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I didn’t start recording to build a case. I didn’t know I’d need a case. I started recording because I was losing my grip on what was real.
By the time Sam told me she loved me, I’d spent months in a state that I can only describe as cognitive vertigo. She’d say something that felt loaded, I’d ask her about it, and she’d offer an explanation in psych-speak that may or may not have made textbook sense, but I didn’t speak that language and I couldn’t do much but accept that she knew what she was talking about and I couldn’t argue in a foreign language. But it didn’t match the way the words had landed. And then I’d leave the session and spend the next few days wondering: Did she actually say that? Did I hear it correctly? Am I reading in? Am I the one with the problem here?
That’s the thing about being in a relationship with someone who has all the interpretive authority. When your therapist tells you that what you heard isn’t what she meant, you don’t have a third party to interpret for you. There’s no replay booth, with an umpire crew back in New York calling balls and strikes. It’s her word and her clinical language against your memory and your gut, and she has a degree on the wall that says she’s the expert on what things mean.
I needed a replay booth.
So, after I agreed to start seeing her again after my breakdown, I started recording. I wanted to be able to go back to it from a place of detachment, to be able to rehear and replay the session and think about what was actually said versus what I thought I’d heard. I wasn’t thinking about lawyers or ethics boards or a blog. I was thinking about my own ability to know what’s going on.
Ironically, I didn’t have the wherewithal to actually listen back at the time. The sessions themselves were so emotionally overwhelming that going back through them felt like touching a hot stove twice. So the recordings sat there on my phone, accumulating.
It was only after I finally left that I went back and listened. And then only because I’d called a lawyer.
When I finally retained an attorney, she listened to my story and said cases like these almost always come down to he-said-she-said, and the therapist’s notes are the tiebreaker. But, I said, I had tapes. I could almost hear her lean forward on the phone. Without the recordings, I would almost certainly not have been able to get her to represent me. Sam’s notes and my word would not add up to much.
She asked for excerpts. The recordings were hard to listen to. Re-experiencing those sessions from outside of them, hearing Sam’s voice saying the things I remembered her saying, confirming that I had not invented any of it, was both vindicating and devastating. I had been right. My perceptions had been accurate. She had said those things, in those words, with that tone. The machines hadn’t lied.
But being right didn’t feel good. It meant that what had happened to me was exactly as bad as I’d feared.
The recordings are the reason this story is documentable rather than dismissible.
If you’re reading this and you’re in a therapeutic relationship that feels off—where you leave sessions confused about what was said, where you find yourself wondering if you’re the problem—I’m not telling you to record your therapist. I’m telling you that the impulse to want a record is itself a signal. If you feel like you need a replay booth to trust what happened in the room, something is wrong in that room. That feeling is data. Trust it.
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Boundary Violations in Psychotherapy - A Personal Case Study 