I feel like The Therapist doesn’t grasp the extent of his power and influence over his clients. Maybe he does reverence his clients, but my experience with him during therapy and with how he’s handled the aftermath of the way he terminated me, make me feel like he doesn’t respect his own power.
Two years ago I would’ve never understood how a client could off themselves from their effects of therapy, but I can see it now. It’s not so much the therapy as it is their relationship with the therapist.
I think for many clients, including ones like me who have had multiple therapists over the years, we don’t expect to connect with any therapist on the level that I felt I connected to with The Therapist. Not only is a connection that strong with a therapist unexpected, it’s way more powerful than a client like me would’ve known to prepare for. I simply didn’t know it was possible. I wasn’t looking for it and I never consciously chose it.
It’s scary, very scary and I never want to experience it again. The level of destruction a therapist can cause is underrated and glossed over so that when they screw up they don’t get punished, but the potential for extremities of progress and destruction is there in exorbitant amounts in certain therapeutic relationships.
The Therapist brings out some of the better aspects of my personality. He magnifies aspects of me that lead to me becoming more and becoming better. Not only is it intoxicating to have someone like that, it’s highly productive. When I’m at a better level I’m in turn a better influence on others.
The dark side of any deep connection is vulnerability. When The Therapist abandoned me, it told me I was unworthy and worthless. When he continues to ignore me and brush my pain away as a nuisance, it tells me he never cared about me even though he showed me he did, and that threatens my perceptions of myself and reality as I experience it.
It’s not a mental leap now for me to see how being unable to break a powerful connection with a therapist who they were convinced actually loved them and who discarded them in a cruel manner, might lead a client into madness and the inability to regain their emotional footing. The world is upside down, truth becomes lies and lies become truth. Their experience is disregarded and stored in a file marked Mistake or Crazy. It’s terrifying and difficult to process the experience because they can’t really process it like they could a romantic breakup because oh, by the way, the relationship that empowered you more than any other was all just pretend.
I imagine they try, even as they plod slowly along to The Hanging Tree, they try to untangle themselves from the one who loved them but who it turns out really didn’t, I picture them frantically working at the knots as the tree comes into view. They want desperately to disconnect from the one who held a mirror up to their best potential and who then suddenly snatched it away and pretended as though they never knew them.
The journey to The Hanging Tree can happen for many reasons, and certainly the destruction of powerful therapeutic relationships doesn’t deserve all or even most of the blame.
But now that I have seen the path those clients take, I’m more aware of the magnitude of power that The Therapist has, and I’m also more aware of just how unaware of it that he appears to be.