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Boundary Violations – A Simple Intro
What therapist boundary violations actually are, why they cause real harm, and why a patient — not a clinician — is telling this story. With audio.
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Things I Know About My Former Therapist (But Shouldn’t)
A list of personal details my therapist shared with me over years of sessions. Every item on this list is something she never should have told me.
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Who I Am, Why I’m Writing This
I’m a normal middle-aged man who went to therapy for normal reasons and ended up with PTSD. This is why I decided to write about it.
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The Beginning
I started seeing my therapist in 2018 with three reasonable goals. Within a year, she was upset that I didn’t think we’d have been friends. That’s where this story really starts.
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Sam Suggests an Affair
My therapist told me my marriage was weak, then suggested I was creative enough to have an affair. I hadn’t asked. I had no one in mind. She volunteered it.
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Sam Wants to Talk About Our Relationship
My therapist kept bringing up “who we are to each other.” I kept saying: you’re my therapist. She kept not accepting that answer.
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In Which I Have Two Dreams
I was a vivid dreamer. My therapist was a prolific note-taker of my dreams. After months of pushing about our “connection,” she finally appeared in two of them.
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“Sometimes what feels like love is just love.” — Sam
I told my therapist I was experiencing transference. She told me it wasn’t transference. She said sometimes what feels like love is just love.
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“I love You. I am Deeply Immersed With You.” — Sam
My therapist told me she loved me. She said we needed to figure out what we were going to do. What I did was have a nervous breakdown.
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Why I Started Recording
I started secretly recording my therapy sessions because I could no longer trust my own memory of what she said. In New York, one-party consent makes this legal.
Unlike a typical blog, this is written in chapter form. Start at the top and read posts downward to follow the story.
This is the story of how a female psychotherapist told me she loved me, a 53 year old professional male, causing a sever emotional breakdown and then reversing roles and treating me like I was her therapist. It includes recordings of sessions, contemporaneous emails, texts, and some of her notes, and a certain amount of theorizing. While all the facts here are absolutely true and corroborated, I do some layman’s theorizing about why she may have treated me the way she did.
This story is here to help others who may find themselves in, or sliding towards, a similar situation in the hopes that you can rescue yourself before you wind up where I did.