Mad thought!

 I'm letting myself imagine writing the complaint.

I know - I said that I would never do it. I believed that the victim statement should be enough. But, but...just about everyone knows, therapy is giving a person space, safety and time to reassociate painful memories, catastrophic replay even, in such a way as to create safety and reintegration, to put episodic memory on to the autobiographical time-line.

The term, epistemic justice, isn't in the ethical guidelines. But it exists within the guidelines as the ethical behaviour of transparency.  Of having nothing to hide. Without the therapist offering transparency, I did not have information enough to make sense of all that had happened I could not feel safe. I was in catastrophic replay and  retraumatised. Because I'd been through all this before in my marriage. My husband was very good at avoiding the truth, and hiding the whole story. And yes, I can back my accusations of flirting and lack of transparency with quotes and theory and yes David (see previous post) - I can write an elegant and probably correct explanation of what made this therapy harmful.

But...as I go through this blog to look for supporting evidence something keeps shouting at me to be heard. My impression of something off, something I called psychic paedophilia. Sorry, it sounds extreme! It isn't. But perhaps I'd misunderstood the first time I felt it. Perhaps I can understand it now?

The therapist had told me that he had a symptom often linked to CPTSD. I couldn't follow the subject, or say anything because I was sitting in the client's chair. 

The therapist often gave me examples of how children carried traumatic startle responses, feelings of being invisible, unheard, being overlooked, ignored, not important...

I didn't follow, or ask questions because I was sitting in the client's chair.

The therapist often told me how he would speak to the Child in the client. How he said it felt numinous, significant. 

I didn't even let that in,  because I was sitting in the client's chair.

OK, no - I picked it all up.

Every last tiny fragment.

And that time when he said, 'you know about me...' and I feigned ignorance because I was sitting in the client's chair....and it felt as if I'd broken something so fragile and precious.

But I couldn't let him know, it wouldn't have been fair to evoke feelings in him...through my understanding, compassion, passion...

OK what am I saying?

Of course I felt it, of course I wanted to rescue him from his bad childhood, of course I resonated and felt that I would save him as well as saving me...

So, is this part of it?

Part of why I fell for him?

And why my adult feelings for him felt so transgressive to him.

To him - I was the adult here, I don't see feelings as transgressive, action alone makes feelings become transgressive.

Yet he'd been the one crossing feeling into action, saying things under his voice...because he was a therapist who never worked with actual children - he worked instead with the Child in the Adult. 

I didn't bring my 'inner Child' into therapy. She was fine! The adult me, however, was bruised and terrified.

I came to therapy as an adult. My conclusion is - because I had adult feelings, I broke his rules. 

Not therapy rules. 

Feelings are not actions.

And, because in his mind clients are all children, he spoke to me as if he was an angry father. He tried to shame me...

Right, this is exactly why epistemic injustice is a problem. And he has made it my problem. In opposition to his process of denial and shame, my choice is to name and describe. I was in the client's chair...it is my right to say  that this therapy cannot stay confidential, for this client's sake! But bloody hell, things would have been so much easier if we had worked this out together, silly man!