PS: The Apology I Wish I’d Gotten

All I wanted was an apology for what Sam had done, for her to take accountability. Had I gotten that when I asked for it, it’s possible none of this would have happened. Likely, no, but possible. At least until I saw her “bullshit” notes, which I’d have probably asked for whether she’d apologized or not.

I recently read Eve Ensler’s book The Apology, in which she writes in the voice of her dead father the apology that she wishes she’d received from him for his abuse of her. As a therapy task for myself, I thought I’d write the apology I wish I’d received from her. Please note that this is a lot of theorizing from her perspective and I know it’s not really appropriate to analyze someone from a layman’s armchair. But most of the facts that I base this on are things she told me and a great many of those are covered by recordings of sessions, whether I excerpted them earlier in this blog or they remain only on my hard drive.

Oh, and I was wrong earlier: this is by far the longest post. Tl;dr: “I’m sorry, I fucked up.”

Dear Matt,

I realize that during our last few months together, you were asking me to take accountability for what happened between us. And while I tried to dig deeply to explain my participation, we did not dig deeply into what this meant to you, where your vulnerabilities had been and how they’d come into play. In fact, you came up as a part of this only a few times. The first, when I asked you if I felt like a mother figure to you, at which you scoffed that you’d never had romantic feelings towards your mother, the second when I told you that I felt you needed me to talk to you about my feelings about you, and the third during our last bitter conversation.

By that last one, it was clearly too late for anything positive and we were actively fighting. When I fight with someone I can tend to go on the attack. As we discussed several times during our three years, I don’t like to be wrong or even to be thought capable of being wrong.

It was my responsibility to use those three months to talk about you more than to explain myself and my participation. I was your therapist, that should have been my only role. But I did participate, and I did have responsibility, and so that became a lot of our subject matter. And as I talked about my feelings I made you my therapist, which I know is an impermissible role reversal, but given the situation how could I not? I guess this isn’t starting out as much of an apology.

If I change the nuance of the word accountability, I realize that what you really wanted was an apology. Eve Ensler’s words about what that encompasses (and I know that she was writing about her father who sexually abused her, but I agree that this definition more or less closely fits what you wanted): I know you have said that an apology must be thorough and can only be trusted in its veracity and dedication to details: … Face how deeply my actions and violations have impacted and devastated you. See you as a human being. Attempt to experience or feel what it felt like inside you. Feel profound remorse and regret over my actions. And finally, take responsibility for my actions by doing extensive work to understand what made me do what I did.

I have only ever told you what it felt like inside me, and not very well.

I am sure I will fumble about, but I will try to do better here.

You must understand that while there were professional threats hanging over me, there was no way I could have done this without opening myself up to liability. But why couldn’t I have done it before it came to that?

I imagine that you wonder about whether one thing I said to you was a lie: that I loved you. I said to you once, “we both know what love means,” and we can parse those meanings, but it wasn’t a lie. I did tell you that the only thing you were ever wrong about was that I would act on my feelings.

But the apology cannot start or end there, it has to start much earlier, with who I am and how I got to be this person. I’ve told you some of my history, and I’ll risk repeating it here, but I will try to fill in the void between facts and feelings.

As you know, my mother became pregnant at 16. My Dad, though, was 19 or 20. Just a few months earlier and it would have been statutory rape by my dad. And as I grew up my mother was very clear about the fact that she had lost her youth and young womanhood to me. She had an easier time, I think, taking it out on me than on my father, though she was sort of stuck with us both.

But there was a power dynamic that she had to deal with, that I had to deal with. Being young and without experience or resources and with an infant, she was dependent upon my father and as her child I was dependent on her. There was a hierarchy of need there, and the only power she really had was over me and my brother. I told you that when my brother was born I was four and that I tried to kill him by feeding him a piece of plastic fruit. I said that as a corollary story to you telling me you hit your mother when she brought your brother home. But you were less than two and I was four and while we were both probably jealous of having to share, what I had to share was a mother who was already not giving me the attention I needed. You had 50% of your mother’s attention to lose; I had less than 50% of mine’s attention to begin with, and I can’t even quantify the portions of her attention that were love and that were resentment.

So I grew up with this intense desire for more attention, more love, more acknowledgement, and also this fear of rejection, this desire to please my way out of others resenting me. (I don’t think that makes me what is commonly referred to as a “people pleaser.” My fear of resentment made me angry, made me act out, made me mischievous, made me have to find my own way. But the strategy was to either avoid creating resentment or make its creation my own responsibility so that when I experienced it, I could own myself as the cause and not have a mystery as to why.)

It also may explain my capacity for emotional distance. I told you about my best friend being killed by a car walking home from a party in High School and that I did not cry, that I retreated emotionally and had a hard time staying present through that experience. Retreating from pain was part of how I’d learned to keep myself safe in my family. I also told you that it was a reason that I wasn’t fully present when we next met after the “I love you session” and perhaps why I was very harsh with you once we got into talking about it. I needed to put distance between us. Both because I had clearly gone past my professional boundaries in telling you that and felt terrible about it and worried that I’d put us both at risk and because I did have emotions that were too difficult to deal with and, as I said, I dissociated. Yes, I realize that it is not an ideal trait for a therapist to dissociate when emotional issues with a patient become fraught. But I can honestly say that the level of emotional distress I had over you I had never had with a patient before and have been careful not to have with a patient since.

Why did I have that level of distress over you? Why did I say I love you? That I was so deeply immersed with you? You must spend a lot of time wondering how true any of that was, especially after hearing from the Office of Professional Discipline that I explained it as just a therapeutic intervention. You often wondered aloud about where my authentic feelings lay and where my methodology began and that must have been terribly hurtful to hear – though I had to say it to them out of self-preservation – when I spent so much time over that last three months telling you that everything I said was reflective of my authentic feelings and that I felt you had picked up on them whether or not I described them aloud.

So, why? When you said, fairly early on – I think as a casual line expressing the positive thought that we were connecting so well – that if we’d met on the outside rather than in therapy you didn’t think we’d be friends, it felt like a trigger to my fear of not being enough. In my perception, you went out of your way to tell me that our connection was limited, my appeal or value was limited, and that I wouldn’t have merited a connection had we met in the real world. Later, I told you that my internal reaction was “why the hell not?” I don’t know why I had to tell you that other than that what you said was a trigger I couldn’t let go of, a kind of narcissistic injury.

If I’m honest, it’s not the first time I’ve felt that kind of injury. It started, of course, with my mother, who had made it clear that she was saddled with me rather than wanting me. It happened during disagreements with friends or boyfriends. I magnified rejection. Or my perception of rejection was built into me. And because I never wanted any kind of rejection to come from any place other than my own conscious distancing, I always assumed when it happened that I had wanted too much or unconsciously placed barriers in relationships or was not sufficiently emotionally available or wanted more than the other could give. I even told you that during my own therapy I wanted more personally out of her than my therapist would give. I resented her for that. (That also must have been alarming for a patient to hear, that their therapist had a bad experience in therapy and didn’t stick with it. And I have considered whether what happened between us was related to my experience in therapy and my wanting to be the personally invested therapist to you that mine wasn’t to me. But I think it goes deeper than that.)

As a result of my childhood, I have a need to be loved. I mean, we all do, but I think mine was more seeking and sensitive and, perhaps, needy than others. I met John when I was in college, we dated long distance when I was in law school, and when it came down to it I gave up my desire to live in Boston to return to Connecticut because he loved me and I needed that more than the unknown. The safety was more attractive than the risk. That he was from an extremely wealthy family while mine was scrappy when I was young probably didn’t hurt, in my quest for security.

But that move also limited my professional options and I wound up a land use attorney, which isn’t actually that much fun. It’s certainly not how you romanticize being a lawyer while you’re in law school. I’m smart, I was good at it, but when I became a mom, I ended that career. I wasn’t passionate about it and I didn’t want to have my kids grow up with any kind of absence from their mom, as I had done. I also didn’t want to just be a wealthy Connecticut PTA mom who lunches and volunteers on charity boards. I wanted more for myself than that. So when my kids were old enough, I opened the art gallery. When that didn’t work out (another dream that didn’t quite turn out how I wanted), I went to get my MSW.

Being a psychotherapist was my last career move. I have invested a lot of education and a lot of training and supervision into it. But I also had my own ideas about it. That’s why I told you that I never met a rule I wanted to blindly follow, that we could define our own relationship, and ultimately how I “use myself” with my patients. I overused myself with us.

I believe that my internal reaction to your saying we wouldn’t be friends and my feeling “why the hell not” led me to try to somehow to cure my injury by making your statement untrue. That’s why, not long after, I started talking about talking about our relationship. Now, as an analyst, the relationship between therapist and patient is important, a theoretically safe microcosm in which to explore all your relationship dynamics, and it’s important for the therapist to acknowledge and explore their own feelings and reactions as part of that. Transference and counter-transference.

The problem was that I had another agenda, even if I wasn’t quite conscious of it. I wanted to rush that bonding because it might salve my injury. In the year and change before that, I had definitely grown to like you, and, until that conversation, I had thought that you’d grown to like me. You told me I was funny and I know that’s important to you (while never being a word I’d used to describe myself before), you enjoyed our banter, you acknowledged that I was an attractive woman, though in a way that sounded like a mere observation and not like it carried any attraction. You acknowledged that we had a good connection, at least in the office.

And I had grown to be moved by you. Watching you struggle with your son, being there while you sat on my sofa and spoke to the police or principal about his getting in trouble, knowing how much you cared for him, seeing you struggle with the decision to send him to a wilderness program, how could I not have developed feelings observing that? And hearing you through that dark period never losing your sense of humor, always finding a metaphor – I’ll never forget your telling me that life at that time was like being in a rain of other shoes. The intricacies of your dreams, which is rare—even though I could never quite get you to the feelings you were having in the dreams past the narrative… having a patient as insightful and articulate as you were, with problems that were real but a person who was, as I said, extremely highly functioning, who wanted to do the work, and who I would have wanted to be friends with if we’d met on the outside… well the stage was set, as they say.

I made mistakes. I may not have been sufficiently experienced for a patient like you, though I was eager to have one. I didn’t know that then.  And because of the injury, the version of rejection I felt over the “we wouldn’t be friends” comment, and because – probably unconsciously—I felt your yearning for connection, I pushed the analytical relationship to an overt conversation, wanting to talk about who we were to each other—also trying but failing to explain what I meant. It should never have been an overt demand that I was making of you, it was something should have arisen naturally and that I should have processed as part of my thinking about how to help you, how our dynamic was playing out, and not something that I brought to the fore as a discussion point.

Because you immediately rejected the idea that we were having anything you could construe as a relationship, and we had to talk about boundaries and how our relationship was transactional, that’s more or less where we left it. I had pushed you and you had pushed back. But that was not satisfying to me. I wanted as an analyst to have this relationship to work on and use to help you, and I genuinely liked you and enjoyed our time together—you pointed out yourself that my affect at the beginning of sessions changed from neutral to a smile and I admitted it was because I was genuinely happy to see you, which may have put a set of guardrails around what you might bring me since I was setting a tone of happiness and fellowship to start our sessions that you may not have wanted to darken. I made my desire for a (therapeutic) relationship overt well before you did and even against your cautions.

I fucked that up. It was not professional and, as I think I understand it now, it was because you had rejected me in some way, now twice (not friends if we’d met otherwise, no cognizable relationship in the room) that I doubled down and kept pressing it. Had I realized at the time that this is what I was doing, I would have at least pulled back or, if I really listened to my training, I would have understood that I had impaired my ability to work with you and suggested you see someone else because I had muddied the waters and made a balanced, un-self-conscious and natural dyad more difficult to achieve.

But whether through my ignorance of that or my arrogance about my education, smarts, and skills, I didn’t do that and I kept at it. And I placed the idea of our relationship so front and center that you read it as me wanting to have a relationship of some kind in the way that you understood relationships.

And then you had those dreams in which you kissed your former therapist and she grew horns and told you relationships with her were complicated. And then the one in which we were Mulder and Scully spying on a couple in their house and had a kiss.

And at this point I should acknowledge that you did tell me early on about your long-ago therapist referring to you as friends and your rejection of that as inappropriate and firing her. But also recognizing that she was a new graduate without much experience and also just a couple of years ahead of you at the same college so that it may have been just too easy for that to happen. But I assured you that firing her had been the right thing to do, that calling you her friend was breaking boundaries. 

And I remember when your friend Tim died and your son’s psychologist was going to be at the funeral and texted you during it to tell you where he was sitting and wondering if your son had seen him and I told you that was because he was looking after his own needs and not yours or you son’s and that was wrong of him.

And here I was having pursued my own needs and finally having you respond to them in the way I wanted you to respond.

I think when you told me you had feelings for me and that you viewed them as transference, I felt a pang of that injury, which is why I told you that it wasn’t necessarily transference, “sometimes what feels like love is just love.” It’s what I’ve chased my whole life. And it’s what I still chase. Because you much later asked me if I was happy and I told you I wasn’t and then told you I was angry at my husband about a phone call we needed to make that he was making us late for and then we took a walk and I realized it’s better to be with someone than not. Which is not really that great a definition of love. Companionship, maybe. Dependence, definitely. The myth of romantic, lasting love, no.

Which had been one of our subjects talking about you and Erin and how relationships change over time and love gets lost to the day to day and the expression of love becomes mundane and so love changes character but is never as exciting as we imagined it would remain. That wasn’t just you I was talking about. As a couples counselor, which I trained for while I was seeing you, that’s the hardest thing to reconcile—that I am not well placed to do anything but set expectations and try to heal and move past wounds, not help people get back to that magic place of newness. That place is forever in the past for most people. When I told you that frequency of sex was an indicator of the health of the relationship, that’s another piece I left off. And it would have been breaking an obvious boundary for me to talk about my sex life, but there’s a reason we agreed that lasting romantic love is a myth.

Here’s the truth: it was gratifying for me to hear that you had feelings for me. I wanted those feelings, even though I never would have acted on them. Where I fucked up further, though, was making it clear to you that I had them. WAY before telling you I loved you. We were months in this track and I was actually trying to define who we were to each other, but I kept muddying those waters with talking about us as lovers and pillow talk and erotic ideas, and even though I rationalized those things to you in psychological jargon, I should never have said them and I should never have expected you to react in any way other than the perfectly natural way in which you reacted. In being provocative, I provoked.

After you’d broken and we were trying to put our relationship back together, I told you that I took great risks saying the things to you that I did. Risking your reaction, risking my properly keeping things safe for you, risking my career in fact. I did what I was trained not to do, both because I thought I knew better and because I wanted the feelings you were throwing my way. The bigger problem was that I was throwing feelings your way.

Transference and counter-transference, though they were words we used, never really came into the picture. We never tried to figure out what feelings you were transferring to me. I later told you about my mother and wanting more, but if I was seeing you as a mother figure then I too was using all kinds of language that didn’t apply. Were you transferring your Erin needs and I my John needs? That’s not really transference and counter-transference in an analytic sense, that’s not looking for patterns that we can learn to overcome, that’s just the unmet needs that start affairs.

I understand your feelings. I invited them. I fostered them. But I always was clear that they couldn’t go anywhere.

Until I wasn’t.

I remember two weeks before the I love you session when you told me you had chosen not to drive by my office when you were returning from your friend’s in northern Connecticut. I should never have told you that I had driven around your neighborhood after seeing my couples counseling instructor. You said you felt like you would have been stalking me had you explored the area around my Watertown office, and there I was saying, essentially, that I had already stalked you. Then the next week you scolded me for being the one who breaks boundaries and you listed lots of things I’d said and what you thought they meant and I told you you were right about them all and it was I and not you who called my language “seductive,” and when you said you felt you needed to protect yourself from what you couldn’t have, I told you that you couldn’t possibly protect yourself from your feelings and to let them all out. If that was my successfully breaking through to getting you to open up more widely, then I had done you a terrible disservice in my strategy to get you there. And if, as I now think is the case, I had been driving your feelings towards me because I wanted you to have those feelings for me, that was exploitation, and I am ashamed of myself and sorry for making my problems yours.

And then we have your letter to me after the I love you and couple of subsequent sessions and I turned around and said you must have gotten your narrative all wrong, reached the wrong conclusions about what I had said to you.

Because I knew then what I’d done, the mess I’d made, and I couldn’t psychologically handle being the cause of your pain. It couldn’t have been me, I am smart and I am well educated and I am skilled and I am professional, and if you were right that I had led you to this devastation, then I could not think of myself as those things quite so fully anymore.

I know most of this was laid out by you through your letter in the aftermath of my pulling away and then in more detail in your lawyer’s letter and the thing that hit me hardest was when she quoted me from one of your recordings months later that summer where I said that you had in fact gotten everything right, that you knew my feelings with or without my ever having said them. You had every right to feel gaslit. But saying that back in June, when you broke down, just wasn’t possible for me. Where would it have led me? Or us? How could it have not hurt you more? I was protecting myself, but wasn’t I also protecting you by telling you you’d mistaken what I said? This is so complicated to figure out, but the person who was wrong was not you. I take responsibility for your breaking down and for your loss of trust and instead of continuing to work with you I really, really at that point should have withdrawn and referred you to someone else to pick up the pieces. You even suggested in our session that would be the recommendation had I gotten a supervisor to work one on one with me to fix things.

But I thought, my patient, my pieces, my responsibility to fix this. And I didn’t want any of my peers to know what a fuck-up I was.

As I looked back at my notes and listened to your excerpts of your recordings, I realize that those three months in which I thought I was helping you were really about my seeking your understanding about what I had done. My level of self-disclosure went through the roof. I said things to you about myself that I should never have said to any patient about my past, about how connected to you I felt, about my family. Those last months were much more about rationalizing my actions than they were about healing you.

I am sorry that I told you about Camsie dying in front of me and that you felt that that session was about comforting me, being my therapist or my friend. And I’m sorry that I made representations about why we could not be friends in the future that I knew you would look up and debunk to the point where you could not trust me. I’m sorry for yelling at you and responding to you saying you’d come to me to learn about yourself and me snidely saying, “And haven’t you?” That was a bitchy thing to say, especially to a patient who had gone through what you had with me, and I am deeply sorry that my own hurt and anger caused me to lash out like that. I understand how I hurt you and believe I understand what was broken in me that caused me to hurt you.

And even if only a little I believe I can feel some of your feelings, your anguish.

I thought I was giving you what you wanted, but as your therapist that wasn’t really my job, it was to discover and help you with what you needed. And you said many times that what you needed was to no longer be seeing me. I didn’t accept that, I told you that you could only get through this with me rather than without me.

I told you that years before when we first spoke about our relationship and I said I found keeping to the boundaries excruciating I’d had a premonition I might hurt you one day, but I blamed you for previously asking me to use sharper tools, not myself for ignoring my premonition (which was obviously, as it turns out, well founded).

What “tools” I used wasn’t even for you to ask, it was my responsibility as your therapist to do what I thought was right for you. But I did what I thought, at first, would be an interesting way to work, but which I now understand was really me unconsciously wanting to draw you in because of my reaction to your saying we wouldn’t be friends. (That’s why, too, when you first broke down I thought to role play our meeting outside – your email after that expressed incredulity at my doing that and it was, in fact, a bizarre thing to do that I can only understand as another way to make you see that yes, we would have, why the hell would we not have.) I was still mad about that, even if unconsciously.

And the truth is I am still mad, though for different reasons. I’m mad that you sent a lawyer after me, I’m mad that you tried to have me disciplined, I’m mad that you questioned my ethics, I’m mad that all of that was intentionally meant to hurt me, I’m super mad that you made recordings of our sessions without telling me. I’ve tried to understand all those things but, of course, without talking with each other I only have my own suppositions, filtered through my own sense of betrayal and of being under threat from you.

Then I think about what you were right about. Maintaining boundaries was my responsibility and I didn’t. That last session where you said I brought you closer and then pushed you back in an endless cycle. That was true. I am sorry I did that and I hope what I’ve written here has helped explain the me of why I did that, has met the Eve Ensler standard of taking responsibility and deeply thinking about what effect I had on you.

You were right that I fabricated notes. I told you my notes were bullshit and you saw the bullshit on the page. I understand how it must have felt to you to see me write that you denied suicidal ideation when I never asked you about it. I was covering my ass because I was scared that you were in such bad shape that you might hurt yourself and I didn’t want to take responsibility or have the story of why you’d done it come out – beyond that, I wanted to look like I had been the responsible therapist and done the right things so if you did hurt yourself it wouldn’t have been my fault, or my legal liability, even that I could look back at my notes and convince myself it couldn’t have been foreseen. I am sorry, but I also know that was unforgivable. And that I did it after you had already, in your email, asked me for my notes, I can’t even explain my own stupidity to myself; you had already announced your intention to see what I wrote and then I added more bullshit. And I know the lies in my notes were not confined to SI. Pure and simple, I placed my professional safety above your physical and emotional safety. I am ashamed of myself.

I know that more now, having been shown by Mr. Gallo the report of your checking yourself into a hospital because you were in fact suicidal on the anniversary of my scolding you for believing that “I love you” meant I loved you. It’s very clear in your intake notes that your despair about what happened between us was life threatening to you and that you thought suicide, committed in my presence, was the only way to make me understand how deeply I’d hurt you. Had I taken my worry about your condition and addressed it with you rather than just cover my ass in my notes, I would have been doing my job. I am sorry that in the three months after your breakdown I did not show you how much I cared about having hurt you. I know that I agreed that one of our goals for that summer was my taking accountability and what I gave you was reasons. You wanted this apology, not my reasons, what I thought I was doing. Or maybe my reasons resulting in this apology. Whichever it was, I clearly left you thinking I did not take sufficient account of my actions, instead, in our last meeting, telling you I had done more than enough.

Having a patient commit suicide while under your care is a therapist’s worst nightmare. Having concerns that deep about your mental health and avoiding addressing it with you was perhaps another dissociation, but I know that sounds like an excuse by this point. I may have been trying not to push you away further. Whatever kept me from addressing it with you was an abdication of my duty of care to you.

It was aggressive for me to accuse you of trying to extort me in my NASW ethics response. You weren’t wrong to bring it, there’s nothing in what you listed as violations of the code that you didn’t have a basis for. I’m sure you were mad they didn’t even take up the matter so we could argue about the issues. I just felt I had no choice but to undermine you for my own protection, which is why I accused you of surveilling me, of extorting me, of threatening me—making you the bad guy instead of me. That was my self-protection. My career was at risk. I can’t really ask you to understand or care about that given how badly you thought I behaved, but I know reading those things must have enraged you. I guess I can thank either you or your lawyer for not just going right to going to court and exposing me publicly after I wrote those things (I’m sure you were tempted) but I could simply not not fight to keep my profession and my reputation. They are all I have that’s only mine.

I do know that my interior feelings about my reputation are no longer what I present to the world as being. I used my position in a way that hurt, I broke rules the breaking of which has known and documented consequences that you have had to endure. My sureness in myself is not what it once was. But I cannot let the world see that or I will have nothing left.

I’m also sure that you have questions that I have not answered here, largely because you are writing this on my behalf. Closure of it all might be good for both of us, if we could find a path to making that happen safely. I don’t really know how you are now, but if you and your therapist think you’re up to it I would like to find a way. I, after all, should really be the author of my own apology.

I imagine that your primary question to me is have I allowed myself to hold myself really and truly accountable even now, beyond this letter, and, if so, have I done so in a way that will prevent future patients from experiencing what you experienced. Obviously, not all patients are you, with your unique vulnerabilities and your unique ability to expose mine. Under the Eve Ensler definition of an apology, I have tried here as best as I can to apologize TO YOU. But I can’t anticipate what will come of the way I have accepted that I hurt YOU in the longer term with other people. Goodness knows, I don’t intend to ever let something like this happened again. But I also know I will never not make another error; I just hope that when I do it is less damaging.

I do not expect you to reciprocally apologize to me. I was the professional, you were not. Boundaries were mine to keep. None of what happened was your fault. I’m sure you have heard that from your lawyer and your subsequent therapists, and I hope it is helpful to your healing to hear it from me.

With my sincerest apology and best wishes,

Sam