You know, I reflected on it a lot later and I realized what was so hard about it for me.

Me, I grew up in a dysfunctional environment where the bottom line was, my voice did not matter. I was forced into a lot of things I didn't want to do and if I said that I didn't want to do them, my reasoning would be invalidated and I would be forced anyway. I was never encouraged or even allowed to exercise my own judgment.

So in that environment you learn, rather than communicating and saying what your needs are, you learn to size up what other people are capable of and figure out what their motive is. If you don't want someone else to force you into something, you have to make yourself unforceable, because you know that "no" will not be respected. It's dog eat dog, it's a battle of wits, people play games and manipulate, so there is no basic level of trust where you believe in the goodness of others, instead you just do everything you can to prevent them from being able to harm you and abuse you.

When a person with that background goes into therapy, they are critically vulnerable. What happened for me was, I ended up developing feelings for my therapist. But like I had learned in my childhood, I can't say what I want, I can't say what I'm experiencing or feeling because if I say it then it can be used against me. Yet ironically the whole point of therapy is to get back to the heart of what you are experiencing.

So thanks to that environment, eventually I wanted to say it. I thought, maybe this situation is different. And I started to feel, against my own fears, like I should say it, I should try to talk about it and I should try to learn to trust another person to act in my best interest. I was even being told that this is what therapy is for, it's okay to be vulnerable here. Everything about that environment and her behavior, was compelling me to become vulnerable, as if it would be okay in the end.

But that is not what happened. As soon as I opened up about what I was feeling, she immediately changed, became anxious, and shut me out of my own therapy until I agreed to end. 2 years of building that relationship, gone in a flash.

That was retraumatizing for me because it left me with this feeling of, "damn! I knew it! I should have never opened up. I should have never said what I wanted." But then, the whole point of going there was to learn to open up. It was just like being back in my childhood environment where I was powerless and my voice simply did not matter. I tried to explain myself to her and she did not listen, she shut down all lines of communication. She had her bottom line, her own personal "ethics," and it didn't matter what I said or what it made me feel. Suddenly it was all falling on deaf ears.

When I looked back on those two years, I realized it had actually always been that way. I had spent that whole entire time reliving my unhealthy childhood patterns, telling her only what she expected to hear and not what I wanted to say. I had never known anything different. So at no point in that experience did it matter what I want. At no point did I have a voice, or any agency. And it had nothing to do with ethics, it had nothing to do with me at all. I ended up in a relationship with an unhealthy therapist and the only thing I could have done about that would have been to realize it sooner and end the relationship sooner. But the target demographic of this service is literally people who have been groomed from a young age for compliance in these types of abusive situations. So that is messed up. Beyond me realizing what was happening, there was nothing in place to protect me from that situation. The thing is, me and my therapist, both of us were unhealthy people. We protected ourselves from each other like unhealthy people do. But the situation was set up so that, if it failed, it still benefitted her. Unlike an unhealthy friendship or an unhealthy romance, this situation was explicitly rigged to fall in her benefit, no matter what.

It could seem like, oh, she realized this situation was abusive to me, and she ended it. That's ethical, right? But that's not true. Because at any point in time, if I had started saying my genuine feelings and experience, I would have been ousted in the same way I ultimately was. So from the very first session, there was a double bind where either you do what the therapist expects of you, you follow their unwritten rules, and they get your money, or otherwise, you don't do what they expect of you, and they drop you and keep the money you spent on reaching that point. The condition for termination is not "you broke this clearly written and agreed upon rule," rather the condition for termination is just "the therapist feels like terminating" and that is accepted as a valid reason. Well, they feel like terminating, of course, at exactly that moment where a client decides to try and exercise their own agency. The ONLY focus of that kind of therapy is on what the therapist wants.

So that situation is set up to be fundamentally exploitative of clients who literally grew up being groomed for that same exploitation. And there's nothing whatsoever that is preventing that from happening. It's the equivalent of a rehab facility that sold drugs, or an orphanage that was trafficking children. In any other field this kind of thing is always explicitly illegal. In pyschotherapy it has flown under the radar because mental health itself has flown under the radar in modern society. I just wish someone was listening to the voices of the people who have been through this and experienced it and came out saying, this hurt me in a way that nothing else has hurt me before, this is seriously wrong, this nearly drove me to suicide, this ruined my faith in humanity. I'll always remember being that person and finding that nobody understands, nobody is listening, nobody cares, except other people who have been through it themselves.

Therapists, their ONLY RESPONSIBILITY is to always put the needs, and most importantly, the experience of the client as a first priority. And quite a lot of the time, that's just not really happening, and worse, there is nothing preventing it from not happening. So much focus is put on sexual transgressions but in any case, the transgression is occurring for a very LONG time before it ever becomes overt, and in many times when it never does become overt (other than an overt abandonment.) It's the covert, subtle, hard to prove transgressions that really need to be paid attention to. Those aren't any one behavior, any one word or phrase or statement by the therapist. They're an ongoing attitude of the therapist ignoring or minimizing or otherwise exploiting the experience of the client. That attitude is insanely harmful and there needs to be accountability for that.