Yesterday I listened to an old session. Yesterday I stumbled across a post I made online recommending you to someone who was really hurting because they’d been abandoned by their therapist. I assured her that you would never do that, you weren’t that kind of therapist. I remembered how much faith I had in you. Then tonight I heard a song, and it felt like all my walls fell down. Looking at all the posts online about therapists terminating clients with whom they previously had good relationships- I find myself baffled. Confused. How does this happen? How does a therapist explain it to themselves, how do you make it okay to offer love, to offer touch, to hold a client’s hand, to hold their HEART, to hug them, promising you’re not going anywhere – to suddenly just taking it all away?

From:
“I like you best.”
“You’ve wiggled your way into my heart.”
“You’re the exception to the rule.”
“You’re special.”


To:
“We wouldn’t want to violate anyone’s body parts.”
“This is how it is now.”
“I just don’t want to anymore.”
“Stop bugging me. I just won’t have it.”
“You want to be as important to me as I am to you, but you can’t be. You’re just another client, one of many. You’re not special.”


How does this transition happen? How do you reason it out? The sense of complete and utter abandonment left in its wake is overwhelming. For me, I hide the feelings and smother them with food. I just don’t feel them. I hold them back. Others can’t do that, or can’t do it well, and they immediately begin to drown the the pool of tears their therapist has flung them into with no warning, no way to keep afloat. They cry, they rant, they beg, they struggle to find some explanation, they hope for reconciliation, but in the end none comes. Or if it does, it is not enough to bring back together the gaping gash inside their bodies.

So as therapists, don’t you all have to know going in that the person in front of you already has serious abandonment issues? That you CAN’T be the one to make it worse? You have to know how hard it is for us to let you in. You have to understand that by behaving as you are, you’re making a commitment to stick it out, because you’re essentially cheating, taking shortcuts to get us to attach, to depend. And then one day you shrug and decide you don’t want to do it anymore, like we are a once favorite pair of jeans you no longer favor, so you toss us into the bin. Like it’s really that easy to throw away a person. Do you have any idea of the pain you cause with the give and take? I think if you had any idea, any concept of the level of soul crushing pain you cause, then you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t even consider it.


It is a case of better to have never received that to receive and lose abruptly, repeating old patterns and reinforcing that same trauma of not good enough, of less than, the very reason we came to therapy to begin with.