My Therapist Terminated Me in an Emotionally Abusive Way
The therapist who fails their client during termination has failed to prioritize their client’s emotional needs or has simply failed to care.
My therapist terminated me in an emotionally abusive way.
And I’m not okay with it. That’s why I’m here.
I write about trying to heal after being terminated by my ex-therapist in a manner that was very disrespectful, dismissive, undeserved, and unethical. I share some of the ways that it’s affected me, and how I’ve been coping. Nothing I write is intended as advice of what to do or not to do. I’m merely someone who wants to share some of my journey.
The therapist who unprofessionally and disrespectfully terminated me was Aaron Gleaves, LPC at Calmed Counseling & Consulting in Blacksburg, Virginia. He was told to terminate me by his supervisor, Stacey Bolt at Calmed Counseling & Consulting in Blacksburg, Virginia. Neither of them gave me the impression that they were prioritizing my needs as a client. They seemed to only care about getting rid of me in the quickest and easiest way for them.
I’ve written a Google review of Calmed Counseling & Consulting LLC in Blacksburg, Virginia. I’ve tried to share what I’ve experienced so that potential clients can go into therapy with their eyes open. I haven’t worked with any of the other therapists who work there, only with Aaron Gleaves. The others might be, and hopefully are, different from him in the way they treat their clients at the end of therapy.
My experience isn’t as unique as it should be. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for therapists to handle client terminations badly. Clients are often forced out feeling traumatized and discarded.
If Stacey was the one who decided that I needed to be terminated and Aaron was the one who decided how it would happen, then they both did a spectacularly awful job as a team. I can only guess that Stacey was aiming for damage control because everyone seemed to have determined that Aaron Gleaves and I had an unhealthy therapeutic relationship. If that’s true, how tragic is it that it felt safe to me nearly the entire time, right up until Aaron joined the call in what would be our last session together. How sad that I thought I was going along doing well with my therapy work and accomplishing a lot, when in the end it was just one more unhealthy relationship I had with a man. My sadness over it has been overwhelming and at times, debilitating.
When Stacey first reached out to me after it happened, I thought maybe she genuinely cared. Perhaps she did care, but I couldn’t get past her doubling down on defending how they’d handled things. I think she mostly wanted for me to see things her way and then I’d be less upset. I don’t see what happened in the way that she does and I’m not going to ignore or run from my pain.
I hate that a woman had a hand in causing me some of the greatest pain in my life. I like supporting other women. Stacey Bolt is a business owner and I love that! But I’m not going to be able to trust her after what she and Aaron did. I think that causing someone more pain than necessary is not caring.
I feel like they weren’t justified in terminating me without warning, and it was done on the anniversary of a traumatic experience that I’d had, and right before Christmas. No, it wasn’t okay to do that instead of Aaron and I planning a termination together. It hurts terribly that he didn’t think enough of me as a person or as his client to let me have a good final session.
I think he must either hate me or think I’m nothing. I wish he’d been more kind to me at the end. It could’ve been a positive ending to all the hard work I’d put in if he’d been compassionate with me. Instead, he was cold and distant and dismissive and stonewalled me in my last session. He didn’t let me talk much and I felt too much in shock while it was happening to know what to do. I just kind of went into survival mode and shut down, too. It was such a horrible way to end a beneficial relationship that had helped me so much for a year and a half. The pain hit me later that evening and it felt like the worst breakup I’d ever experienced.
Not only did I feel betrayed, I also felt like I was being infantilized. I feel that Stacey and Aaron must think that clients are incapable children or that we’re too broken to know what we need. I can’t think of anything I did that would’ve made Aaron think I’m that incapable.
I’ll never know if being cold and hateful was Aaron’s idea, or if Stacey ordered him to behave that way, but I do know they hurt me and none of it appeared to hurt them.
One of the documents that Aaron gave me to read and sign before starting therapy with Calmed Counseling & Consulting had a section about termination. I’ve included a screenshot of it later in this post. It’s written in a way that makes it seem like Aaron would have a respectful discussion with me about the termination process when that time came. In reality, he didn’t follow his termination outline with me hardly at all. He surprised me with termination in a session and wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. I wasn’t even trying to prevent it, I just wanted it to be respectful and positive, but my accomplishments over a year and a half didn’t matter to him and neither did I as a client or even as a person, matter to him. It was humiliating to be treated so cruelly by someone who I’d trusted and confided in.
It feels awful to go to a therapist for help in dealing with the negative effects from past trauma and then be treated badly by that very therapist who is supposedly there to help and not add to the harm. It feels worse when the therapist is helpful and compassionate much of the time and then seems to suddenly change to condescending and dismissing behaviors. It’s shocking and traumatic.
My heart goes out to the many other clients who have experienced traumatic terminations. I feel that therapists should be held to a higher standard of behavior with how they end things with clients. I don’t like the way therapists only really have to answer to other therapists. I hope things change for the better in the mental health industry.
I worked hard in therapy the entire time and even came up with additional ways I could improve. I followed through on my therapy goals, and I never missed a session.
I also tried to be careful from the beginning to not get too emotionally connected to Aaron. I had to decide after my first session if I could be strong enough to not be sexually distracted by him. I actually almost stopped therapy with him due to his good looks.
If you’ve only seen his picture on Psychology Today (which is where I found him), then you haven’t yet seen how gorgeous he really is. It’s unfortunate that he’s a therapist, from a certain point of view, because he’s extremely attractive. But I thought it over and figured I’d be ok because I have a negative bias against tall, handsome, white guys since many of them turn out to be jerks. Also I’m not close to a perfect 10, so it’s always seemed like a waste of time for me to pursue the guys who live the life of the handsome privileged. I figured it was a safe and manageable situation.
I managed to do a good job in that regard. I never could fantasize about him sexually. I actually tried once to think of Aaron that way, but my brain channeled my attraction into the guys who I was dating at the time. Lucky them! There was one guy in particular who I was seeing who rivals Aaron in beauty and intelligence. I think it was thanks to him that I didn’t have the need to get bogged down with therapist infatuation during therapy.
However, I really thought Aaron Gleaves and I had a connection of some kind. There was definitely some sort of friendly chemistry I thought I felt. I also thought I felt some tension from our different energies and our personality differences. It didn’t seem to be a hindrance to the work though, on the contrary, I think it made our discussions more lively and interesting.
I ended up liking Aaron in some way that remains unclear to me. I told him I felt like I liked him. I thought he could help me work through it, but he quickly dismissed it as transference and seemed a bit annoyed. I’ve since learned that many therapists make the mistake of handling it that way. But at the time I felt confused and then became afraid that if I continued to feel friendly to him it would be an issue, so I mentally worked on not liking him. That went pretty well and at one session I told him that I’d managed to stop liking him and now felt totally neutral about him instead. His physical reaction appeared to me that he was offended. At the very least he was annoyed. Well then, did he want me to like him or to not care? I was even more confused after that and tired from feeling that I kept getting it wrong. At that point I was willing to do whatever would have less of a negative effect on our therapeutic relationship.
I never got to figure it out. I questioned him about some comments he’d made and tried to explain how he’d been making me feel confused, and he emotionally shut down. I was just confused and frustrated and wanted his help to work through my feelings, but I think he’d already decided we were over.
After the way Aaron Gleaves and Calmed Counseling & Consulting terminated me, I let my feelings about Aaron turn into hate as much as I possibly could. Sometimes hating him is the only way I’ve been able to function knowing that he tricked me into believing he cared about what happened to me, when I was only practice therapy so he could get his license and I meant absolutely nothing to him.
Because of my terrible termination experience, I can’t recommend Aaron Gleaves to clients who need to work on deeper issues like trauma or relationship patterns. I think Aaron has personal issues that he lets get in the way of his role as a therapist. Even though I accomplished a lot in therapy, I sometimes regret ever meeting him because of the pain I’m feeling now.
The therapeutic relationship has been referred to as an approximate relationship. I don’t think it’s worth going through this amount of pain for a relationship that isn’t even considered real. If I have to suffer through heartache, it should at least be for something that has a shot at being genuine.
I often wish that I’d found somebody other than Aaron Gleaves to work with back then. I’m trying to keep the good from my experience with him and put the negative in a productive perspective, but it’s been a struggle, and I can’t confidently say it’s a fight I’m winning, at least not yet.
I’ve had a lot of rejection and broken relationships in my life, but I seriously don’t think I’ll ever fully heal from this one. I feel like a vase that Aaron Gleaves threw and it shattered into pieces on the ground. When I glued the pieces back together, I found there’s a piece missing. That might sound childish pathetic, especially over a pretend relationship, but it’s what I feel like.
My thoughts about all of this are kind of a mess sometimes. Writing helps. It’s good this site isn’t hardly indexed to be found yet because it’s kind of a mess too. It reflects my emotional state—a struggling, sloppy, yet mostly coherent, mess.
I never heard from Aaron again after he sent me referrals and after he confirmed that he’d finally submitted the claim to my insurance. I tried emailing him to maybe have a better ending conversation for closure, but he’d blocked me. How dumb is it that I can’t even type that he blocked me without starting to cry.
Here’s an email I can’t send:
To: Aaron Gleaves LPC Calmed Counseling & Consulting LLC
Dear Aaron Gleaves,
How could you treat me like I’m nobody after saying we were “a team” and supporting me through my struggles during the year and a half that we had sessions together?
Why did you think it was acceptable to give me no say in how my therapy termination went?
You disrespected me so badly and then you wanted me silenced and now you pretend that I never existed.
There’s nothing kind about how you terminated me. There’s nothing compassionate about the uncaring attitude that you showed. There’s nothing empathetic about the way you discarded me.
It’s not okay at all.