Aftermath: Harm and Recovery

After ending things with Sam, I went into a spiral. I drank myself to sleep every night, I ruminated about her and what happened constantly, I withdrew from my social life and everything I had previously enjoyed. I spent a lot of time in a fetal position, trying to make myself smaller and smaller.

I have always had an active internal monologue, always been in some sort of conversation with myself, always understanding how I feel and actively thinking about what’s going on around me and what people are both saying out loud and meaning underneath that. But rumination turned that monologue into an awful thing—it never stops, there’s a part of your mind that feels like it’s working on some unsolvable puzzle all the time, running in circles, chasing down tangents, rehashing and rehashing, looking for points at which I could have known, should have known, that I needed to get out, furious at myself for knowing that I had known she wasn’t behaving appropriately but staying anyway because I liked it… circles and circles and circles.

I was angry at her and angry at me, but that anger could only stay inside so long and would eventually vent where I didn’t want it to. Even when I could sleep, I didn’t dream. I’d frequently wake up in the middle of a memory from a session or in the middle of an imaginary conversation in which I was telling Sam what had happened to me since I left. I lost confidence in myself, I lost confidence that anyone who says they love me actually does, I lost my sense of humor, I lost a lot of my creativity, I lost my ability to dream, I lost my confidence that I understood fully what people were saying to me. I lost my ability to trust. My life was both a sleeping and waking nightmare.

It was only in March of 2022, about six months after I ended things with Sam, that I was able to be convinced to start therapy again to try to deal with what happened. My trust of therapy and therapists had been shattered. I did not feel I could make myself vulnerable in that necessary way ever again, possibly to anyone. But I knew couldn’t go on like this. My wife and my attorney finally convinced me that I had to see someone.

Despite restarting therapy, as the anniversary of that rupture came up in June of 2022, I was more distraught than ever. Preparing the legal case and board complaints didn’t help any. I could not sleep, I was consumed with ruminating thoughts and memories, feelings of worthlessness, self-blame for everything. I started to think about suicide and realized I needed more help if I was to live so had to recover, though I wasn’t sure at that point what living meant.

But I told my wife about the feelings I was having and I called my therapist, who told me to get myself into an ER right away. I looked up resources in my county and was told on the phone by a helpline person where to go. I wound up spending five days in a mental hospital—which was a horrible experience by itself, and in its desensitizing way it sort of woke me up. I realized that in going to the hospital and asking for help I was expressing that in fact I wanted to live and I recommitted myself (no pun intended) to try to use therapy to get back to myself.

The hospital also put me on anti-depressants and told me to see a psychiatrist upon discharge. I saw one, who kept me running through one anti-depressant after another, each with its own horrible side effects. I have no criticism of anti-depressants in general, but my body did not react well to them. Some made me feel worse, some made me have tremors such that I couldn’t hold a glass of water without shaking, some–perhaps in combination with the anti-anxiety drugs he was also giving me, caused hallucinations. He finally told me he was out of ideas.

That didn’t strike me as something a good psychiatrist would say and so I found myself a better psychiatrist, who has been managing my medications much better—and who insisted that I give up alcohol, which I did diligently for five months and then began to have a couple of beers or a glass of wine on occasion. My psychiatrist didn’t particularly like that, but as I tried to repair my social life I needed the camaraderie that comes with light social drinking. I would go weeks between drinks, and that would have to be good enough. I’m trying to get better at who I am, not focus on being the perfect non-drinker. I slept with the help of medication.

I have been unable to answer for myself the burning questions I have about what happened with Ms. Lyman. If it’s not my fault and entirely hers, I was still vulnerable to her. Why was that and what was it about me that made her choose to do what she did with me as opposed to someone else? Was it even a choice for her or was she playing out her own trauma that she described of her painful childhood, the result of which was her needing “more” in relationships. Was it actually the case that she loved me, or was she playing out some psychological need of her own, or did she actually think she was engaging in some sort of therapy? She had once told me that she hates to be wrong—was this whole thing an effort on her part to tell me I was wrong that time I said we wouldn’t be friends if we’d met elsewhere?

I found that the first therapist I went to when I was willing to go back was not the kind of therapist I needed. Far be it for me to give advice on choosing therapists, but the first one I saw was, like Sam, trained in psychoanalysis. I saw her for about a year. Psychoanalysis appears to me to be about uncovering repeating patterns in your life and tracing them back to a childhood trauma of some kind. This wasn’t a repeating pattern. This had never happened before. And so my psychiatrist and I decided that I needed a more proactive type of therapy, and we settled on my current therapist, who practices Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which I describe, jokingly—but also hopefully—as brainwashing. It is a way of looking at what happened in the past and developing exercises to channel away the negative thoughts—not not have them, but recognize them for what they are and where they came from and in doing that deprive them of their negative energy—and also to accept that what happened is now a part of me and commit to redirect myself towards my “true self,” who I was before I was knocked off kilter by the experience with Sam. I can’t ever be only that prior self again, but I can move back in that direction, I hope.

These are slow, hard processes and progress takes fits and starts. One of the reasons I decided to write this account is to try to take some of the events and feelings out of the spin cycle of my mind and deposit them on digital paper, share them in the hopes that they help someone else who may be in—or suspects they’re in, or fears they’re in—a similar situation, identify myself to researchers who want to learn about the lived experience of someone who has suffered deeply from non-sexual boundary violations, and make it clear that this kind of abuse is not limited to male psychologists preying on female patients, that it can happen to anyone who, as they should, exposes their vulnerability to a therapist but finds that the therapist is either not competent to handle them or sees something in that vulnerability that their own psychology drives them to exploit.