I substituted the pseudo-friendship, of therapy for real friendship. Of course in time you understand "this isn't a friendship" I'm an object, a diagnoses, and a paycheck. Paying someone to simulate a sort of emotional intimacy ended for me when my therapist wrote a diagnoses for me that she didn't believe I had. The betrayal of that act when she knew I was sensitive about labels was the end of any possible therapeutic relationship. She said "I don't agree with him and I think it is inaccurate but he is my supervisor". I realized she didn't understand me at all and that a "friend" would not have thrown me under that diagnoses bus when she knew that it could only wound me. Paycheck in the end won out of over a personal ethic.

Friends and people with a lived experience are a source of healing. I like the analogy here of an emotional prostitute thinking it something more than that was my error. Lastly, my sister is truly emotionally abusive person, she should have been arrested for child abuse when her children were younger. She became a therapist that uses her clients insisting that they worship her. She gets away with it because initially she is so comforting and then she begins to tear her clients down as only a skilled therapist can. That splitting process is pretty devastating if it comes from your therapist