My experience of my therapy with Mr. Gleaves and my opinions about my experience matter. It might not matter to therapists at his counseling firm unless I leave another review and they get offended and outraged, but what he did and how he did it and my experience of that matters to other people, some of whom are therapy clients. It matters to clients and people who care about those clients, and that should matter to him and to them, even if I don’t or if I never did.
Hurting me, leaving me hurt and what (waiting and hoping for me to die I guess?) has a ripple effect. To some degree, he will get back what he gives out, and what he gave out was extremely bad. It hurt me which affects my family and ends up affecting people I talk to and meet. This is the truth even without my blog. I might be his least favorite person, but not everyone hates me and some people feel empathy for what I’m going through and also scared that other therapists who seem trustworthy like him will do similar crap to them.
He has navigated this ship into troubling waters and it has hurt a lot of people. Therapy is kind of like an island until it isn’t. Then it’s far reaching and I’m not ok with him throwing around pain and anxiety like it’s coconuts. He shouldn’t be ok with it either.
Will he please own his choices and take responsibility for his actions, instead of hiding and being passive aggressive and getting a fucking promotion from it or being creatively shelved from active therapy and put in a box or whatever that creative little move with a great big title was intended to really be? Anyone else here besides me finding it hard to believe that a business woman who has an employee who drags her firm’s name through the fucking mud, turns around immediately after and promotes him to a director. Tell me I’m not the only one who can’t picture her being that careless with her business, and I don’t even know her.
But I can tell you I didn’t grit my teeth and withhold my reviews of him for that purpose, to have them play around with fancy titles and give my fans and my haters and the other therapists who have opinions about this, the impression that he’s getting rewarded for what he did.
While I might or might not agree with him being demoted into a role with more limited client involvement, I’m going to try to be patient and think that’s what really happened. The entire reason I think it’s what happened is because I can’t fathom a successful business woman who has any business acumen reacting to his shitstorm by promoting him to a position with even greater influence. I can even make my hypothesis sound logical by acknowledging that the average therapist he advises would ideally have more built in checks and balances to any of his suggestions than average traumatized clients might. Thus his direct impact should be less potentially devastating. But I also want to add the warning that the opposite will be true if any young therapist gets muddled by something he says to her because he’s influential and because he’s attractive. Laugh at me for suggesting that if you must, but it’s not as far fetched as you might want to think it is. If the plan is predicated upon him being supervised, please consider that supervision of influential adults rarely works. Even I was influenced by him while he was supposedly being closely monitored and I was told later on that I was indirectly being supervised too. This blog is a testament of how well therapy supervision works. If you get nothing else from this blog, let it at least stand as proof of the very real limitations of supervision and of therapy in general.
Back to his creative job title and the change in the way he interacts with clients, well I know I can make almost any reasons line up if I really try to, but until someone shows me evidence that the owner of his firm is much dumber than I think she can be (and I have no reason to like her so if I doubt that she’s an idiot then please pay attention) I’m choosing to believe he has been given new boundaries.
My idea would be different from that, and riskier on paper, while ultimately more effective and having the long reaching positive benefits he most likely got into his career to have. I’d be inclined to think why not get him to finish his fucking job and actually make the world a little bit better or at least be a hero about it and take some of the pain and annoyance off of the people who don’t deserve it. He could start with me, for example.
Asking passive aggressive avoidant types like him to be brave seems futile, because it usually is, especially when they’re surrounded by enablers. And I’m aware he might think I deserve to be hurt, but I needed to ask him one more time to man up so I can show everyone who I meet and talk to after this, that I tried. I tried to communicate with him even when I was ignored and blocked and insulted. Even when it was hurtful, embarrassing, and difficult. I tried to clean up the mess even after he let people attack me, even in the moments I hate him for being exactly like a bad ex boyfriend.
Say what you want to about my methods, but at least I tried.
As far as I can tell, that makes one of us.