. He came and
like other like a bunch of friends and family, other
professors there too, and we had this talk where he
was like, you know, we need boundaries in our relationship
and you can't stay in my house over the summer.
And I kind of asked him what he meant or
what he was talking about, but he had to leave
(32:14):
and then he just kind of ignored me and was like,
hang in there, and that was it. So I decided
that I was going to leave, and when I did,
I wrote him an email saying like, hey, I'm not
going to work for you. I decided I'm leaving, and
then I wrote this page long letter and delivered it
(32:37):
to his house and then I left, like a day
or two later.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
What did the letter say?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Oh, I remember too when we had that talk and
he said we needed boundaries. He was like, y're two
dependent on me, And so in this letter, I guess
I was explaining why I was dependent on him because
of my dad and his illness and him dying, and
so I came to rely on him, and I think
I apologized for that. I think I like told him
(33:05):
how much I cared about him and how I grew
to love him. I guess I think I said and
that maybe I had become dependent on him, but also
like the way he acted and treated me like he
was dependent on me too, and it wasn't just a
one sided thing, and I wanted him to take responsibility
(33:26):
for that.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Did he respond to the letter.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
He did respond to the letter, but it took him
a few weeks. Then it was very professional and buttoned up,
and it was the email he basically said, like, you know,
I'm so glad you took these classes with me. I
wish you all the best.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
But he didn't address the fact that you said you
grew to love him, or that you felt he had
also crossed some boundaries with you.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
No, not at all. He basically kind of invalidated or
just ignored it, like I was any other student who
took classes with him and wished me all the best
or whatever. And I confronted him again, probably a year later,
and so I asked him to meet up, and I
(34:15):
was like, do you know what I want to talk
to you about? And he was like, I think you
feel like I let you down in some way, and
I was like, yeah, I guess so, but it was
more than that. I said, I also feel like you
made sexual advances towards me, and we're kind of inappropriate,
and it was really confusing, and he like very defensively
(34:38):
and firmly denied that and got like pretty upset.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Did you give him examples of what you felt were
sexual advances?
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah? I said. I was like, you told me about
all of your ex girlfriends, you talked about your sex life,
You told me that you thought it was okay for
professors and students to date as long as students were seniors.
And he just fought out denied it.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Okay, what's happening with your dad at this time? Is
he still alive when this is going on?
Speaker 3 (35:04):
So he had died a couple of months before I
wrote that letter, and when I confronted him it was
like a year and months afterwards.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
It just sounds like it was dealing with a lot
of loss. It sounds like you got closer with your
dad again and spent a lot of time with him,
and that makes it really difficult when he passes away.
And that's around the time that you were with this
professor that you know he was perhaps pulling away. I mean,
(35:35):
it just sounds like you had those losses truly back
to back at that point.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, it was hard too, because he was someone who
encouraged me to talk about my dad, and other people
wouldn't really ask me about him because they were didn't
know what to say, or they didn't know if they
should ask about it. But he always did and wanted
me to talk about it and was really supportive. And
(36:04):
so then to like a couple of months after my
dad died, to have him then just like completely what
felt like kind of like completely breaking ties was. Yeah,
it was really hard.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
It just seems like such a painful double when me
to go through losing these you know, your dad obviously,
and then this person who seemed so significant to seem
like the person who would be there to help you
through it.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, definitely, that summer was so hard because like, not
only had I lost my dad, but also my mom
was just like kind of a wreck, like totally understandable,
but I didn't really know how to deal with it,
and it felt kind of like losing two parents. And
I think I emailed him. I reached out to him
(36:54):
and said something to that effect. Did he respond He
responded that. I think he expressed some empathy or more
sort of I think he asked me if I had
a therapist.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Emma. In your letter, you indicated that one of the
reasons that you are attracted to older men is because
the maturity and stability and they get things. And I
can see in the relationship with a professor why you
would feel that way, because he actually asked and he
was curious about what was going on with your dad,
and he seemed very supportive for the time that he
(37:29):
was there. But then the way it ended didn't sound
like the most mature way to end that situation, and
it was very disappointing and hurtful for you. With that
in mind, I do want to hear about this current
relationship that you have that you wrote about, can you
tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Sure, the professor was like over thirty years older than me.
This other person is so only twenty years old, and
I met him through work and I just like developed
(38:11):
these really intense feelings for him. And the nature of
it is so different, Like it's super lighthearted, it's like
really fun and easy. But he's also married and has children.
But he also like leaves me a lot of attention
and showers me with compliments and it feels amazing. But
(38:32):
it's super different, and it's not burdened by my dad
dying or some really dark thing happening in my life.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Does he know that you have these feelings for him?
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I think on some level, when someone has a crush
on you, you always know.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
It's funny that you say that, because it sounds like
in your family there was a lot of assuming what
was going on with other people, but not directly talking
about it, And so for you that might seem like, well,
that's the norm that people into it what you're feeling,
even if you don't say it directly, because that's what
you grew up with.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
I want to open you up to the idea that
maybe if you don't communicate directly with people, they don't
know exactly what you're feeling. So when you say he
showers you with compliments, I assume those are professional compliments.
They're not romantic compliments. Is that right? Yeah? And so
(39:38):
it's almost like a lot of these relationships are taking
place in your head. And I don't mean that you're
making them up. I mean they're very real to you,
but that the other person isn't involved in the sense
of you have sat down and been vulnerable with this person.
You talk a lot about being vulnerable with the Professor
(39:58):
about what was going on with your dad, but you
weren't vulnerable with him in terms of what was going
on between the two of you until the very end.
And with this guy, it sounds like he doesn't really
know what happened with your dad because you probably haven't
opened up to him about it and it's not happening
at this moment. And I really wonder whether he has
(40:24):
any idea that you feel the way you do about.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Him he does know what happened with my dad, And
maybe he doesn't know, but he might know. The reason
I think he might know is because I mean he
also like flirted with me a little bit.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
One of the reasons that you seem to believe that
you're attracted to older men is that they have more
life experience and therefore are emotionally deeper and can understand
you on a deeper level. And yet you haven't really
engaged in any kind of deep I thou reallylationship with
either of them, And by I thou we use this
(41:03):
term in therapy, meaning how I relate to you, how
you relate to me. And you said that you did
try to date someone who was about ten years older,
and that you felt like this person didn't have that
level of emotional depth, and so I don't really hear
a lot of emotional depth happening with the current person.
(41:26):
It sounds like you joke around a lot that you
have a fondness for each other, but I don't really
hear anything romantic going on necessarily from his end. You
know what draws you to him more than maybe the
person who was ten years older.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
The person I was ten years older actually was really
great and it was going super well, and I didn't
think that he couldn't relate to me. I felt like
we could relate to each other super well. But it
turned out he had just gotten out of a relationship
and wasn't ready to enter into a new one, and
that's why it ended. It was pretty brief.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Interesting is that to me, the relationship that sounds like
you were most in it is the one in your
sophomore year with the guy who was your age. That's
the one where you entered into it very quickly. The
two of you kind of moved into his dorm room
(42:20):
right away. That he felt it was a little too
quick and he was putting on the brakes, But you
were in it, you were interested in it, you were
going for it, and that was your first real relationship.
And then since then it's been real safe choices for you.
In the sense that you know the professor, he's thirty
years older. There was a lot of disclosure going on,
(42:43):
and that felt very intimate. But nothing happened between the
two of you and the guy at work. He's married.
He doesn't even know that you have these feelings. The
guy who was ten years older was right out of
a relationship and not ready for a new one. And
I have this feeling that there's a part of you
that really wants to just actually be in a relationship,
(43:05):
to have that part of your life because you're almost
you're entire of that life was taken up with your
dad's illness. And then you meet the guy who's ten
years older. Even that felt good for a while. What
doesn't feel good is that when you're with the older guys,
with the professor, with this guy from work, you are
pining for someone who's older, but it's almost collegial or mentorish.
(43:29):
It doesn't feel or seem romantic, but it does feel safe.
And I wonder if that early experience and all the
turbulence of your adolescent years, after all the losses you've had,
you're playing it safe.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah, I think that's definitely makes sense too. There is
also there's something a warring about someone who's unavailable and
kind of unapproachable, and it's easier that way because there's
not really in the realm of possibility, and therefore there's
also not a lot of room to get hurt or
(44:06):
be rejected or left or whatever.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
But they occupy that emotional space in a way that
doesn't leave you free for someone else perhaps who might
be there, who might have something to give back.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Yeah. Probably true.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I've noticed that even in our conversation with you today,
you haven't really looked at us very much. That when
you start talking about something that feels very tender or delicate,
you look down, and when we're talking like right now,
you'll look right up at us. But then when you're
responding to us about something that feels maybe vulnerable to you,
(44:47):
not once in this conversation have you looked at us.
And you think that there's something about getting close to
people or really being seen that feels terrifying to you.
And part of it might have to do with the
fact that, starting when you were in high school, you
(45:08):
were dealing with potential imminent loss with your dad. But
part of it might also have to do with the
style of communication in your family, where things weren't really
directly talked about. Everybody seemed to love one another, but
they didn't really talk about the things that needed to
be talked about in a direct way. And so part
(45:29):
of it is that you went through this experience of
losing someone that you were very close with. But the
other part is that I don't think that you ever
really learned how to get close in a way that
felt safe, that speaking up felt terrifying in your family.
Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yeah, that definitely resonates. I was also like a very
quiet kid, and I didn't really start talking a lot
until Honestly, like even in high school, I was pretty shy,
and I didn't really start being more open and vocal
and putting myself out there until I was in college,
(46:07):
until like my sophomore year of college, when I kind
of just let everything go in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
You might be shy, or you might have been shy,
but that doesn't mean that you don't have a circus
going on in your head. Okay, it's very loud in there.
There's a lot going on there. It's not as though
there's an absence of intense feeling of lots of things
swirling around there all the time. This relationship that you
(46:36):
have right now to the person that you work with
is very alive and very active in your mind, even
though you haven't vocalized anything to him.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
To echo Lorre's point, you mentioned that I think in
your letter that your friends are like, you know, roll
their eyes a bit or something like that, oh you
and your older men kind of fixation kind of thing.
But I think that that's also that maybe you're not
opening up to them, to really talk about how you're feeling,
(47:06):
what your needs are, what your hopes are, what it
would be like to be in a relationship with someone
who could reciprocate. And I think it's easier to talk about, oh,
the professor and the married guy than talking about and
yet I'm really lonely and I really want someone, and
I don't know how to go about it because it's very,
(47:27):
very scary out there in the dating world. Do you
have those kinds of conversations with your friends where you
talk about that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
I mean we talk about dating and stuff, But.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Do you hear the difference between talking about dating and
having the kind of conversation with your friends about you
not dating in general and the kinds of general stories
people talk about about being in the trenches, but about
something specific to you, which is I really struggle with
putting myself out there emotionally. I really struggle with with
(48:00):
getting close to someone and risking having that go away.
I really struggle with the possibility of rejection. I really
struggle with the fact that my dad died and I
haven't quite dealt with it in a way that I
think would be helpful for me. Did you ever talk
to them about that? Not so much.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
I really struggle with the fact that not only did
my dad die, but then my mom was really dealing
with this, and I felt very alone. I didn't feel
like I had a parent anymore.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, not really.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
How much emotional real estate goes toward thinking about the
different men that you have been really interested in, and
particularly right now with the current person, what do you
think would replace that if you weren't thinking about him?
(48:58):
And it sounds like you think about him quite a bit,
You talk about him quite a bit, to the point
that your friends are saying enough already. What do you
think you'd be thinking about if you weren't thinking about him?
Speaker 3 (49:09):
I know that when I was thinking about the professor
a lot, and I would stop doing that. I would
think about my dad a lot, and now I would
probably think about my brother who's been having a really
(49:30):
hard time.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
And so when you hear yourself say that, can you
hear that these distractions conserve is almost like a drug,
like I'm going to put the needle in because I
don't want to think about these other things. I'm going
to numb myself with thoughts about people I don't have
(49:54):
to get that close to. But it feels good to
fantasize about it or imagine it. When you take the
needle out, you start to say, oh, what's there that's
about my dad or my brother? And I think underneath
that even is this intense loneliness. And we don't want
you to have to feel so lonely. So, Emma, we
(50:21):
have some advice for you, and what we'd like you
to do is we would like you to call your
mom and we would like you to start a conversation
with her by saying, you know what, Mom, there's this
guy that I can't stop thinking about. And I realized
that if I stop thinking about him, what I would
(50:42):
be thinking about would be Dad. And I would like
to be able to talk with you about what this
experience has been like for our family. And I'd like
to be able to share with you a little bit
about what has been like for me. I know you've
(51:03):
certainly struggled with it, understandably so, and so do you
think that I could share a little bit with you
about what this has been like for me to go
through Dad's illness and to lose Dad. Could we start
maybe opening up those conversations and I want to be
clear that it's not like you're going to go through
(51:24):
the last ten years in that one conversation. It will
probably be dipping your toe in and letting your mom
acclimate to what it's like to have these kinds of
conversations in the family, because your family wasn't a family
who had these kinds of conversations even before your dad
became ill, and just sort of gauge her reaction and
(51:47):
be able to tell her maybe a little bit about
you know, I realized that I haven't really dealt with it,
and it would feel so good to be able to
talk about it with you because we've been through it
sort of in the family together, and see what that's like,
see what happens for her when you open it up
(52:07):
in that way. And we'd like you to have a
similar conversation with your brother, and you might open it
up with him and say, you know what, there's this
guy that I think about a lot. And I realized
that if I were to stop thinking about him, I
would be thinking about Dad, and I would also be
(52:28):
worried about you, because I know that you're struggling a
lot too, and I would love to be able to
talk the two of us as siblings about what we're
struggling with and what we're going through, and maybe have
more direct conversations about that, because I think it would
be really helpful for both of us and see what
(52:48):
that conversation is like with him. And we also feel
like that would help you do some of your grief
work that hasn't been done yet. How does that sound
to you?
Speaker 3 (53:00):
Sounds hard but manageable.
Speaker 2 (53:04):
Okay, good Emma. There's the second part you wrote to
us about dating, and we have some advice for you
there as well. You probably spend many hours a day
thinking about the guide from work, and those are in
essence a bit wasted hours because there's nothing that's going
to really happen there. Would like you to convert at
(53:24):
least an hour of that time where you would be
thinking about him, to thinking about more likely suspects for dating.
And are you on any dating apps?
Speaker 3 (53:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Great. We would like you to spend at least an
hour a day talking with age appropriate people. Now, we
had a debate about what that is for you, and
I suggested be cappy with thirty. Laurie said thirty five.
We're going to agree on thirty five. We would like
(53:58):
you to try if you can within this week set
up a FaceTime date or a socially distanced one with
somebody within that age range. You've spent so many years
dealing with loss and grief and illness and not being
(54:19):
able to really have that young adulthood that you really
want to have in part, and we don't want you
to waste too many more years on the unavailable older
guys who can't give you that, So we would like
you to spend this time trying to get at least one,
and just to remind yourself of those options and that
(54:43):
there are people out there and that age range who
are mature enough and open enough for you that you
can have a relationship with.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
Potentially, And we want you to make sure that the
age range really is twenty five to thirty five. You
are considering people who are your own age because I
think there's a story that you're telling yourself, particularly about
the person that is the object of your affection right now,
that somehow he's deeper and can to understand you better
(55:14):
than someone in your own age range. And yet nothing
deep has transpired between the two of you. There has
not been one hint of the depth of his inner
life in anything that has transpired between the two of
you other than that you admire his work. So we
also are giving you the ticking clock of the week
(55:35):
because you have all kinds of excuses for you know why,
nobody is appropriate. We are forcing the issue, and we
are making you choose someone. We're not looking for perfect.
We're making you choose someone that you think you might
have a nice conversation with. That is the extent of it.
As part of this exercise, we would like you to
(55:57):
tell your friends, who are so tired of hearing you
talk about this other guy, Hey, I am really making
a concerted effort to meet someone my own age. Is
there anyone you can think about introducing me to. Just
making it clear to your friends that, hey, I want
you to know that instead of spending all that time
(56:18):
talking to them about Oh my gosh, and here's what happened,
and we had this interchange and he looked at me
this way, and here's what happened at work. To say,
you know what, I'm not going to spend my time
talking about him with you anymore. So we want you
to stop talking about him with your friends. We want
you to talk about the things that you would be
talking about if you weren't talking about him. Talk about
your dad, talk about your fear, talk about this new
(56:41):
idea of I'm going to be open to meeting people
in my age range. Talk about movies that you saw,
talk about books that you read, talk about the things
you would be talking about if you weren't on the drug. Okay,
all right, all right. So we look forward to hearing
how the conversations go and how the dating goes, and
(57:04):
we will hear back from you shortly.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
Thank you. What became clear to me in this conversation
with Emma was the extent to which these infatuations with
the older men are truly distractions from dealing both with
(57:27):
the pain of losing her dad and with a fear
of finding someone whose age appropriate, of entering into her
own relationships, of dealing with loneliness, of dealing with the
risk of rejection. And I hope that our homework for
her will help her break out of that.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
Yeah, I think we're trying to redirect her and help
her to deal with what's really going on. When people
ruminate like that, when they sort of ruminate and obsessed.
She said she thinks about him all the time, that's
all she can think about. Studies show that in order
to break that, you need to focus on something concrete
(58:08):
for a specific amount of time, just to kind of
reset your brain. And so I think giving her that
hour where we're saying, Okay, you want to obsess eight
hours a day, that's fine, do what you need to do,
but on this ninth hour, we're going to have you
do this task. It will give her the opportunity to
(58:29):
take the needle out for an hour and to access
all that she is trying to distract herself from, because
I think what she will find is that her fear
of her feelings is a lot scarier than the feelings themselves.
Speaker 2 (58:48):
You're listening to Deotherapists from iHeartRadio. We'll be back after
a quick break. We did not receive a voicemail from Emma.
This is the first time that we haven't received a
(59:10):
voicemail from one of our guests, one of our fellow travelers.
We asked our producer to reach out to Emma and
inquire about it and remind her, and she did and
to ask if there was any reason that Emma didn't
send the voicemail. And Emma actually said no, that she
just was busy and didn't have a chance to get
(59:32):
to it that she would, but again she did not.
Even after she said that, we still didn't get a voicemail.
And so we're going to discuss a little bit about
what that might be and why that might be going on.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Right, and so something like that happens when we have
that happen in the therapy room, for example, and somebody
says they're going to do something and then they don't
follow through, and then we talk about it and they
say they're going to follow through and they don't. We
didn't have the opportunity with Emma to really understand more
about what was going on for her, but based on
(01:00:06):
our conversation with her, it did seem like there was
a lot of avoidance going on of really dealing with
the impact that her father's long illness and death had
on her all through her teen years and then through
her college years. And what we were asking her to
do was to really go to places that maybe she
(01:00:28):
wasn't ready to go to.
Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
What happens often is that when somebody comes and tells
us their story, and here the story was I get
into these relationships with older men. It doesn't work well
for me with the younger men my age, and we
as therapists, our job is to tell them, often a
different story than their story, and in this case, the
(01:00:52):
story was you had a lot of trauma and loss
with losing your dad, and you had a lot of
hesitation about getting hurt, and so it was safer to
go with older men who didn't really have a relationship
with you had crushes on than to deal with the
fear and the anxiety and the hurt and the potential
(01:01:13):
loss of somebody more in your age bracket than somebody
who's twenty or thirty years older. And that is what
she then had to confront And I think that it
wasn't just the task she wasn't ready for, but it
was the narrative that we were proposing that she was
struggling to accept.
Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
I think you're right about really embracing this other part
of the narrative, and maybe she's having some trouble with that,
But I also think that those relationships served as an
escape for her from really dealing with the grief and
the loss. And when we talked to her about what
would you be thinking about if you weren't obsessing about
(01:01:57):
the current guy, and if you hadn't been obsessing up
about the professor, and she said, I'd be thinking about
my dad. And I think that when we asked her
to talk to her mom and talk to her brother
about maybe opening up these conversations in the family about
the impact that this experience has had on all of them,
(01:02:19):
that maybe that was something that she's not ready to
do yet. That it feels so good in a certain
way to hold on to Well, let me think about
the guy at work and what does that mean that
he said that, and was he flirting with me? And
is he ever going to leave his wife for me?
Then to say, hey, mom, hey brother, we have a
(01:02:42):
lot of stuff that maybe we should talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
I agree. And I think the other part of that
is it also was safer to think about the married
guy at work than it is to deal with the
potential hurt and disappointment of taking someone that actually reciprocate
and have a real relationship with all the fears that
go with entering into that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
Yeah, And I have a lot of compassion for Emma
because I think by not reporting back to us on
how these tasks went, and I think that means that
she didn't do them that she was sending us a message.
But again there's that avoidance of instead of saying to
our producer, you know what I thought about it, but
I just I'm not really ready to do these things yet.
(01:03:31):
I'm so sorry, and just being direct about it, she
just said, oh, yeah, I'm going to have it by tomorrow.
I'm going to have it by this day, and then
radio silence. We just never heard. So I think there's
that question about you know what makes it hard for
her to actually be direct instead of avoiding something that
might be difficult.
Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
And we know from our practices that people have to
be ready to make the changes that we try and
help them make. And I hope that when Emma feels ready,
she'll know the path that she has to take.
Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Next week, we'll get updates from last season sessions to
find out how our advice worked out a year later.
Speaker 5 (01:04:18):
I was always taught that your parents will live with
you and you take care of them for the rest
of your life. There's no other option. So when you
both presented something else to me and gave me permission
of a sort, that that was life changing.
Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Hey, fellow travelers, if you're enjoying our podcast each week,
don't forget to subscribe for free so that you don't
miss any episodes, and please help support Dear Therapists by
telling your friends about it and leaving a review on
Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really help people to find the show.
Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
Bigel Smooth, email us at Lorian Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Mike Johns, Josh Fisher, and Chris Childs. Our interns
are Dorit Corwin and Silver Lifton. Special thanks to Alison
Wright and to our podcast fairy Godmother Katie Couric.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
We can't wait to see you at next week's session.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Dear Therapist is a production of iHeartRadio.
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