Laws to protect women are being used against them by men...

It isn't just women. 

I'm not even going to say that this happened to me, but if someone else told me that what had happened to me had happened to them...

Ok, well we know that therapists will go to the police and claim that they are the victim of harassment - see Dangerous Memories (Tortoise Media / BBC Sounds), The shocking part is, the 'victim' only has to say that they told the client never to contact them again (twice ) for their complaint to be taken very seriously as harassment, and to have some evidence such as an email about or to the victim says that there is a problem with the victim. The communication doesn't need to contain a threat. The perpetrator doesn't have to have made a threat to hurt or harm.

The victim's complaint is enough.

Because a person experiencing harassment might be in such a bad psychological state, that they can't speak about it. And quite possibly, police, unlike therapists, don't feel comfortable with going into the deeps.

But, the harassment law is incredibly easy to exploit maliciously. A professional person is usually instantly seen as being trustworthy and of good standing. It is very likely that if the victim is a man, the assumption is, it must be more difficult for him to admit his vulnerability than it would be for a woman.

What I'm saying is, without a threat free interview with both parties before the police assume a probable crime, the police have to make a decision. If that is based on based on the acting abilities of the victim, you can see where this can lead.

Laws designed around an awareness of interpersonal dynamics, falls at the first post. 

Men can and do exploit laws designed to protect women, to bully and harass women who try to prevent such men harming others.

Harassment occurs when a person uses fear and coercive tactics to get another person to take responsibility for something that they cannot be responsible for. So, a man who has beaten his wife black and blue tells her that she deserved it because she made him so mad. As long as she never makes him mad again, he tells her, everything will be OK. Though she is the victim of man's inability to control himself, when her case is taken seriously, she is the one who has to move away from friends, family, support. Her children have to change school. They have lost their dad, they love him, they hate him. There is fear, alienation and then dad finds them again. The threats begin, he makes her feel unsafe. Her life is in danger. 

Sorry, a lot there!

But that's the more usual scenario for harassment.

Except... I've described how the power of fear is used to harass. I haven't described the twist that undelies the difference between a legitimate use of power to alter behaviour and harassment... 

For instance if someone decided to go to the police to say that the repeated demands for money from the water supplier is upsetting them,  pointing out that they have asked the water company to stop sending bills - this won't convince the police that harassment is the right word. 

The critical difference between a demand from the water company, or the demand from the abusive partner is this - the abuser uses power to force someone else to 'control' his behaviour for him. 

An abuser makes the abused person take responsibility for something that they are powerless to protect themselves from, namely the abusers capacity and threats to destroy the victim's life. 

I was a threat to the therapist' good standing. I can understand how his sense of threat, made him feel. I absolutely believe that he had talked himself into believing that he was completely powerless. 

The outcome is that if I made any request for resolution or an apology i would risk getting a criminal charge'. He would call it contact. A loaded term. I feel as if that extends to making an official complaint too. Without a doubt he'd frame it as persecution. 

He has succeeded in silencing me. 

Except I left the police station saying that I will make my story public. I said that now this account belongs entirely to me. 

And I felt supported by the police. 

So, to sum it up, harassment is a non consential 'power exchange'. Whereas getting a bill from the water company is a part of a consensual power exchange. This is why the statement about asking someone to stop communication is taken as evidence of harassment. 

I assumed that the therapist had a duty under the ethics of his profession to take any complaint made to him about himself as a therapist, very seriously. 

I genuinely believe and still believe that a request for an apology, and evidence from the therapist that he understands how his use of therapy caused harm - is not harassment.

I still believe, and I can't find any reason not to believe! That it is his responsibility to demonstrate candour and humility. 

I am certain that the therapist honestly (?) believed that he couldn't:

1. be honest about his feelings with me; that it was impossible for him to talk about Eros (third person) between therapist and client, or (first person) any presence of Eros in his experience of therapy,
2. Nor could he apologise, because in his view nothing was wrong.
3. Not could he, in his own mind accept responsibility for triggering me into catastrophic playback.

Normally, I don't think that anyone would seek an apology from someone who had triggered them? We would explain what happened, but we wouldn't think it was their responsibility to really get it.

The difference - he is a psychotherapist, and he had heard me explaining why I needed to know if my intuitive sense was accurate! My husband had continually told me that I was imagining things, and making everything worse by asking questions. The effect on me was erosive, toxic, so bad I lost all trust in myself. So bad that I ended my course and thought that I couldn't be a therapist because I must be so out of touch with emotions and body language because I must be reading my husband so wrong! Giving up on myself, abandoning my promises, I was suicidal. Now here I was, in therapy with another man doing exactly the same, telling me that my intuition was wrong. Telling me that I was 'having all sorts of problems', that I was 'transgressive.' Not rocket science to work out why I was falling rapidly down to and beyond the previous point of despair.

Nor does it require a Masters in psychotherapy to understand why I needed honesty and transparency from him. I also believe that it is quite obvious now, and not difficult to understand exactly how his version of therapy was so catastrophically harmful for me. 

Easy to understand how, but not why. 

I assume that it is preferable, for him, to remain convinced that I was asking for something that was out of his power, and not his responsibility to give; that I was upset because he had said no to a relationship. 

I had said that I'd fallen in love with him and needed to know what his feelings were. I had felt as if he'd felt close to me during the first year, I'd also felt that he'd realised that I had feelings and then reacted to other me? 

This is misconduct.

And going to the police was the same process writ large. No wonder I felt like I was walking on thin ice.... 

To 'protect' himself he chose to frame me as a predatory stalker minx hybrid. And in this way he has justified - in his own mind - taking responsibility for the effect of his mixed messages. 

I was asking via email that he would never do again what he did to me. I pointed out that I'd reason to believe that he'd done it before. The recordings and my transcript were and are evidence, he could have used it to ask himself if he had handled things badly - instead he silenced me. 

From the therapy sessions he also knows how I was silenced before, and that I have always refused to remain silenced.

To go back to what happened. In the light of his framing, the police approached the therapist's complaint of harassment as if he was a victim of stalking. The responsibility for the problem was placed entirely on the person accused of harassment, me.

When I left the police station that framing remained, but the police now saw that the therapist shared some responsibility. 

Therefore I avoided a criminal charge.

The finer details of this argument should have gone to his profession body. Which of course he had changed, to avoid a complaint? I don't have any evidence to the contrary.  I certainly see it that way.

Unfortunately any presupposition that there is a just dispute process for clients harmed by therapy isn't supported (yet) by my research. 

Just to be clear, I don't for a second see therapists as being happy to make complaints about clients to the law. Therapists, just like everyone else are subjected to abusive behaviour by people who have no intention of doing anything other than causing shock and distress. 

We handle it, we cope. We let each other know the names and contact details of the people who try to do this, we report. And we take ourselves to supervision to get patched up and restored.

But, a complaint from a client about their therapy is a very different thing. Admittedly if the client was threatening to do physical harm - go the police! But in every case I've heard of from clients harmed by therapy, such clients don't threaten harm to anyone except themselves - they complain to the therapist because something doesn't feel right. They say that they are hurting. Then they suddenly find themselves in attack // defence positions. Clients who don't have an opportunity to get to a resolution give up, or make an official complaint. And then, because the complaint process is so slow, and might not feel fair, both sides can find it so awful they can't function. 

And when you think how devastating it is, to have trusted a therapist with your most personal thoughts and feelings, and then to be responded to as if you are being malicious, out of order in someway.  No surprise is it that clients give up! 

Whilst therapists who tried during therapy to give as much unconditional positive regard as they could, can easily feel that clients are out of order by expecting too much from therapists. So now it is the therapist'responsibility to demonstrate good communication! Of giving good reasons to the client why expectations  on both sides might be problematic, and then seeking to find an alternative way to proceed! 

What sparked this post?

An account from a woman, not a therapy client or therapist, who had emailed several venues to warn them about the behaviour of a man. And this man then went to the police and accused her of harassment. Did the police seek out information about his behaviour before getting her into the police station? Absolutely not. She had to get a solicitor and be interviewed as a potentially dangerous person.

There is no mystery why people like Jimmy Saville 'got away with it, and are still getting away...

For the record, here is the victim statement that got me accused of harassment.

--

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 occurred 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]