Some of you might have read various times when I posted in response to others about an unhealthy relationship with a T whom I lost my voice to. I became attached and it was an abusive cycle for me, someone who grew up being emotionally abused by her parents and brother. So, 17 months later, and having worked for this long with a great T, I wrote the following. It was hard to write and even send--I don't think that I want to hurt her, but she just has to know that the rosy glasses I wore at the end of our relationship were just that. Our relationship was unhealthy and damaging. I don't know if she'll respond - I genuinely don't want her to - and I have to accept that I've just burned a bridge, but I think that it was a bridge that needed burning.

Dear Ex T,

I’ve thought about writing this letter for about six months, knew that I would, but I first wanted to defend my dissertation and work through some things on my own and in therapy to write less from a place of anger. There is some anger still in me—I’m not sure if it will ever go away, but I feel that I’m in healthily more distant place from this anger.

I really have seen you and our relationship in a much clearer light since early last spring. This slowly evolved from reading the emails you sent to me last February/March, hearing about your exchanges with new T last spring, meeting in June, rereading emails/notes in my book that you had written to me during our relationship, remembering things that you said to me, and finally as my relationship with new T deepened and I grew. I will explain all of this below.

I realized this summer that you are very much like my parents in relationship to me. You did the best that you knew how to as my therapist, but your best deeply hurt me and was very unhealthy for my well-being. You simply were unable to be the mental health professional that I needed. I put my trust in you, believed that you knew what you were doing and I genuinely realized only after our relationship ended that my trust was misguided. I struggled all along with this, as you know, but I lost my voice and gave up my power to you. I take responsibility for this, and as a professional I believe that you could/should have noticed this and helped to steer me in a more healthy direction. I can now pinpoint the moment when I fully gave up this power. I can’t remember why I did this, but in August I went back and reread the email that I sent to [previous T before T I'm writing to with whom I still kept in touch] that day in August 2.5 years ago after we had met on a Thursday afternoon and we talked about physical abuse and it brought up so much for me. I tried to reach out to you many times as I was panicked and feeling suicidal. You know that I wrote an email to [previous T] then in desperation and explained what was going on. I very clearly wrote to her that I didn’t think that you were the right therapist for me if I contacted you feeling suicidal and you ignored me. While reading this email was upsetting because I remembered vividly the utter pain and fear that I felt, reading my next email to her made me very sad and made something click. I wrote back to her after you and I met that Monday. I told her that everything was fine and fixed and told her how you spent the entire appointment with your arms around me and were very loving--this had solved it all. All of the clarity and self-preservation that I had in my previous email had disappeared and sadly did not come back again throughout relationship. Our entire pattern of interactions during and between appointments was dangerous for me.

As new T and I moved into our work I realized how little of the things that I came to therapy to talk out (including things going on at the present time) you and I worked through. We never talked about my suicidal feelings (past and present), made a viable plan of what to do when I felt this deeply, or discussed the shoplifting incident. You clearly did not trust me, which is very sad as our relationship was supposed to be about this and based on this. I’m not sure if I’m wasting my time by saying this again, but the shoplifting wasn’t about trying to “manipulate” you and see you more. Since September 1 (over the span of 7+ months), I had made $2,500 and had been rejected from 40 jobs/postdocs and was nowhere near finished my dissertation. I was subsiding on money from my parents, which was terribly humbling at 34 years old. I thought that I could get away with it – I needed groceries, it wasn’t something frivolous – and I had gotten away with shoplifting maybe a dozen times in my past, mostly groceries. How I am 100% certain that it had nothing to do with getting you (or someone else) to see me more, pay attention to me is that I shoplifted again this past August. This time at a grocery store here the week after having woken up in severe back pain because I was sleeping on a mattress that desperately needed replacing and I couldn’t afford to do. I’d just had it with the money thing and the exact same feelings came up for me as had that day in April 2010. I didn’t steal much, but I did shoplift from the local grocery store. It was really hard, but I told new T about during our next session. We then made a plan – what can I do when I feel that pressure and it’s worked. Also, since she will call me back when I call her and we regularly see each other twice/week, there was no trying to manipulate her or get her attention--I have her attention. Shoplifting was purely my utter frustration with my financial situation – scared that it would be yet another failed year on the job market (which was just beginning). Another example about your failing to trust me, something that made me very sad, was when you went on vacation and initially offered to see if someone in your consultation group could meet with me. Then as the time got closer you said that you thought everyone’s schedule might be busy and asked if you could ask them anyway. The next time I asked again whether you’d checked on this and your response was “I know how you are, if you meet with one of them, you’ll make me out to be the bad guy.” This hurt so much and demonstrated as well your insecurity. So what if I did this (which was not my intention)? You have a professional relationship with them, as well as me, and I had recently been suicidal, was a few weeks out from my arrest, and had just lost my best friend--there's nothing wrong with your being on vacation, but I simply needed regular support at that time.

You said many times that your goal with me was to be consistent, but I’ve realized that you were rather inconsistent. You set rules, rarely discussing them with me first, and then sometimes would break them, but it was OK for you to break them. For example, after setting the rule that you would never call or email me you did occasionally do these things. Sometimes it was to ask me to stop contacting you, but I can remember this one time that I’d called you a couple of times the day before, you did not call me back but you had the crisis line do so (and I did not answer) and then you called me yourself the next morning since I had not called you and presumptively you were worried. You spoke just briefly and raised your voice at me. Meanwhile, I was feeling terrible emotionally and you didn’t ask if I was OK or anything. You just wanted to know that I was alive, so after a minute you said that you’d see me in 5 days and hung up. Even after our relationship ended you very strictly said that I wasn’t to email you until the holidays and then every 6 months. I was planning on following these rules and then one day 6 or so weeks later you sent me an email out of the blue and said that I could write you back just once. While part of me was very excited to receive this email, it actually was quite disruptive as I was trying to work through my emotions of our relationship having ended and it was confusing since you were very strict about no exceptions, but then decided it was OK if you made an exception. The rules you set also changed and were confusing. Throughout our relationship emailing changed very often, from I was allowed to email you and you wouldn’t respond, to you decided to respond, to not only would you not respond but I could no longer email you and had to drive downtown with printed out messages to slip them under your door. When I went to Europe for 3 months I was thankful that you allowed me to send you actual emails and when I got back though we didn’t really discuss it, I was still allowed to do so (and very occasionally you responded even though you said that you never would). I was utterly confused about the appointment situation and was left hanging on for months about this. You never discussed it with me. At first it was I don’t have room in my schedule and that should change in a few weeks, then in a few months, then maybe in May, then all of a sudden it was “in your best interests.” This was very hard for me and I knew that I wasn’t getting the support and therapy that I needed. I’m saddened that I didn’t take more steps to look for a new therapist. Then 6 months after our relationship ended you shared that part of the reason was that you didn’t think that you could handle two times a week. When I read these words it was as if someone slapped me across the face as I felt like I was so difficult/miserable to be around that you—who knew my deepest darkest places—wanted to spend even less time with me. By the end of our relationship I had believed and trusted you that meeting once/week was in MY best interests. Sharing this with me in an email like this, I believe, was a very poor decision.

But reading these words (as well as learning from new T what you said about the shoplifting) also allowed me to more clearly see you and our relationship and recognize what a mistake I made staying in it for so long. I struggled for a long time with allowing myself to trust new T as I was petrified that what she said was OK or how she interacted with me one day would change without warning the next day. New T allows me to call her and she will call me back for a few minutes. One time I texted her to ask if she could call and I didn’t hear back for a few hours, which was odd for her. I looked down at my phone and realized that I didn’t push send, so I quickly called her and asked her to call and also shared about the text. She was just starting three appointments back to back, so I didn’t hear back from her for about 2 hours. During that time, I had what was like a PTSD attack as I started worrying that she all of a sudden would change her mind about calling me back (I only called her about once every 6 weeks). I thought that I was messing up and feared/believed that she would respond like you had by changing the rules and cutting me off. By the time I heard from her I was so worked up (and actually took several hours to completely calm down afterward with my heart racing and feelings of fear). We talked for maybe 10 minutes, she reassured me that she wasn’t intending to change how we interacted and if she did think about this that we’d first discuss it together, and we talked briefly about strategies. The next time I was feeling badly I was much better able to take care of myself remembering our conversation (and after that I didn’t call her again for a couple of months). After some time I learned that new T deserves my trust because she knows how to interact with me and is always acting in MY best interests, while keeping boundaries that work for her. We don’t agree on everything and when there is something that she doesn’t feel OK about, we talk about it and come to a decision about it that works for both of us. Sometimes this can take a bit, but we work through it together. I feel like I can be completely honest about my desires and deepest pains without having these feelings being used against me or being told that I was trying to manipulate her. We investigate the parts of me that are protectors, children, etc. and why they exist—and always embrace them, never yell at them or provoke them.

So, why am I writing this letter? I contemplated long and hard about writing you. There are several reasons and I want to emphasize that none of them is to hurt you. I’m sorry if you do not believe this, but this is genuinely true. The two primary reasons are that I needed to share my recovered voice with you from an evolved, more peaceful, healthy place and I hope that you’ll not only read this email in relationship to me but also to other present and future clients. I do not want anyone to have the same experience that I had with you, whether this includes your recognizing that there are certain people that you are unequipped to help and not believing that “I know that I am a good therapist” is a uniform statement that allows you to effectively treat everyone. I thought a lot about things that I wanted to say to you since this past summer and they are things that I need to share with you after realizing how unhealthy our relationship was. At the end of our relationship I was so caught up with losing your physical presence in my life (particularly your many hugs) and I was so attached to you that I did not see things as they really were. I was unable to see how much what you’d done had hurt me and how very damaging our relationship was for me—sometimes you can only really know this after a relationship ends. My calling and texting continuously in moments of panic was my choice and I take responsibility for this. And I also needed your constructive help as my therapist to help me to get to a less panicked place for the long term—take a walk, listen to music, masturbate, exercise, eat a healthy dinner are coping mechanisms, not exploring in a safe, nonjudgmental space with a professional why I felt and acted as I did. The approach you took of not responding to me clearly did not work—even by the end. During my last week living in X town I called and called you one day reaching out for your support. This time was no different from the other times I’d done this and you’d had the same response over the course of our relationship. I learned nothing from your choice to not call me back—I became worse. I realized that I became more panicked when you didn’t get back to me over the course of our relationship and this seeped into other relationships. I felt like I wasn’t worth it, didn’t deserve the help, love, and respect that I deserved as a human being. My already low opinion of myself dipped further and the extremely suicidal feelings, which had been at bay since late December 2007, started appearing much more often. I didn’t have a safe place to process them and we got into a cycle of my feeling badly during the week, reaching out to you and feeling rejected, and arriving to our appointments so upset that we spent about the first 20-30 mins sorting out these angry feelings toward you and then were left with 20-30 minutes for therapy. This became exacerbated when we moved to once a week and you pulled back things that were regular parts of our relationship and I was going through a tough time with the job rejections. I also feared that you would all of a sudden stop seeing me. You did this for several other things (holding my hand, emailing me, calling me back, writing in my book, changing the frequency of appts, etc.) that this fear was not a stretch at all. You once said to me that you learned shortly after starting to practice that you could not harm a client unless you slept with him/her (I’m paraphrasing, but this was the gist as I asked you to repeat it to me to be certain that I understood). This statement is simply incorrect and I’m sad that you believe it. Like my parents you emotionally hurt me. But the difference is that you are not my parents, but a mental health professional. My trust in you was misguided. I’m not going to think about why you were unable to fulfill your role to me—notably recognizing what wasn’t working and trying to change it—but I know that this greatly hurt me. When I questioned you, you sometimes responded that you’d checked with your consultation group/a colleague and they said that you were doing the right thing. But the “right thing” wasn’t working, didn’t work for almost two years, and made me worse.

Ex T, I wish you well. It’s sad to me that you are really no different from my parents in that you did what you thought was best and this was unhealthy and damaging. I’m thankful to be in a much better place inside my head and on a much better path that includes a healthy therapy relationship with someone who trusts and believes what I say and who will work with me--not against me. I am less dependent on new T than I was on you even though she will write, text, and call me back. This is the irony—providing that solid grounding has made me more independent, healed from the old wounds, and moving forward. I knew this all along but lost my voice to you. If anything, this is a great lesson to have learned and I am stronger for it.

Eastcoaster

[Chopin99]

Wow eastcoaster. I am sorry you had to go through this. I am glad you have a GOOD new T to help you. Thank you for sharing your story and letter. I understand why you sent it; it does help provide some closure for you.

[nannypat]

Wow. Good for you. Your letter is one that many professionals should read to see that they can hurt clients in many different ways depending on the vulnerabilities of the client. I have been hurt too, but you are so articulate in your letter and write so well. If I tried it I am sure i would screw it up some way.

I am so glad you have found someone who you feel taken care of ( not like child but as a patient). I have also found someone too. I miss the hugs of my last one who I was with for 20 yrs,( my new one has a no touch rule) but he is so able to hug me with his words. I don't need the physical contact to know he accepts me.

Congratulations. I hope this has brought you some closure and you will now be able to heal from both your difficult childhood and your ex-t.

[faith1983]

your letter is wonderful and so well written. I'm glad you expressed what you feel to ex-t but I'm also so sorry you had to go through all this...

Thanks to everyone for their hugs and support. I was a bit surprised because I received a response back at 8am this morning from her. In a way, I could imagine that she felt defensive and wanted to, well, defend herself. But in another way I see some of the same patterns, particularly of her questioning my perceptions and thoughts and feelings (and some of what she wrote is incorrect). I'm just not quite sure what to feel or think. I truly didn't want her to write back - I'm over her and didn't need a response to move on (in fact, this keeps open a dialogue), but I didn't write please don't write back, so I completely understand that she did write. Here's her response, on another thread: http://forums.psychcentral.com/showthread.php?t=215846

Thanks again for your support and hugs. This is really meaningful to me!

[zooropa]

so much of what you wrote here is familiar to me, eastocoaster. I'm so sorry you had that experience, I know how much it hurts. And I am so impressed and encouraged by the progress you have made since.

I'm so glad you found a therapist you can work through all this with.