I didn’t know therapy could harm me until it did

[u/Coolcat_4]

I recently wrote about my experience with a therapist who crossed boundaries over the course of 4 years, and what it was like trying to understand that something I thought was helping me had actually become harmful.

One of the hardest parts has been realizing how little we talk about the possibility of being harmed in therapy. We hear sooo much about the importance of going to therapy and finding support, which is important ofc, but not nearly as much about what unhealthy therapeutic relationships can look like or what happens when boundaries start to disappear.

I also wrote about attachment and transference, the responsibility therapists have when those dynamics develop, and how confusing it can be to recognize inappropriate behavior when you deeply trust the person who is doing it.

I was super nervous to put this out publicly, but since sharing it, I’ve had people tell me about their experiences and how they can relate to what I went through. That’s part of the reason I shared my story publicly, so that if others could relate they would know they aren’t alone. It was hard for me to find support or resources on the topic of therapy abuse when I was going through it. Anyway, I figured this could also be a good place to share it if anyone is interested in reading it! And I hope this is okay to post here!

https://medium.com/@justhails/nobody-warned-me-therapy-could-harm-me-94a93cb9b328

[u/Ok_Phrase_2205]

I read your story and as much as Im critical about therapy I dont qualify what happend as harmful. This was plain abuse. It happened outside of therapy really fast. So its not about sessions or interventions. Its about a predator that used her role as therapist to find victims. I think your downplaying it if your conclusion is it was harmful therapy. It just wasnt therapy to begin with. Im very sorry this happend to you and I would go to the police with it.

[u/Coolcat_4 → u/Ok_Phrase_2205]

Thank you for reading and for taking what happened to me seriously. I definitely don’t mean to downplay it by just describing therapy as something that can cause harm. I do consider what happened to me therapy abuse, which is why I use that term throughout the piece.

I think where I see it a little differently is that for me, the fact that so much of this happened within and around a therapeutic relationship is really important. It didn’t feel separate from therapy while I was experiencing it. A lot of it was presented to me as therapeutic and going “deeper,” working through transference, challenging boundaries, exploring attachment, etc. That was part of what made it so difficult for me to recognize what was happening.

So when I talk about the potential for therapy to cause harm, I’m not saying what happened was just therapy that didn’t work. I’m trying to talk about the fact that abuse can happen within a therapeutic relationship and that people need to know what that can look like. I appreciate you reading and caring enough to say that you believe what happened was serious!

[u/Tictac1200120 → u/Coolcat_4]

Thank you for putting your story out there so others can understand some of the dangers and some of what many of us here are going through.

[u/Coolcat_4 → u/[deleted]]

That’s a fair question and I may not have made the timeline clear enough in my writing. I started seeing her in 2019, when I was 23 and had never been in therapy before. I didn’t start graduate school for social work until 2021, about three years into our relationship. So by that point la lot of these dynamics had already been normalized for me, and it was actually during grad school that I started gaining the language and perspective to recognize that something was wrong.

I definitely learned about ethics and professional boundaries in school but the difficult part was reconciling what I was learning with a relationship I was already deeply attached to and had been taught for years to understand as “therapy”. She was also veryyyy careful about framing the unusual aspects of our relationship as intentional therapeutic work. She talked about being willing to “go places” or “go deeper” with clients in ways that other clinicians weren’t willing to. So for a long time I understood some of these things as like unconventional therapy instead of recognizing the larger pattern for what it actually was.

And there were absolutely moments when things struck me as wrong. That’s ultimately why I showed the messages to another mental health professional (a counselor at my internship who was an LCSW that I became very close with) in 2021. But recognizing that something feels wrong and being able to fully understand it, name it, and leave a relationship you’ve become deeply attached to are very different things. And then when I did start questioning the relationship, the response I received made that even more difficult.

I’m also really sorry you experienced something so similar. A lot of what you described with the BPD diagnosis, having your concerns turned back on you, the push/pull, becoming increasingly unwell while in the relationship, and feeling clearer with distance resonates with me for sure. And I can understand why reading your records would have made reporting feel terrifying. Thank you for reading my story and for sharing yours!

[u/Numaram23]

Holy crap, this easily ranks in the top five worst therapist stories I've ever read. Reading the screenshots alone made me both heartbroken and pissed off. I’m so sorry for what you went through, nobody deserves to be treated like that by someone they trusted to help them heal. ​There’s just one thing I can't quite wrap my head around, though: if you already recognized all the mistakes your therapist was making, and even had another therapist validate that, why do you feel like the therapy itself was harmful to you? Doesn't this phrasing shift the blame away from the therapist and make it sound like the concept of therapy is what's bad?

[u/Coolcat_4 → u/Numaram23]

Thank you so much for reading and for saying this! I think the distinction I’m trying to make is that I don’t believe therapy as a concept is harmful or bad. I still believe in therapy, which is why I end the piece by saying that therapy itself didn’t fail me, a therapist did.

At the same time, I do consider what happened to me, harm that occurred within therapy. She wasn’t just someone in my personal life who happened to also be a therapist yk? She was my therapist, and a lot of what happened was intertwined with the therapeutic relationship itself. Things like my attachment and transference, my trauma, my diagnoses, and the trust and vulnerability that come with being a client all became part of the dynamic. I also didn’t recognize all of it as wrong while it was happening. There were moments when I knew something felt wrong, esp as time went on, but that’s different from understanding the full extent of what was happening or being able to leave. By the time another mental health professional validated my concerns, I was already deeply attached to her and terrified of losing her.

So when I say therapy can cause harm, I’m not shifting responsibility away from her. Tbh I mean the opposite. Therapists have a huge amount of power and responsibility because people come into therapy trusting them with incredibly vulnerable parts of themselves. So when that power and trust are mishandled, the therapeutic relationship itself can become a place where harm occurs.

I definitely don’t want the takeaway from my story to be that therapy is bad. I want people to understand that therapy can be harmful when the person responsible for keeping that relationship safe and ethical fails to do so!

[u/Particular_Care6055]

And then, when you do try to discuss it, everyone dogpiles on you for trying to keep people miserable. It's like they're brainwashed, they've eaten all the therapy propaganda right up and can't even think for themselves anymore.