Resources

I’ve linked to a number of scholarly papers that are available without subscriptions in the blog. But there are some organizations and people that you should know about if there’s anything in this story that makes you think you are in a similar situation.

TELL (Therapy Exploitation Link Line) is an organization of survivors who support and offer resources to people being exploited or abused by therapists and other healthcare providers. They are responsive, supportive, caring, empathetic, and they will keep you completely anonymous. They have a list of attorneys in several states that take on cases like this (it’s where I found mine).

Surviving Therapist Abuse is there to bring awareness to therapist abuse from a survivor’s perspective and to offer support and resources. There is a message board here with a number of stories. None of them sounded like mine because it was mainly male therapists sexually abusing female patients, but they also have a list of attorneys, should you choose to go that route.

Here is a recent article from the New York Times that anyone interested in this blog should read: Therapy is Good. These Therapists Are Bad, by Christina Caron. It’s been reported elsewhere that 38% of therapy causes harm rather than helping and that 93% of therapists believe they are in the top 20% of therapists. All that said, I am not here to preach that therapy is innately harmful, just that some therapists can do a lot of harm.

Complaints

While I can’t go into detail, I did go down the path of engaging an attorney and I’m glad I did. It does take a lot of fortitude to get into a lawyer battle with your ex-therapist, but I found it more healing to do it than to let Sam’s behavior just pass uncontested. But it’s not easy to get a lawyer to take a case. You need evidence. In my case, I had made recordings of sessions, excerpts of which you heard here, in which she admitted to the core facts of the case. Without those, it’s he-said-she-said with the only “source of truth” being the therapist’s notes, which (as was the case here) the therapist may falsify in order to cover their ass. You’re not likely to find a note that says, “I really messed with Matt today by telling him I loved him and implying that I was interested in having a relationship with him. Planning to let him down double-H-hard next week.” We didn’t know it when my attorney took the case, but having recordings of sessions that also proved that she falsified her notes gave us an additional smoking gun.

I also filed a licensing board complaint in both NY and CT and a complaint with the National Association of Social Workers. As you may have read in Dr. Appelbaum’s letter and my fictitious apology from Sam, all were dismissed. Licensing Boards don’t like to take action (and in NY the person making a decision is a member of the accused’s profession). NY Office of Professional Discipline investigator David Buckley, whose previous job had been with the NY Park Police, told my attorney that the volunteer board member who made the decision said Sam had claimed that her treatment of me was just a form of therapy and was told to maybe not use that form of therapy anymore, but that was the extent of her “discipline.”

CT waited until NY made its decision and then just shrugged. None of them did their most fundamental job, which was to protect future patients from therapists who have done significant harm or broken licensing laws (such as falsifying notes).

Here’s an article about a particularly egregious case, which, like mine, resulted in a finding of “insufficient evidence” even though the evidence was overwhelming and in the therapist’s own voice.

The National Association of Social Workers complaint process is a joke. Can you both sell a therapist malpractice insurance and also find her liable for malpractice, without conflicting yourself out of credibility? They wouldn’t even agree to hear the complaint. My advice: don’t bother with NASW; they have no interest in enforcing their own ethics code.