Write the warning.

This morning, is the anniversary of discovering my husband’s infidelity, and two years after my final therapy session. So I’m thinking about how perpetrators want their victim to be silent - and the many ways they achieve this. 

Did the therapist win? 

Well, I didn’t make the formal complaint.

Some of the reasoning about the risks people face, can be found here:

 https://5tarry3kies.blogspot.com/2026/06/dont-speak-out.html

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, 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 was asked if I was suicidal?

I answered truthfully "no, but I have been".

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. And then 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. Didn't happen. Something was clearly wrong. Months before I could even begin to write my victim statement I’d flagged my concerns about his therapy to him, 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, indicated a problem! I wanted both of us to admit our human vulnerability, at that stage I was willing to believe that we had both made mistakes that caused harm to the other. 

How did I begin to understand that I was actually the 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 and that they would find it helpful to hear me describing them as contrary and tangential? 

If I’d though that any of those excuses were reasonable, except ‘I liked the client’ I’d be an idiot! But if I had thought that the ‘I liked the client’ excuse 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. And also reminded me that I’d broken client confidentiality by talking about other clients with them. And if I didn’t then respond with the sensitivity that had been so missing during the sessions at the very least...

If that was me, I shouldn't practice as a therapist.

I justify my judgment because to refrain from discriminating between safe and dangerous therapeutic practice, would be to condone it. 

I can forgive it, I can understand it, but I will never be able to say that it was not potentially lethal. Or agree that the mechanism of my re-traumatisation could not have been predicted. 

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’. This would have been grounds for an official complaint. When he told me about her therapy I thought poor woman! In trying to understand his view 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 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, his 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 love to enable his fantasy of nurture. 

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 if 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 his denial of any idea of my feelings for him was a lie. I honestly believe that he understood very well. Telling me that he had had no idea about my feelings was simply another way to avoid. I felt a whiff of law at that point, did he have a legal background, did he once upon a time study law? 

[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 did his acting protect? Why did he play at being a therapist in that way? What need in him did it serve? My question; was he just profoundly wrong in his approach to trauma, or was his therapy for him, self-serving?

I cannot know.

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

Yet this client - me - almost died..