Personally, I follow basically a karmic principle about human interactions. And, yes, my perspective has evolved as I've learned from my own experience.

Like I have said to you before, there are always two sides to the story. There is the therapy that creates the situation, and the client that accepts it. The T that charges and the client that pays. There is the therapist that does not reveal information about themselves, and the client who does not demand to know it. Both sides must maintain a certain balance for any relationship, including a therapy relationship, to exist.

I disagree that therapy is like a parent-child relationship, even if it appears to have those dynamics. There is a serious difference between an emotionally dysfuncitonal adult and an actual child. Any physically healthy adult is capable of emotional maturity, they have the mental resources all in place, they just do not use them correctly, whereas a child actually does not have those resources, and is actually dependent on their caregivers for survival.

It is never true that the T is like a parent to the client when both T and client are adults. If either the T or client believes that that is true, it is that belief that creates the feeling of harm, not the conditions of therapy itself. And by extension, changing that belief can help to change the perception of harm.

Well, let's think about it another way--how, objectively, is the client-T relationship like a parent-child relationship?

The T does not feed, clothe, financially support the client. The T is not responsible for the client's life choices. The T has minimal actual involvement in the client's daily life. The T's services come at a price and that is seen as an equal exchange.

When a T terminates a client, objectively speaking, no material harm is done. No resources are taken from the client. If we say that a T cannot terminate a client, that implies that the T owes more to their client than the actual terms of therapy, basically, indefinite availability and unconditional willingness to provide that client services. The T does not actually owe that to the client, and it is not included in the therapy fee, and there really is no way to guarantee such a thing, because it simply is not realistic. Also, for a T to provide services to a client they wished to not provide services to would make those services ineffective anyway and would further destabilize the relationship.

Not all clients end up being abandoned by their T. Also, Ts who abandon one client do not usually abandon all their clients. Most therapy clients do not leave therapy perceiving that they have been harmed by the process. So we can figure out that therapist abandonment happens not as a direct result of therapy itself, but due to the combination, within therapy, of a specific T and a specific client--a relationship, which, yes, incorporates elements of both T and client's unique personalities, and is more or less successful based on that combination.

It is not realistic to say that a T should be willing to, or even can work with all clients who behave in any manner. It is also not realistic that a T can continue indefinitely to work with a client that they once could work with, if the situation changes significantly enough to be such that the T does not think they can work with that client anymore.

This is not specifically a fault of therapy, it is simply a natural consequence of the fact that therapy is a type of relationship, and relationships involve two humans interacting, and two humans can only continue to interact harmoniously, or at all, if a certain balance is preserved, where both parties mutually perceive that to be the case.

It would be impossible to create a kind of therapy in which a T never abandoned a client. It would also be impossible to create a kind of therapy in which a client never developed expectations which the T could not fulfill. Because these are not therapy issues, they are relationship issues. So that therapy could only exist if the therapist performing it was not human.

The only difference between a therapy relationship and a normal relationship is that a therapy relationship exists with the common goal of providing therapy to the client. If, at any time, either the therapist or client perceives that that is not sufficiently happening, and is no longer possible, then the therapy relationship cannot productively continue to exist.


People do fail and make mistakes, this is also part of reality. Nothing is certain, the only thing we can control is our willingness and ability to learn from the bad experiences to more consistently create better ones.


I have more opinions on this but my post has already gotten really long. But, whether or not this would be ideal, I think it is very hard to evaluate actual objective harm done in these situations because it is not material harm, it is perceived psychological harm, it is inherently subjective, and the motivation to hold the therapist accountable also comes from that same subjective place, whether or not it is valid in any given case.