Defining Abandonment

I've seen a few posts in this group about Ts abandoning their clients and some of the responses to those posts questioned whether such and such situation was a true abandonment or just a chance in circumstances for the T, the client, or both.

How would you define true abandonment of a client by a T? Is there a magic formula that makes it abandonment as opposed to a T changing how they do things due to stuff they have going on in their own lives?

Honestly I think it's just if we as clients feel abandoned.
Example is... when my t used to always reply to emails then began ignoring them. In those times I felt abandoned. I felt like I messed up and scared him away. We discussed it and I decided to just not email anymore. Not only to avoid that again but we had so much misunderstanding in emails

I don't feel abandoned by people in general. Just with him.

Leaving by one's own free will (meaning not out of medical necessity/because of losing a license) without notice or at least 3 termination sessions and without providing referral to a new therapist.

my first therapist abandoned me. She promosed repeatedly she would not ever terminate with me, that it would have a natural ending. She then one night out of nowhere, said “I’m done” and said she wouldnt be seeing me any more. there was no warning. there was no way to see it coming. nothing had been going wrong . she just, i guess, decided she didnt have the skills to help any more.
no preparation, no follow up. just... she was done.
i still have no idea what i did.
it screwed me up for quite a few years and ruined my trust in people.
she is still there at the same practice. i tried calling and emailing once, but she didnt respond. i wish i knew what i did.

the definition of abandon says to cease support. I would see abandonment as a therapist terminating suddenly with no explanations or closure sessions.

as far as emails and texts, I think it's really defined within its context. for me... I had feelings of abandonment and still do. but I realize those feelings come from my child part. logically I see valid reasonings behind my therapist backing off of outside communication. and I see progress within me and my life from it. I do think he fumbled it up though in the beginning, which I addressed with him (numerous times) and he has been apologetic and compassionate (in person) to my pain and hurt I feel about that...

I agree that if a client feels abandoned, then they were abandoned. Could be literal, or could be virtual... e.g. when a therapist withdraws emotionally or otherwise alters their persona.

Therapists should not get a pass when they cause a client to feel abandoned or betrayed, just because the therapist meant well or couldn't avoid some circumstance.

If a therapist asks for your trust, opens pandora's box, then announces something in their life necessitates shutting you down on some level... then they have s**t the bed as i see it.

People get to define whatever they want to however they want to. I presume when people post here (or at least mostly) that they are willing to hear how other people see it, not to dismiss the poster's reality but to see the range of possible perspectives. Much of my own suffering, post CSA, was about how I defined and then reacted to things. Being less rigid and being willing to consider how I could see or think about something different has been good for me. If people don't want to hear something other than what they believe, they can just say so in their original post.

I think the question is not so much how does a person define abandonment or anything else (my personal area is disrespect), but what does it mean once you define it? If you could think about it differently, what might change for you?

People can hunker down and insist that abandonment is exactly this, no matter what anyone else thinks. Up to each individual. But sometimes the willingness to change for the better begins with the consideration of how you precisely look at things.

Tbh that is such a weird, messed up way to terminate therapy that I really doubt it had anything to do with what you did. If it was something you did but you had a good, professional therapist they would discuss their reasons openly with you and even be happy to clarify them afterwards to you. There is no way that a therapist behaving like yours did is being professional and following any ethical guidelines. It'll be most likely that she had got some serious issues herself that need sorting and she's taken it out on you.

By this logic no therapist could ever change jobs, change professions, retire or die, which isn't reasonable.

My personal view is that abandonment means no referral and no notice period. I'd say a month is a reasonable notice period - - it gives you time to process things emotionally, get closure, and set up an appointment with somebody else.

I completely agree with this.

My ex-T abandoned me. She terminated me with no warning and she didn't give me any closure sessions. She did give me referrals in the mail: the first 3 DBT Ts in a psychology today search. Not helpful. At first I questioned if I was actually abandoned. But everyone including current T said it was abandonment.

I don't see how a warning of impending abandonment makes it no longer abandonment. What if the client needs 6 months to climb out of an addicted/regressed/fragmented state, created by therapy, and ending in 1 month will drive them to a nervous breakdown? Oops.

The therapist can do whatever they want. But having a good reason for leaving someone high and dry after mooching their money and trust... it's still leaving them high and dry. And then the client is supposed to start over with a new therapist, and risk repeating the same nightmare.

Because the client is not a dependant child in the therapist's care. The therapist has not made a marriage vow to the client, to love and protect them forever.

They've made a business contract with the client - - to provide therapy sessions for payment. They have not promised to be there for them forever, no matter what.

I have a trusting relationship with my therapist. But I've never assumed that means one of us will never leave.

I find this disingenuous. We've all seen the hundreds of posts here describing overt dependency situations, with clients regressing into child-like emotions, and many more describing poisonous abandonment and betrayal episodes. Are these feelings wrong, and in need of correction by the next therapist/jedi master, who will explain to the hapless client that it's just business?

Some therapists say they can re-parent you. Many suggest you ought to trust them, even if you trust no one else. Many promise to transform your life and all that other bullsh*t. Many are tweaking unconscious impulses and needs with their role playing. This is the general milieu that gives rise to abandonment feelings.

I think that there are two different definitions of abandonment. The first is the way that we feel. We can feel abandoned if a therapist doesn't respond to a message or they go on vacation or move or for whatever reason they are not available for us when we need them. And that feeling is absolutely valid. You feel the way that you feel.

But the other definition is more of an ethical/legal definition. According to the APA:

"Psychologists can ethically discontinue treatment when clients aren’t benefiting from therapy, may be harmed by treatment, no longer need therapy or threaten the therapist, themselves or others.

Your psychologist should explain why the current treatment is no longer appropriate, suggest alternative service providers, address feelings of rejection and resolve any practical issues.

In contrast, abandonment occurs when a psychologist inappropriately ends treatment."

If a therapist feels completely uncomfortable with a client or is completely untrained and unable to help the client, then she should probably terminate with an appropriate referral. She should explain why and she should allow the client the opportunity to express the feelings that he or she will naturally have at being terminated. She doesn't get to avoid that part of it ethically.

I think that @Starry Night absolutely would have a case for client abandonment if she decided to pursue it.

@AnnaBegins From reading some of your other posts, I think your therapist behaved unethically. It seems like more of a boundary issue than client abandonment to me...or maybe I think that abandonment wasn't the worst thing he did. But I can totally understand how you might feel abandoned. That is completely understandable.

I don't understand your point, and I don't see what it has to do with what I've said.

I find it interesting that you berate therapists for encouraging false, non-natural relationships on other threads, but then seem to think it's their responsibility to have lifetime relationships with their clients (past death, it seems).

What you're describing is the way therapy SHOULD be: a business contract made clear from the beginning. Unfortunately a **** ton of therapists are not clear at all, encourage dependency/enmeshment from their clients (who are often very vulnerable and needy). Look no further than this forum to see that this happens a lot. Look at how many threads talk about how it's about love in the therapeutic relationship, how it's still a real relationship, etc. Is it any wonder that many clients feel abandoned when it all turns out to be an illusion? I think that's what Budfox was saying and I don't quite understand why you think his comment is irrelevant.

I've never really become attached to a therapist the way some of you seem to be.

I "berate" therapists both for their manipulative come-ons that lure vulnerable people into dangerous relationships, and for their many failures that leave people feeling abandoned or otherwise traumatized.

It's clearly much more than a business contract. Therapists screw with lives.

The odds are seemingly high that a person whose greatest fear is abandonment will be subjected to various forms of abandonment in therapy. That is insane.

Rather than being insane, it makes perfect sense. How could one work with his fear of abandonment when any such feelings are avoided at all cost? The answer is, he won't. Of course, one option is to avoid forever. Another option is to go to therapy.

When it comes to therapy I think there are two ways of defining abandonment. There is the emotional feelings of abandonment that may be in no way the therapists intention. This happens when the therapists feels that in order to foster growth and independence changes need to be made. For many of us it triggers old feelings of being abandoned, not good enough, not worthy, Etc. However part of a therapist's responsibility is to sometimes change our course so as not to be stuck forever in a pattern.

The other is when the business relationship comes to an end. No matter how much time and preparation we have, it can again trigger those deep rooted abandonment issues. Unless there are extreme circumstances a therapist needs to give notice and time to briefly work through the why's and have closure. When the don't in my opinion there really is abandonment.

Sometimes T's have the best of intentions that don't pan out. T always told me she would give me plenty of notice when She planned to retire. I trusted that completely. Unfortunately, she was not able to.

I went to therapy, for many years, with many different therapists. I "believed" in therapy for many years and in the eventual success of the process. It gave me hope. It was, as was referred to in another thread, a way for me to try to take responsibility for my life -- ironically, by handing it over to the therapists and therapy establishment. Which I now see as badly misguided but well-meaning and due to the lack of a mature, coherent sense of self, which is a condition that I went into therapy with but could not see, because it was the way of life and adaptation that I had.

So, eventually, determined to push forward with the last therapist, I triggered something in her which led to a rupture without repair. She said that she did not have the emotional resources to continue therapy with me. She did do research and talked to a couple of other therapists and gave me a referral, so her behavior was within the bounds of the professional ethics, I suspect.

But personally, interpersonally -- I experienced it as, and I believe it was, a betrayal. An abandonment, because she didn't have the resources. But an abandonment nevertheless.

This eventually triggered the long-dissociated rejection and abandonment terror from my early life. It was a "reenactment". But left me still alone, and without emotional and social resources, again, still.

Yes, I have some insight maybe after all this experience. But I'm 71, my life is almost over, there has got to be a better way.

Yeah, there is a really huge range of attachment when it comes to therapists (and everyone else, obviously) - this is really to be expected. For some people it’s extraordinarily painful to form this kind of relationship. For others the relationship is a non-issue.

I obviously recognise that people can feel abandoned even if they've been given years of notice. And I'm not naive enough to assume all therapists behave ethically.

But at some point, you recognise that you'll sometimes have reactions that are disproportionate (valid, but disproportionate) to somebody's very reasonable actions. (Like feeling abandoned by a therapist who has given you notice and referred you on.)

It's not realistic to expect the world and everybody in it to stay static to spare your feelings. It's not realistic to expect a relationship to be pain free (though a good therapist will try to minimise this). This is what Budfox seems to be advocating therapists do and why I find his argument, well, silly. If a therapist did this, they're not helping their client deal with the real world.

I don't think you can wave to this forum as evidence of anything. A forum like this is going to attract people who have strong views on therapy, have had very good or very bad experiences in it, or who are deeply interested in therapy generally. The average forum member is not your average therapy goer.

And I still don't think Budfox has answered my question. Why does he berate therapists for setting up non-natural relationships with clients, but also expect them to create this impractical lifetime "I'll never ever leave or change" relationship?

What I was trying to say is that therapy in its essence makes people dependent. It doesn't matter whether you're a "good" or "bad" therapist. The only difference is how clients approach therapy. A lot of therapists subscribe to the idea that the "relationship" heals, that there needs to be a bond between therapist and client and in order to do that, they encourage attachment, consciouly or unconsciously. It's all on their websites. So it's no surprise that so many people feel abandoned after having been fed this illusion of a perfectly attuned person who cares *so much* about you and then boom! the therapist moves away/retires or simply grows tired and it's bye bye. And a lot of therapists are not clear about this: either because they lack self-awareness (pretty ironic) or because (more likely) it feeds their ego. Having said that, I know several people who have been to therapy (my girlfriend included) and who never experienced any of this dependency and abandonment feelings. Their experience was a big ol' "meh" (sometimes useful, mostly pointless). But they were not isolated, didn't go to therapy to be reparented or because they had trauma. So I'm certainly not saying that everybody experiences this. But it's always interesting to me how people dismiss this forum as not being representative. How would you know? Also therapy should be safe, if it's incredibly painful like a lot of people report on this forum, what is the point exactly? Except adding more stress and problems to your life?

Don't buy it. It obviously happens, but to claim therapy is synonymous with dependence is a huge, unsubstantiated claim. I've had six therapists over my lifetime, some good, some bad, but none of them encouraged dependence. If anything, they've encouraged my independence.

As I've said, some therapists are unethical. If you tell a client you will always be there, you are unethical.

And who's the client most likely to show up on this forum? The person with a fabulous therapist who found counselling helpful and is now living a better life? The one who found it useless and moved on?

Or the person who had a run in with an unethical therapist?

Think of when you fill out customer survey cards at restaurants. When do you fill them out? During your run of the mill meal? Or is it when you've had a really good or really bad experience?

Same concept applies to this forum.

I don't, but the likelihood is it's not. Only about 12% of therapy goers attend therapy for more than 20 sessions. I don't think that's the makeup of this forum - - I'd put good money on most people here having attended therapy for more than five months.

I don't really know what to say if you think this forum is representative, except to read up on selection and response bias.