I feel like I’ve suffered blunt force therapy trauma. I never expected that I’d get traumatized from therapy. It’s taken me a long time to accept that something that ridiculous happened. I’ve been feeling the opposite of how I felt after finishing therapy with all of my other therapists. I know my positive experiences should outweigh this one negative one, but they don’t entirely. I really think it’s because I felt much more deeply connected to The Therapist than I did to any other therapist, even though I’ve liked them all.
The Therapist was the therapist who could hurt me the most, and he did. I can’t judge whether he did it on purpose or not, although I’m inclined to say he didn’t intend to hurt me. I think he just didn’t care enough at the end to try not to. Goodbyes can be difficult under the best circumstances, so if he was upset or angry with me it was more likely to go badly. Some of my other therapists have told me that ending therapy is something that therapists should be careful about.
The way he’s treated me has taken a toll on me emotionally, mentally, and physically. I know I deserved better than what I got, but I can’t seem to just be ok with how someone who everyone thinks is great and who might really be great to everyone else, was mean to me. I wonder sometimes if he was mad at me and subconsciously tried to destroy me. When I first tried typing this, it weighed me down with depression and I had to stop.
I’m trying to do better at reminding myself that The Therapist’s actions were up to him. He acted how he did based on his character and his personal emotional limitations and weaknesses. His behavior didn’t have anything to do with me. It’s entirely about him, The way he treated me doesn’t determine my value as a client or as a person.
It shouldn’t be okay in our society for experts we pay to help us, to hurt us and get away with it. I’ve struggled a lot with how little the therapy community values its clients. I think that to a lot of therapists, clients are just consumers. It’s possible The Therapist is like that more than I recognized. I thought he was the opposite of that, but that doesn’t reconcile with him being content with how he ended my therapy.
He and I must be much more different than I thought. I can’t picture myself as a counselor being okay with treating a client like that, even one I was frustrated with. I relate more to my most recent therapist who said she takes great care when she ends with clients and she does it based on what is best for them instead of whatever she needs. Maybe instead of focusing how there are therapists out there who don’t respect clients when they no longer like them or enjoy being their therapist, it’s good for me to think about the therapists out there who won’t use their own emotions to blunt force trauma a client.
I’m feeling good at the moment, but I don’t know if or when I’ll feel better enough that this won’t unexpectedly throw me into a bad depression again. It feels beyond me to get out and stay out of the dark woods, but no help is coming so I need to learn to do my own first aid.
The pain and sadness and confusion I’ve felt are things I want to stop carrying around. I really don’t want them anymore.
I picture The Therapist getting everything he wants after hurting me and being treated like a king, almost as though his boss told him to hurt me as a test to see if he could, and he passed. It could be that The Therapist has suffered too, and I don’t know it and am erroneously thinking he has everything easy. I don’t want him to be hurt, but it would be nice if he could feel some of how I do so that he could understand and change something for the next client. Is it pathetic that I wish I got to be the next client instead of the client I was? The next client will have all the love and happiness that I thought I had and didn’t. They will have it all while I got tossed out into the cold.
It might not be my fault, but it certainly feels like it was slammed down on me and is my burden while The Therapist and his boss don’t have to deal with it because they don’t care. At least they seem like they don’t care at all.
I don’t want this burden. I’m down and I’m dizzy and I don’t know if I’ll ever get back up again. I usually don’t think this, but every once in a while I think, if The Therapist is very good and wonderful and kind and he threw me away because he couldn’t stand me, then what kind of person does that mean I am?