therapist just terminated with me

My guess is the writer of the proposal has no standing. They cant tell anyone how to run their business! Seriously? Stop taking advice from your "consultant." They are not a nice person. As lola says, find a new t.

What I don't understand is why the MP gets a copy of whoever-this-is's proposal. Why would they care? Why would they even read it?

Additionally I don't understand how proposing the therapist take time off will get anywhere, especially if this advocate is not even the therapist's supervisor. In which case no proposal would be needed. Or why the therapist taking time off would help OP who says she is in a high-risk situation now.

Toto, I just don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Why would one want a nice advocate? There is no need to be nice towards the errant therapist. Women are all too often urged to be nice, play nice, don't stick up for yourself it might make someone else (a man -a male therapist)feel uncomfortable etc.
It is not the job of a female client to be nice.
And as for honoring anything - what does that even mean?

Different countries work different ways. My clients have written governors and senators before - and they have sent some staffer to look into it at times. It is not unheard of.

I dont trust that the advocate is being nice to the OP, ie working honestly in her best interest.

For me it's not about the OP being a good girl and running along, it's about her making a choice to stop hitting her own hand with a hammer over and over again. This T has said he doesn't want to see her, his employer has said he can't see her, she's turned up at his home, he's still refused. Whoever this advocate is clearly doesn't understand that if this T has stopped working at the place he was seeing this client he ethically can't see her outwith that working arrangement (not that he seems ethically bothered).

As others have said, other than threatening the T with complaint there's no way to force the T to meet her, writing to the MP might mean they take it up with the health service or clinic but they don't have the power to force the T to see her. You can't force someone to do something they don't want to, and in the meantime the OP carries around the hope that this will work and this time she'll get what she wants. You're right, that's all kinds of abusive.

I would be devastated if this happened to me. There may be all sorts of reasons why your T has acted this way, even contractual if he is off sick from NHS, it might be a breach of his employment contract to work with clients. In real life, people can leave us suddenly due to ill health or death. I would use this event to explore with a T my reaction to it. To process my feelings, alongside my reaction to them. I think the T process is really hard, they can be huge figures in our life. I hope you can find someone who will work with you through this.

It's weird how people advise someone who has just been abandoned after six years of therapy to just accept that they have been dumped like a dog and move on to another therapist.

More therapy is not the solution to bad therapy.

Life can throw curve balls at us. People can die. People can be forced to move away. Loss is inevitable. But the loss that happens when people have no choice is not the same as the loss that happens when someone decides they don't want to see you anymore. Equating the two is mentally disingenuous. There is every difference in the world between having someone not be able to see you anymore, and having someone not want to see you anymore. One is a loss, the other is a rejection.

OP has just been rejected and abandoned by someone she paid for six years!

Many people here are still not over ruptures and terminations that happened years ago, and yet for some reason, OP is supposed to just get over it and move on with life? She's not supposed to be able to have the proper termination that therapy so touts? She's not supposed to fight for what she was promised?

It's odd, because if anyone so much as suggests that maybe therapists don't actually care about their clients at all (which is borne out in the fact that abrupt terminations can and do happen all the time, even after many years of 'work') then that is met with horror and even scorn.

I don't understand how people reconcile 'My therapist really cares about me, my therapy isn't just about money for the therapist, my therapy really heals, our relationship is special' with 'Your therapist is allowed to stop seeing you at any time so move on and find a new therapist.'

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. What makes people think their therapist is any different than the therapists other people are attached to? Time and time again, we see people who would have sworn up and down in year two, or three or even fourteen that their therapist cares and loves them, show up here having been abruptly abandoned in year three or four or fifteen. And yet, people insist that they are in a different situation. Their therapy is better. Their therapy is special.

It isn't.

Personally, I don't think therapists care about their clients in any way close to the way 'attached' clients care about them. I don't even think they 'can' care that much. Therapists are trained to be emotionally available in 50 minute segments. They cry with you over the sadness of your childhood, and then they shake your hand, take your money, and cry with someone else over the sadness of theirs, repeat until burn out or boredom with a particular client inevitably sets in and they start 'cutting back hours' or taking extended holidays, or talking about how really they only see clients for X period of time, so let's work towards termination. And those are the best case scenarios! In the worst case, they do what they've done to OP and many OPs like OP.

At least in real life and real relationships if there is an abrupt dumping, you usually didn't PAY for it. If you get dumped several years into therapy, you could have outlaid thousands simply to have a gaping emotional wound left in your psyche.

And then people have the gall to suggest you do it all over again and just hope the next one doesn't screw you over the way the previous one did. And if the next one does, why, just pay yet another one, and then another one! It's therapists all the way down, folks!

At what point do we learn our lesson? Therapy is a paid relationship. Investing emotion as well as money in seeing someone who wouldn't give you the time of day unless you showed up with funds in your pocket is a recipe for total and utter disaster. The relationship often hurts far more than it heals.

Bravo SkyScraperMeow, well said!
I applaud you.
I cannot move on to work with another therapist, quite frankly I do not want to start another trusting vulnerable open loving relationship with a therapist or within the therapy setting ever again, not after this, the fourth abandonment by a therapist in my life.
what he has done is cruel. He is working at his other job three days a week and he is fully aware because he knows me and my history, how much damage this will cause me. I am fragmenting. He knew this would happen. and he still did it. He is going back to work with other clients as far as we know. He should be brought to account. This is utterly ****** and I refuse to become a victim of a bad therapist all over again. What he did was unethical and broke his professional rules and any good psychologist knows this. he took an entire month to get round to writing me a ****** and patronising letter and thinks he is off the hook. He is not. I couldn't have said it all better than you SkyscraperMeow and I am so glad you 'get' it. I really am. I am tired of being told to move on. This is a deep abandonment and betrayal by the professional I went to, to heal abandonment and betrayal issues.

Skyscrapermeow, I agree. The hypocrisy is always amazing to me. You put it so well.

I'm also kind of surprised the full on blaming of the client hasn't started yet although there are hints of it.

Without advocating one course or the other, mainly because it's completely up to the individual involved and no skin off my nose whichever option is chosen, out of curiosity, what would you advise a therapy-dumpee to do? See no mental health professional, even if there is a need/want to do so? Just gut it out on their own, with whatever possibly totally unsatisfactory support network led them to wanting a therapist in the first place?

What are a dumpee's options besides therapy/no therapy? I think "find another therapist" is just papering over the cracks, so to speak, but I think "don't find another therapist" needs to be filled out with "instead, do..."

Its kind of how i feel about deathbed reconciliations. Per my long term t from the 80's, If you havent worked out your relationship with someone already, a few words at the end isnt really going to change anything.

This heavy feeling sounds like depression to me, and indicates that when the OP was notified of the ts unavailability due to the funeral etc, she needed at that point to accept it. Serenity prayer time.

Eta - its two months later, op says hes working now, just not seeing her. Well, thats hindsight. And stalking?

He's working at his other job, the employment he saw the OP under has ended - he won't be paid for any more sessions with her because he isn't in that job any more and that agency aren't paying him to see clients. On a purely practical level where would he see her and should he do the 5-10 sessions for free? No matter how "loving" the relationship might have felt, it is his job and his job there has ended.

I don't at all blame the OP here, her experience has been terrible but at some point she will need to move on or be stuck in this place indefinitely - the original harm was caused by her T - that isn't going to be repaired in 5-10 sessions. The original hurt is on the T, staying in that place and subjecting yourself to further hurt at his hands is a choice.

OP you say you can't move on, I guess I'm wondering how much more of your life are you going to give this person who has hurt you so badly?

more therapy was the answer for me after an extremely damaging therapy experience. it is not the answer for everyone, though. claiming its one way or the other without regard to the individual and their experience is not gonna help, IMO. "more therapy is bad." go back to another therapist" it is totally up to OP what she wants to do next

Is it at all possible that he was sacked from his job and therefore 'cannot' work there? You said his managers were being defensive and not forthcoming with information so just a thought?

Finding another T helped me. It saved me. Sure I still struggle with the loss a year and a half later, but for the most part, I've moved on with my life. Therapy helped me do that.

I see many people on here who are still stuck in their pain. It seems that those who are stuck are the ones who decided therapy as a whole is bad.

I know you have been abandoned multiple times, so I can understand if you don't want to do therapy anymore. I don't blame you. But obsessing about your ex-T isn't going to help you either. I think you still need outside help. Do you have family and/or friends supporting you through this? Could you talk to a peer-to-peer support line? A crisis line? Maybe try online therapy?

Trying to contact your ex-T or force him to see you again is futile. Again I ask, what do you hope to gain by seeing him again? The relationship is over. I know it's painful, but it's the truth. Do you think if you see him again that everything will go back to the way it was? How could you even trust him again? How do you know he's not putting on an act?

Are people so threatened by the idea of a client not caving and following approved script that they feel compelled to shout orders and reprimands? Seems the idea that a client would not obediently "move on" is just intolerable.

An abrupt ending after 6 years of therapy, do people really believe someone would be over that in a few months? And how exactly is finding another therapist going to help with that?

Clients are sometimes the more mature and responsible ones in these relationships and ought to be given the space to do what they feel is necessary. It's part of what we pay for, the right to have a say in our own therapy.

When and how therapy ends should NOT be up to the therapist. If it is, and they impose their will on the client, then the client has been cheated and deceived.

Shout orders and reprimands?? Where are you seeing that? Several posters have said that the therapist was indeed completely unethical. That being dumped after 6 years is absolutely terrible. We get it, you hate therapy and think therapy is a scam. That doesn't mean that the OP may not be helped by another therapist: to process all of this. As junkDNA pointed out, she was helped after trauma by another therapist. So it is possible.

I saw another therapist after therapy went bad, it's not a course for everyone but she helped me process that loss and I am processing the reasons I went to T in the first place.

I don't think OP should move on, complain and argue all you want - if it helps! Just don't expect the person who broke you, to heal you. This T has already proven he can't be trusted.

I don't think people are thinking about the comfort of the therapist but instead trying to advise best they can. People are trying their best to help and I see all kinds of advice being represented here. Op can take what she needs.

Here's my 2 cents worth: whatever is going on for the exT, this human being is clearly unable (or unwilling - what does it matter? Outcome is the same) to be able to give this client what she needs. The T, or others around him, have decided it's in somebody's best interest (T? Client? Who knows?) for T and client to no longer have this T relationship.

What I know for sure is, no matter who owes whom what, once this kind of impasse emerges, trying to make T and the system work like they are 'supposed to' is completely futile. Take it from someone who tried

What OP is going through is absolutely devastating and she does need help and support and maybe, if that's her best course, professional support from a T. Just not the original T and the people around him: either that person has already proven himself not to be up for the job, or confusing and unknowable circumstances make it impossible to discover why he can no longer be her T. It's an awfully hard thing to do, but acceptance of this reality and finding a safe place to heal, away from those IRL who will have their own agenda or create drama around this, is better and simpler by far. Or at least, it's what I wished I had done.

Complaints etc can always be filed through the usual channels down the line, when the time is right.

I'm not going to call anyone out. It's blindingly obvious. Sure, everyone commiserates about what is happening now. That's easy. But when it comes to what should happen next, totally different story. She already said she is tired of submitting to the insanity. Respect that.

OMG a client is trying to think for herself, she must be stopped! It's so incredibly patronizing.

In my case I pressured former T for more contact. I ended up getting some confessions and honesty that never appeared previously. It also was quite painful so mixed bag. But it was not a case of me passively seeking healing or anything from her. It was more about me saying what I needed to say, in her presence (well on the phone anyway), while she shut up and listened. That's what she is paid to do. Risky yes. But potentially quite productive. The idea that the therapist is required to "do" something is misguided. They are just a lump of theories and ideas. If they are worth anything at all, it is as a target for whatever the client needs to express, especially if it involves the therapist making a mess of everything on top of the client's existing woes.

Please folks, we understand that this topic garners very different schools of thought. We can appreciate those different schools of thought providing they are not shoved down our throats or by making accusations towards other members regarding their thoughts/beliefs.

Let's not argue between ourselves here and remember this is a support site and that this thread has been turning unsupportive at times (while not towards the OP, but towards fellow members, which is inappropriate).

Remember, generalizing about anything is grossly unfair. Talk about "YOUR" experience as it pertains to this topic.

Thanks for your efforts!

Hi guys, I am having such trouble with sleep. Ever since this blew up, 8 weeks ago, I have woken before 4am each morning, which means I am losing half my sleep. At first I thought it was just a short term thing but now it is just feeling endless. I wake with my mind churning and my body full of adrenaline. I know all about 'how to cope with insomnia' in the sense of going and getting a milky drink, warm bath, do something else for a while. I just wish it would stop. I am finding it a form of torture. M says that it is exactly what a small child feels when she loses her attachment figure suddenly and brutally. I just wish that part of me didn't choose 4am to feel so bereft.

Not surprising i guess, this kind of physiological and emotional dysregulation following a significant abandonment and rejection. Even more distressing when it comes at the hands of a paid helper.

Could be blood sugar related. Prolonged stress can impair adrenal function, and the adrenal hormones are involved in blood sugar regulation. Wonder if the 4am wakeup is a hypoglycemia signal. There are some things that might help:

- More salt. The body needs more sodium under stress. Can mix sea salt into glass of water and drink first thing in AM.

- Supplement other electrolytes especially magnesium at bedtime, maybe potassium.

- A snack in the evening eg nuts and raw honey, to avoid the crash later.

- Calming supplements like Theanine at bedtime.

- Adaptogenic herbs like Ashwaghanda.

Btw, in traditional chinese medicine, waking between 3am and 5am is associated with grief.

I'd add one thing to BudFox's list, that helps me a great deal with the "waking up at 4am" problem: I take phosphatidylserine, which is just a form of an amino acid. It's sold under the brand name Seriphos but I just take a generic kind, 500mg the evening before. Works wonders for me and is a godsend, but everyone is different. I can only take it 3-5 evenings in a row before I start finding it a little harder to get up in the morning, so I only take it when needed. Hope you start finding some relief soon Maria, at least in some small ways.