I cancelled my next appointment. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. So I wrote the following email to Sam, lightly edited. If you fully read the last post, you might skip this, because it covers much the same ground, though in a more raw and direct way.
Dear Sam,
I am profoundly wounded. I’ve spent the last week in a state of wracking sadness and despair such as I have not felt in 25 years, if ever. It is affecting everything, from how I deal with work to how I relate with Erin, who sees how discombobulated I am but who doesn’t know why and who will not understand if I explain, which I may soon have no choice but to do.
After my first week of processing through it all I have come to understand a few things, with probably many more to go. I’m going to lay them out here as best I can, but I’m sure I’ll skitter all over the place and wind up more impressionistic than complete and coherent.
One thing I understand is that I am not reacting like this merely out of disappointment that our “relationship” must stay in the therapy room. I wanted to take it farther because my feelings became too expansive to comfortably fit inside that frame, but the more I examine our three years together and the roots of those feelings and the content of our relationship, the more I realize that what I feel is not loss but something closer to trauma.
Ever since you brought up my early remark that if we’d met out in the world I didn’t think we’d be friends – which you told me elicited a “why the hell not” reaction from you – our “relationship” has been at the forefront of our conversations. From the very start of that, I argued that what we had was not a relationship in the way I grok relationships. I see, in retrospect, we have always had that tension: your belief that an hour-per-week conversation centered on my emotional life can constitute a rewarding relationship and mine that a relationship in any satisfying sense is bigger and more mutual than that.
But the concentrated talk about who we are to each other went on and with it my feelings deepened, which I told you last Fall. I recognized the limitations we faced and, at the time, assumed that I was having a transference reaction and made no assumptions that your feelings went beyond warmth and professional compassion. But then you started using language that signaled there was more there. “Excruciating” to describe maintaining the boundaries, “lovers” to describe us, “pillow talk” to describe some of our banter. “If by ‘flirty’ you mean interested in playing with erotic ideas, I guess I was.” You called yourself, and us, “lonely polygamists,” the conditions for which are loneliness and some form of plurality. You said that we didn’t have only transference/counter-transference: “Sometimes what feels like love is love.”
Over the course of several sessions prior to last week, I explained (re: why I didn’t stop and look around Watertown when I drove by) that I consciously tried to keep my deeper feelings for you at bay to protect myself from wanting more than I can have. I brought up that when I was describing my relationship with Jess you seemed jealous that I don’t speak with you in the boundary-defying and sometimes crass ways I do with her. I observed that it was you and not me that kept using boundary-busting language. I told you what I read from the signals you seemed to be sending and you confirmed, again, that I wasn’t misreading you. You called your language “seductive.” I recognized the boundaries even while I didn’t like them and I had been doing what I had to do to maintain our “relationship” inside them. You counseled that I couldn’t possibly keep my deeper feelings in a box and I should let them out.
Two weeks ago, you told me that you loved me.
You said you were “deeply immersed” with me. Maybe that was some kind of psychology term of art, but I mainly speak plain English and in plain English it seemed pretty clear that you were describing an intense depth of feeling.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that when someone tells you they love you they actually do. I don’t think I was wrong to interpret all the signals, and especially “I love you, Matt,” as real. I specifically asked you about the signals. You owned them. I didn’t make this all up. I let all of my feelings out: I told you how much more I thought we could be to each other, that I’d be willing to risk the “relationship” we had on the possibility of a deeper and more fulfillingly reciprocal relationship.
I don’t want feelings in a container – I want to have them, feel them, act on them, suffer or celebrate the consequences of them, understand them by running them hot and staying in conversation with them. I want them to be real, alive and in the world. I want them to be at risk, like all feelings. I don’t want them to be encouraged and grown and then ushered into a brick wall. That’s not love, and I don’t think it’s therapy either.
When we spoke last Thursday, I began by asking you your feelings about the prior week’s confessions. You started off generically, as if you didn’t remember it, or didn’t see it as consequential… “Well, when I looked at my appointments this morning, I was conscious of looking forward to seeing you.” I was stunned – I’d spent the whole week thinking of little else. Eventually, you came around to the question that was foremost in my mind: “What do we do now?” And then immediately, you shut that down, clearly and firmly stating we had to stay within the frame. That in our “relationship” I could lay out all my everything, that I could be raw and honest and open, but that “I won’t.” It was disorienting. Just the prior week you’d said you loved me and now the closeness was distance, the warmth cold. No love, all limits. No reciprocity, no mutuality, none of the things I’d been saying for a long time are important to me. You called me your patient.
The next day, I had a breakdown on my drive, and told you in a text. You wanted to check in to see if you could help. I said I feared it would do the opposite. It did the opposite.
I told you how devastated I felt about yesterday’s conversation, how confused by the firmness after the prior week’s love. And you redefined “I love you, Matt” down to this: “I am moved by you.” I heard the passive voice, something that I did to you, something you’re not responsible for. Being moved by someone is a completely different thing than loving them. I’m moved by a story of sacrifice, an appreciative comment, a picture of a rescue puppy. All I can think is that you realized how deeply you’d hurt me and jumped into a mode of trying to mitigate everything that came before, trying to avoid your share of the responsibility for how stunningly sad I was. Maybe that’s what happened a day earlier when you shut the door; you realized you’d gone too far the previous week and chose to reassert a more professionally distanced persona.
Later, you wanted to role play what could have happened if we had instead met out in the world at random rather than in your office at the other end of a referral. I don’t know what you were trying to achieve with that, but asking me to imagine a different beginning was also asking me to imagine a different future and it was a terrible idea. Did you somehow need to prove that two plus years ago when I made that remark I was wrong? What could have been the upside of role playing a fantasy between us in the same conversation in which I’d told you that I consciously avoided fantasizing a different relationship with you because I needed to protect myself from wanting too much?
We brought up ending. I asked you if we did that whether you would burst into tears like I would, and you answered by telling me that you never cry. You didn’t tell me how you would feel. You said that when things get difficult you fight to stay with it – which seemed more like a suggestion that I stick with this thing than a description of how you’d feel if we ended.
And that brought things full circle – you will seem to tell me how you feel, but you will not tell me how you feel. After a long time thinking otherwise, there it was, stark. I question whether anything I thought I received emotionally from you over the last three years was authentically you, or whether it was just technique. I remembered the LinkedIn incident where you ascribed to yourself the story you’d read in another psychologist’s paper. I can’t know if you were ever being yourself or if it was all recitation.
I lay on the couch sobbing after our call, for literally hours. And more the next day. And more since. And with many of the sobs came insights that passed me back and forth over the stages of grief, which I now know are not sequential, but all tangled up in each other.
I don’t know if you led me to think you were more in it than you were intentionally, but you absolutely did it knowingly. You told me that you were describing how you felt in the moment, as if that justifies dangling a possibility that isn’t. But if you were always going to stay strictly inside that container you should have been more contained, and when I pointed out what those signals made me feel – many months ago and whenever they happened – you should have either stopped or suggested that I find someone else to see. You should not have kept going until I broke.
And so now, after recognizing what feels like your unilateral power to cross the boundaries when it suits you while keeping me to my side of them, you have made yourself another person who will say they love me but who doesn’t want me. I can’t seek your help dealing with those sad realizations. I can’t trust you like I did. You were either inauthentic or you could not manage your authenticity inside your own constraints. Either way, the relationship we wound up with has left me in deep pain.
I have a lot more processing to do, a lot more thinking over the last three years. I would appreciate it if you would send me copies of your records and notes from our sessions as memory joggers and as a way to recall sequences of events. I need to understand more fully what this journey was.
I said last week that if we end I would invite you to note whatever length of time the ethics code requires no contact on the calendar and hope that the day after that you give me a call. As hurt and angry as I am right now – and in full understanding that reading this has probably made you hurt and angry – I still make that invitation, though with little expectation that you might.
Love (yes),
Matt
June 12, 2021 email to Sam
Boundary Violations in Psychotherapy - A Personal Case Study 