Dear T : I Need To Tell You Something, but Don't Know How(Part XXVIII)

Dear 3,

I finally felt up to dealing with the letter you sent Info. Or rather I got this crazy idea that since I’m finally divorced, I should try to lay to rest all the other problematic relationships in my life. I wasn’t ready. Too late now.

Your letter hurts like hell. Mainly because of paragraph 1. A bit because of paragraph 3.

I accept your explanations. If nothing else, I’m forced to do so because I checked the duplicate letters you sent and in fact the first copy I got, the envelope does not have a stamp, just as you suspected you had forgotten. Somehow the postal service got it to me anyway. (Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.)

But paragraph 3...forgetting I didn’t want to hear from you when you sent the record, even though I told you very clearly it would put me at risk, even though I said that in an email with the subject line “Please, you have to leave me alone,” even though you sent the record only two days after that email was received...that is a hell of a thing to forget. It may be human, as you say, but that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. You can’t just walk away when you’ve made that huge of a mistake. Good therapists don’t. Decent human beings don’t.

And yet that is exactly what you did. In paragraph 1, you say you didn’t write me an apology or an explanation until Info got involved because you feared it would prevent me getting closure for our relationship. But—as I also told you quite explicitly at the time, two months ago—your communicating with me had already robbed me of that closure. I did not initiate any contact with you after we met in June. Instead I tended to my own grieving process, only to suddenly be hit by a bunch of communications from you, so unwelcome that I had to ask you to leave me alone. These are demonstrable facts. As I told you, those communications, and in particular your failure to remember that I had asked you not to communicate with me, had already robbed me of that sense of a good ending, of closure. It is then the height of illogic for you to claim that you were worried that your sending an apology and an explanation—which I also told you were what I needed to regain that sense of closure—would keep me from getting closure. Because you had already removed that closure by your actions.

I had told you how bad my condition was when I asked you not to communicate. I had told you, after you screwed that up, that I would be greatly helped by an apology and an explanation from you, and that your failure to heed my request had worsened my self-destructive cycle, and, yes, I was self-harming and feeling suicidal. While any self-destructive actions are my responsibility, your thoughtlessness contributed to my motivations for them. Me hurting myself and bleeding, and who knows where that ends up, is a hell of a lot worse than me not having a sense of closure that you’ve already taken away from me.

And for two months you let me stew like that, even though you knew I was struggling, that I was at risk. And then when a third party got involved, you were suddenly interested in making amends.

Overall, your paragraph 1 reeks of infantilizing the client as too dumb to know what would help them (while the omniscient therapist does), of only being interested in making things right when a third party gets involved (very bad optics, that), and also of being completely unable to recognize your own role and obligations in the matter (hint: first do no harm). Nice hat trick.

So, no, that letter resolves nothing. I am sure you think it should. It’s too bad—you are by my standards a competent therapist (which is high praise from me) and yet you could be so much better, were you to learn to listen to clients on what they need and to place yourself in their shoes instead of retreating behind your defenses when you make a big mistake. This wasn’t your only big mistake with me; your pattern is to make huge mistakes and then evade taking responsibility for them by hiding behind professional nonsense about things like closure. It is the pattern of a scared little girl, not an adult woman who has chosen a profession in service to others.

I write this coolly, not in the heat of anger: I wish that we had never met.

I spent all of last night dreaming of suicide. I begged God to kill me in my sleep.