The Last Waltz

I began our September 15,2021 session by telling Sam that it would be our last. Unusually, these are my words I’m quoting.

I want to lead off by saying that this will be our last session. I can’t go on. I don’t sleep the evenings before you and I speak, it’s become very toxic for me. And I have to end it. You know, we’ve been talking about ending it for months. And you’ve been drawing me back in and saying that, you know there’s more harm by ending than there is by staying and I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I’m going to go find out…

I feel like whether it’s the the mind fucking therapist that you alluded to in our conversation last week, or something else, you’ve been trying to bring me closer and at the same time stop; “closer…stop…closer…stop…closer…stop.” I’ve told you this a number of times in the last few months. I can’t trust you. As I understand it, there’s sort of a requirement, or at least a goal, that our relationship not be harmful. I have been harmed really badly.

And whether it’s just something in the nature of the dynamic between us, or whether, as I actually believe, you made a lot of decisions that turned out to be harmful to me, I can’t continue seeing you.

And more than that, as devastated as I am right now, I probably need therapy now for the first time, really in my life. But it absolutely cannot be from you. And I don’t know that it even can be from someone else. Because I don’t know that I trust anybody, at this point.

I am leaving today in way worse condition than when I walked in your door three years ago. And among the things that that hurts as we’ve been trying to figure things out over the last three months is that I said at the beginning, when we decided to spend the summer doing this, that it was important to me to hear you take accountability. And the extent that I’ve heard you take any accountability has been ‘I made some mistakes. But I’m only human. I’m not perfect.’

I didn’t play the recording of me saying that because it’s too painful for me to listen to. I copied it from the transcript prepared for my lawyer so I didn’t have to listen again as I write.

Ms. Lyman accused me of not being fair. “It’s not my experience that you can’t trust me.” Although she had a couple of sessions earlier said, “I can feel you not trusting me.”

She said that she had taken ownership and thought deeply about how she participated, and then blamed me for my role, stating: “but depicting me… as the one who’s caused all the pain and who’s sort of manipulated and coerced you, I think that leaves you out of the equation. It makes me a bad guy.”

She accused me of making it impossible to have “any kind of ending that feels good for either of us today by starting today saying that this is going to be our last session.” 

I hung up after 26 minutes and cried for hours.