Salt.

The question I wish to answer through writing this blog post is: where am I now in all of this? What do I feel, think, want. What do I know, what do I want to know...

And where do I even begin!

OK, well I'm beginning to enjoy? Is that the right word - I'm beginning to value my position as someone who will tell the truth. My experience of therapy abuse isn't the one most people instantly think of. This makes it important that I tell my story. By crossing through the fire-wall I describe instead the other truth - my lived experience.

Let's begin: I was a client, and I fell in love with the man and not the therapist. I thought that he was a rubbish therapist - not because of his lack of skill, I can't comment on that. I simply don't agree with the basic assumptions that underlie his version of therapy. And this must have been obvious to him as soon as he asked me a standard set of questions about my childhood. At that time, June 2020, I was drowning in absolute and total despair. I held tight to the bloody mess of myself and smouldering fragments of my past life as my secure future collapsed. My son's psychosis, the catastrophic intervention of the mental health services, my husband lying to me for a year, my efforts to convince myself that I was just suffering from the effects of stress. 

I needed a safe place to heal, and I thought that therapy would provide this for me. 

A reasonable assumption? 

The therapist's version of therapy is to seek old patterns and developmental issues that could account for my present. These were not needed. Nor was I in any fit state for this. And perhaps this alone explains why he chose to be more himself with me? But I didn't experience that sense of honesty as a technique. I felt that he was talking about himself because he wanted me to know who he was, who he is. 

How my feelings about him changed slowly and increasingly into a disconcerting and depressing realisation that I was falling in love, are recorded elsewhere in this blog - so I wont repeat. There was no seduction. Nothing most people would call abuse. Yet when therapy ended two years later - I was in a worse psychological state than when therapy began. 

The cure was to untangle the catastrophe of what had happened to the point where I could write and send my victim statement and ask for an apology. Despite the reaction I got, I'd advise anyone in a similar position to do the same!

When I left your room for the last time I walked in a daze back to my car. The sun seemed distant, a watery blue moon and so cold. I drove to the supermarket car park closest to the rail tracks, the place where my son’s friend had taken his life. I needed to be there to remind myself that I had promised at his inquest to become the kind of therapist who could help people in the same desperate agonised state of mind that led him to the tracks. As I left your room my promise felt violated and torn and I was in a worse state of mind than when I’d first started therapy. I left that final session carrying the full weight of pain, grief and loss from the four years before therapy with the addition of your lack of trust in my abilities as a therapist.

Until my last session in May, I tried once or twice openly and at other times very obliquely, to bring the subject of Eros into the room. Even if you were unwilling to talk about the personal, it would have been possible for us to explore the cultural and institutional assumptions around the erotic. But the subject was impossible to talk about, instead the situation was framed simply as my transgression, and you explained to me yet again what you thought I didn’t understand.

My feelings, my erotic feelings were never misconduct. Expressing my feelings for you in words, was not misconduct. But I believe that the way you responded to me was misconduct. It has taken me over three years to begin to understand what happened. That Eros enters therapy as a bridge, as a connection that indicates the possibility of a deep relational depth. I understand that I was not given the hermeneutical information that would allow me to understand my own feelings, and I was denied the information that would allow me to make up my own mind about what was happening. [21st September 2025]

The above is part of my 'victim statement'.

His reply was to go to the police and accuse me of harassment.

For a therapist to refuse to take something like this seriously, is in my view, absolutely misconduct. 

But if a therapist fails to bring another therapist's suspected misconduct to scrutiny - this is also misconduct - so I'm guilty too.

Sounds easy doesn't it. 

Simply make the complaint.

Perhaps I should have.

But I was in no fit state to do anything after therapy. As I left the last session I felt psychologically beaten, bereft of strength and courage. I had felt as if I had been forced into compliance, and so I did what I had to do - I appeared to keep my head. It was like putting the experience into cryo, for revival only when life feels safe enough for me to have the space to process what happened. 

Three years later I very cautiously tried to complain...and was instantly put off by the response from UKCP.

So, where am I? 

I didn't fall for the therapist, I loved and probably still love the man. But I sure learnt a lot about psychotherapy. I learnt that the ability to write essays about theories as scientific and factual as the Cthulhu mythos proves only that a person can write the mythos! Until I discover that I'm wrong I will continue to regard therapeutic theories and diagnoses of mental illnesses as self referential, coherent, persuasive stories that empower some people to make interpretations about other people.

In other words, stories designed to create or support an unequal power dynamic.

My view of the man stays the same though, I'd gush and swoon in his presence. The vulnerable and clever person who hid behind theory, who did me such harm, who ignorantly inflicted more gaslighting and in this way re-traumatized me?

No change. 

No ill will. 

This whole journey has taught me so much more than I could ever have imagined. 

Jung, perhaps the most mythic of all mythos writers drew from ancient texts about alchemy - but this mythos; of how to turn 'base metals' into pure gold, suits me fine! It helps, it supports, it empowers...I quote Hillman.

“Felt experience” takes on a radically altered meaning in the light of alchemical salt. We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live. The fact that we return to these deep hurts, in remorse and regret, in resentment and revenge, indicates a psychic need beyond a mere mechanical repetition compulsion. Instead, the soul has a drive to remember; it is like an animal that returns to its salt licks; the soul licks at its own wounds to derive sustenance therefrom. We make salt in our suffering and, by keeping faith with our sufferings, we gain salt, healing the soul of its salt-deficiency. Hillman, James. Alchemical Psychology (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 5) (pp. 60-61).