Write the warning.

This morning, being as it is the anniversary of discovering my husband’s infidelity, and two years after my final therapy session, I’m thinking about how perpetrators want their victim to be silent - and the many ways they achieve this. Have they won, I didn’t make the formal complaint?

In September last year the therapist tried to silence me by going to the police to say that I was harassing him. The harassment was my victim statement. It was also the physical recordings and transcripts of two therapy sessions. The therapist was no doubt fearful, but of what, the police didn’t uncover. I imagine it was of a formal complaint! He used the fact that I’d posted the transcripts plus flash-drive through his door, as evidence that I’d ‘gone to his home’ which has a certain vibe and implication. I’d posted them through his door because I wouldn’t trust them to the postal service. When the police asked me how I knew where he lived, the fact that I’d been going there for therapy, the image of me as a mad stalker woman, already crumbling by the obvious state of shock and mild mannered distress I was in, fell apart.

I’d sent the transcripts, recordings and my victim statement to him to make sure that he’d got the information he needed to understand exactly the nature of my complaint, I was going to make it official. I was done with giving him any more chances to respond.

I’d started therapy in 2020 - and the effect of that therapy, the way it eroded my self confidence lingers. I’m still working hard to switch off my defensive and avoidant responses. It is hard work to slow down; observe, evaluate and then step forward. For those two years, the choice to continue with therapy had been mine, but, I was beginning to see that the responsibility for the harm was his. Victims often feel that they are responsible for their own abuse. Eventually I came to see that I was taking all the responsibility for bad therapy. It took me three years to be able to write my victim statement. 

I’d requested my notes, didn’t happen. I’d requested an apology. Months before I could even begin to write my victim statement I’d flagged my concerns about his therapy and said by email that we both had things to apologise to each other for. I received in reply a blunt ‘whose need to apologize, why?’ My husband had used similar language. It turns a request for collaboration into conflict, making it about power ‘explain yourself to me and I’ll judge if anyone needs to apologise’. 

In response to his tone I couldn’t even try to explain. I’d said that I had serious concerns to discuss, and that we both need to apologise to each other. He is an intelligent man. My statement, putting it bluntly, indicated a problem. I wanted both of us to admit our human vulnerability to messing up.

How did I begin to understand that I was a victim?

At a certain point I stopped seeing him as a victim (of what?) I asked myself what I’d think about me as a therapist, as a human being actually, if I had flirted with a client during sessions. What might be the reasons? How forgivable was it? Perhaps if I liked the client and got carried away, perhaps if I imagined that the therapy contract was a magic document (hint, it isn’t) that would prevent a client being vulnerable to the impact of that flirtation? Perhaps if I’d thought that there had been zero overwhelm, distress, shattering following the client’s four years of trauma?

If I’d though that any of those excuses were reasonable, except ‘I liked the client’ I’d be an idiot! If I thought that ‘I liked the client’ justified anything other than honest, open discussion - this is even worse, it was cruel. And if, some time after therapy had ended, that client then told me how devastating my insensitivity to their emotional state had been, further, highlighting the fact that I’d broken client confidentiality. And if I didn’t then respond with the sensitivity that had been so missing during the sessions at the very least - my judgment is, I shouldn’t practice as a therapist. Making a judgment can be extremely important sometimes!

Of course there was no requirement for him to respond to me once therapy was over.

But there was that statement he’d made about the other client (!) who accepted his love ‘in the end’. When he told me I thought poor woman! And I thought of the mediaeval concept, fin’amor. Elevating desire to a sacred plane (hence the metaphor of the plane crash, probably!))!

During those two years of therapy I had experienced a therapist who talked about seeing his clients become children, of how he speaks to the child in the adult. The way he said it? It felt personal, more than transactional analysis, a mission. In his therapy role he placed love as metaphysical, a fantasy love always safe and spacious. I’d go so far now as to say that he needed the client to see him as the source of this nurturing fantasy,

And I knew that I hadn’t been the only one subjected to this creepy madness.

I began to see that I’d trusted an actor who became annoyed whenever I tried to break the fourth wall. This happened whenever I tried to say that I felt as if something needed talking about. I wouldn’t accept that I was supposed to be playing a supporting role - pretending to trust and understand his good intentions! Good intentions that included flirting with me, culminating in saying that he thought of me as a minx. I was unable to make any sense. In retrospect I think that he understood very well. Telling me that he had had no idea about my feelings was simply another way to avoid.

[From my written journal]

1/2/21.

As I was speaking, the feeling of that evening was seeping in to my present reality like cold, dirty water. I felt ashamed of myself, and as if no one could forgive me. I was feeling as my husband had felt? And how he had made me feel...Intellectually I knew I was years away from there. But psychically, I was there watching this happen to me again. As I described this I needed to be with a ‘trusted companion’. Someone who I trusted to be on my side. I was starting to untangle a pattern that would repeat over and over for twenty-five years as I tried different ways to avoid or talk to, or to appease my husband’s cold rage. Talking to the therapist I closed my eyes to focus on the sensation, to recognize, to know. And then I looked up

I looked up, his head was to one side, he said “The way you raised your one eyebrow as you described that, I thought...”and a smile widened across his face “minx.” When he called me a minx, his smile, his tone of voice hit me like a bolt of lightning. Waves of shock and pleasure took me momentarily - I was on fire. .

OK, messed up and human and understandable. I think it stinks, but I get it. And if there had been some honesty from him afterwards I’d have been able to process it. What came after was self attack, despair and suicidal thoughts.

So I’m not done with telling the tale, this isn’t over.

The deeper question remains unanswered though. What does his acting protect? Why play at being a therapist in that way? What need in him does it serve.

Is he simply profoundly wrong, or is he self-serving?

I cannot know.

His ability to follow the script will protect his role for sure.

Yet this client - me - almost died...

--

From my victim statement:

6th September 2025.

I’m writing now because it has taken me this long to dare to tease apart the factors that led to the hurt and harm of your biases. I might not wish to remember, but I do. I take unfinished business seriously. And I write because I am hoping that you will consider the harm that you caused me, and make reparation.

During therapy, sometimes I’d felt as if our conversations took part on two levels; as if there was something under the surface. The recording (Samhain) was an attempt to get this feeling into awareness and understanding. I was requesting a reciprocal level of sincerity and openness. And so I had no idea how to respond to what felt like your avoidance, being delivered as education. And at the end of the final session I felt condemned, positioned as being at fault for telling you the truth.

Leaving 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 me.

Walking towards the car I walked away from hope, as if the heat and life giving properties of the sun had turned to ice.

When I arrived at the car park I didn’t have any strength or courage left. I was at the edge of my own disintegration; the air was thick with images of death and destruction under a heavy blanket of amnesia and fog - only my longing for it all just to stop, to give up and to give in. Staying inside the car I wrote out my feelings, capturing the cascade of images. I was powerless, feeling utterly, utterly worthless.

And I was still without answers.

Three years and four months later this story is now CC.

I want people to know that if they fall for their therapist and it doesn’t feel safe, if they feel demonized and blamed that this isn’t how it should be. Eros is a desire for a deep, secure, intuitive connection. If you as the therapist are working with someone who feels this way about you - bringing both the therapist’s and the client’s feelings into awareness where they can be spoken of, is not ‘pouring oil on the fire’. Eros is evidence of a relational bond, beyond conventional power roles and sexuality. The key to this is comfort with one’s own sexuality and an acknowledgment of adult erotic feelings.

One thing Eros is not, it is not sexual misconduct.

Ethical sexual conduct requires a person to refrain from committing any emotional, or psychological harm within the domain of sexuality. This is more complex than avoiding physical contact. By this definition sexual misconduct occurs when the therapist blames or otherwise disrespects the client for their erotic feelings, thereby causing emotional harm to the client. I know myself to have the capacity to hold such feelings securely within the boundaries of the therapy contract for my clients. I knew that about myself when I gave you the recording. My therapy with you has taught me only how harmful naïve moralising can be.

I believe that whatever happened to you in your training certainly contaminated our sessions. And this email is an opportunity for you to acknowledge that despite your best intentions, I left that final session in a worse mental state than I’d started with.

I believe that I deserve an apology.

[Sent 20th September 2025]