How Much Gaslighting Before You Go Up In Smoke?

In the session in her office, Sam told me how intimate she felt our relationship had become. Not the carefully chosen words of someone trying to help a patient get over their Adverse Idealizing Transference (if that’s what it was). But at that point, it was clear to me that there was no romantic future. Nevertheless, the way she spoke about us made me think that when therapy was done there might, after a cooling off period, be some future friend-like relationship. I mentioned this.

Oh, no, she said, the ethics code absolutely forbids that.

I went home and I read the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) ethics code, to which she took an oath. It doesn’t say anything about post-termination friendships. Neither does the American Psychological Association (APA) ethics code, which I read just for good measure. I didn’t have an explanation for why she had lied, though I began to suspect that this whole story was about her having needs and wants that she couldn’t contain but knew she couldn’t act on and taking ownership of her obligations would have made it impossible to indulge those needs and wants. I’m going to conflate a few sessions in describing how this played out.

I didn’t tell her I’d read the ethics code. A couple of sessions later, though, I told her I wanted to end therapy. She asked whether I thought I would be better off ending – and made it clear she didn’t think so – and I replied that I had no way to predict that.  But that when we ended I would invite her to wait a couple of years and then, if she wanted to, give me a call, but I predicted that she would not. She scoffed that my prediction wasn’t accurate, but that she didn’t think we should end—that, in sum and substance, I would never be able to work out my feelings about what had transpired between us without her participation and partnership.

Freud says something like we cannot conquer something in absentia, in effigy. Like, you need to have it in front you need to have the thing in front of you in order to be able to grapple with it and so when you say the feelings come up with me and so you can’t work on it with me, I thought of that, I thought of that sentiment.

Though isn’t “in effigy” what most psychoanalysis is, the therapist herself almost never being—and never supposed to be—the problem itself?

I told her then that I had read the ethics code and it said nothing about post-termination friendships. She frumpfed about a bit and then said, well, it’s not in the ethics code, but like a statute that has case law interpreting it, there are ethics board findings forbid post-termination friendships. I asked her to send me the citations of that kind of case law, that I was interested in reading them. She said she would. She didn’t. Because, I believe, there are none.

And, to be clear, my anger about this wasn’t about the result as much as about her lying and rationalizing. Had she just said, “no, I wouldn’t want to do that,” that would have been that. But she couldn’t say that, she had to pretend outside forces prevented it. Or she couldn’t say that because that’s not how she felt. Who knows? But straightforward answers are always better than obvious bullshit.

This fight went in circles for weeks, not about the ins and outs of the ethics code, but about me trying to say I quit because you have not been honest with me and I cannot trust you anymore and her telling me that I should not quit and then going right back to telling me I was wrong about everything. She talked about how therapy needs to be a safe place for both of us (news to me, it’s supposed to be a safe space for the patient, the therapist’s emotional safety should have no reason to enter into it), whereas I pointed out all the harm that had come to me inside the “safety” of therapy as she practiced it.

One of the harms was to my confidence in my previously very reliable ability to hear, evaluate, and respond to both the text and subtext of what someone was saying to me, an ability that was crushed by her validating my interpretations of what she was saying to me right up until she had to protect herself from my breakdown by denying it. Only then, as in the last post, to tell me I was right about her feelings all along. I never should have had to be aware of her feelings either way; the fact that I was aware was the biggest boundary violation of all. “I didn’t want to pretend like it wasn’t there,” she had said back in our first session back. So imagine my whiplash when she said that perhaps my confidence in my ability to read between the lines of conversations wasn’t what I thought it was, which I heard as, “The thing you’ve always been confident in you should never have been confident in.” Find me that in the Therapists’ Handbook of Validating Phrases.

Then she dropped this on me:

There was one point where I used the word “excruciating,” I just had this feeling like I could find myself in the position of causing you harm.

Remember a lot of posts ago when I mentioned this moment? She’d said that she sometimes finds sticking to the boundaries to be excruciating. That was before any of this happened, from the moment that I had responded negatively to her wanting to start talking about “our relationship.” So she felt as if she might one day hurt me and she blew past her own anxiety about that and blew past every warning signal I had thrown up and just went down this path anyway and destroyed me.

Because she always seemed to run out the clock when I raised the issue, I repeatedly tried to discuss the logistics of termination with her before the session ended.  Sam repeatedly and expressly stated that she did not think we should terminate the “therapy.”  She said terminating would “re-traumatize” me.  I told Ms. Lyman again about the trauma this experience had caused—that I had lost self-confidence, didn’t trust people (her in particular), and was unsure of my previously reliable ability to read what people meant behind their words—to which she replied: “Unless you have a disingenuous therapist who is mind fucking you.” This made me really angry. I replied that if I had a mind-fucking, disingenuous therapist then it was absolutely time to end.  She kept saying that only in the boundaries of the therapy relationship was there safety and when I said that I had been harmed inside those boundaries, she said, “Oh, because I can’t give you what you want, now I’m harming you?” Blaming me again, and also, in some strange way, forgetting every conversation we’d had about it over the past months.

As the session ended, Sam asked twice if I could “hold onto the mutual respect and admiration” we had developed over these years. Was she asking me not to hold a grudge, not to think about how she’d hurt me, not to file a complaint? I made it clear that we were not ending on a good note.  She asked me to not make this our last session, so I told her the next would be the last.