And I accidentally abandoned this blog again… I’d always intended to take a break over January and February, to clear my head and to catch up on some of my end of 2023 blog posts, and while I obviously did take a break, neither of those things happened. Instead, I had a very traumatic break up with my therapist and I’ve spent the last two months or so in such distress that writing blog posts wasn’t even on my radar. Hopefully I’ll return to those posts and get them finished, posted, and out of my brain but, for the moment, I’m still feeling really overwhelmed and traumatised by those last three sessions and the absolute landslide of emotion and distress that they caused.

I’d been struggling on and off with therapy for a while, which I’m pretty sure was a result of feeling really burned out: with so little energy – physical, mental, and emotional – I found it really difficult to put myself into a position where I knew I’d end up feeling even worse. It was taking everything I had just to get out of bed, let alone go and pour my heart out for ninety minutes only to stuff it back in and walk around for the next week like it wasn’t utterly draining. So my attendance wasn’t deeply consistent but I was trying; I was giving it all I had even though I didn’t have much to start with. And then something changed around October last year.

Whenever I mentioned having a meltdown, she’d question it, to the point where it started to feel like she was trying to determine if I was lying or like she was trying to catch me out in some way, like “Gotcha! I knew they weren’t meltdowns!” And whenever the topic of my family came up, she’d dig, like she was looking for trauma or dysfunction. I also had the vague sense that she was trying to drive a wedge between my Mum and I, which I didn’t understand at all since we were trying to chip away at some really, really hard stuff and my Mum feels like the only person I can just about share this stuff with. As far as I can tell, it’s not uncommon for autistic people to have a ‘safe person’ in their life and destabilising that relationship, especially when I was already feeling so fragile, felt unwise at the very least. At first, I’d brushed it off, assuming I was being overly sensitive or something but it kept happening and was bothering me more and more. After our last session before the Christmas and New Year break, I decided that I’d bring it up when sessions started again.

I really struggled over Christmas and New Year – it’s a time that I’ve been finding increasingly difficult, especially over the last few years – with my depression and suicidal thoughts reaching really scary levels. I did email my therapist but we never worked things out over email: it was more about putting some of those thoughts and feelings somewhere and to keep her informed so that, when I arrived at the next session, she’d at least have a basic understanding of where I was at emotionally. We’d also discussed exploring Brainspotting since I was having such a hard time talking about my core fears, one of which was the main reason I’d gone back to therapy this time.

But we never got to any of those things. The session was an absolute nightmare. I can’t remember the first half of the session because the second half was so traumatic. We were sat on the floor and I had Izzy in my lap – she’d come to several sessions with me since she’s become such a grounding presence for me – and I’d thought we were going to talk about Brainspotting but then, for some reason still unknown to me, my therapist started asking me question after question about this core fear. My anxiety got worse and worse, I couldn’t breathe, and it wasn’t long before I was in verbal shutdown. I couldn’t speak; I could not answer her questions; and she wouldn’t step back, despite my obvious distress (I mean, I thought it was blatantly obvious). I’d lost all sense of time but eventually she slowed down and when she next asked a question, I dredged up my last reserves of energy and, my brain still barely functioning, I forced out a sentence. Maybe it was just inside my head, but it sounded flat and slurred – all off my energy was going into forming the words; I didn’t have anything left for expression or emotion. I had two reasons for forcing myself so beyond my limit: firstly, because I was scared that I’d have a full on meltdown with all of the worst elements (screaming, pulling my hair out, self harming, etc), which I dread having anywhere but at home (and it’s not like I enjoy them at home…) and, secondly, because I was scared she’d touch me, meltdown or not, which I viscerally did not want, especially while I was having so much trouble speaking and wasn’t sure I’d be able to say no. I felt like she was trying to force me into a meltdown and, regardless of the fact that this was coming from someone I was supposed to feel safe with, I felt and still feel deeply traumatised by the experience. The ‘conversation’ that followed only compounded that. We’d run out of time – thank god, because I felt utterly wrecked and wanted nothing more than to get out of that room – and I was packing up my bag and sorting out Izzy when my therapist said that, instead of pursuing Brainspotting, we were going to repeat that experience every week. I don’t know if I can even describe the feeling that that triggered – panic, terror, I don’t know – but, even though I was so drained that I could barely keep my eyes open, I couldn’t let that go. Maybe some sort of survival mechanism kicked in. I said that I knew that that would make things worse but she brushed off my reaction and said that it would help, both dismissing and invalidating my feelings. By that point, I was so overwhelmed with so many blinding emotions that I couldn’t say anything else; I had to get out of the building before I fell apart entirely.

The next several weeks were dominated by meltdowns, paralysing anxiety, crying jags, and the feeling that the ground was constantly shifting under my feet. I felt so traumatised, so completely rocked by the session that all I could do, for weeks, was lie on the sofa and stare blankly at the TV. I’ve experienced dissociation of a sort before but this was far, far worse: whenever I thought about the sessions or even therapy in general, my thoughts would scatter and wouldn’t reconnect until hours later. I couldn’t even engage with the thought of therapy until a month after that awful session. My Mum had been in regular contact with my therapist, letting her know that I wouldn’t be coming in, but it was a month before I could even think about writing to her myself. Even then, a month since that hideous session, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I was about to throw up, like my mind was going to get shoved right out of my head and I’d shut down. But the idea of carrying around all of those feelings felt unbearable so I spent a full day shouldering through the nausea and writing her an email, describing my experience of the session. Just the thought of being in the room triggered such an intense flight or flight response that I couldn’t imagine going back there so soon, so I suggested doing a Zoom session (which we’d done before when one or other of us had been abroad) as a stepping stone to getting back there. When she replied, she shot it down without explanation, triggering another tidal wave of anxiety and confusion – she felt like an entirely different person to the one I’d been working with for so many months. It was like she’d had a personality transplant or, probably a more likely explanation, that something had happened in her life and it was creeping into her work. I still wonder if that was the case. (In a later email, she explained why she hadn’t wanted to use Zoom and her reasons were completely understandable but I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t simply said that in the original response, why she’d chosen to leave me confused and upset when she could have so easily prevented that.) That response left me untethered again and I could feel this monstrous, ugly trauma growing and feeding on itself; it was like someone had ripped open the stitches and the tissue that had just started the slow process of knitting itself back together was torn open, messy and raw.

It took me over a week to compose a response but then, before I could send it, I received an email – in the same cold tone as the previous one – where my therapist declared that since ‘we’ hadn’t found a way to meet in person (an interesting word choice since I had been the only one suggesting alternatives), she had decided to terminate therapy. Reading that felt like experiencing a physical trauma, like something dense and heavy impacting my chest and splintering every bone, pulverising every muscle, organ, and blood vessel. I couldn’t tell if I was going to throw up, stop breathing, or completely dissociate. I felt so fragile that I honestly feared that my brain would splinter and that would be it: I’d learn what it means to lose your mind. I couldn’t believe she’d be so cruel; I’d never imagined that she could be so cruel. Part of me wondered if it was a manipulation: she was forgoing the carrot and using the stick to force me back into the room, regardless of my feelings about it. But I couldn’t believe she’d really do that, couldn’t believe that the person I’d known for a year would do that – to anyone. She suggested a session or two to wrap up but I could barely process that concept: the words ‘terminate therapy’ were all I could think about, drowning out everything else in my head. It took a while but when I could eventually form coherent thought, I knew I couldn’t miss the upcoming session, not with this weight hanging over me; I couldn’t carry it around any longer than I had to. So I wrote back, trying to briefly express the hurt and anger I felt to, at the very least, establish a foundation for what I assumed would be the final session. I didn’t know how much I’d be able to say myself so I wanted to get some of it out there before I got into the room: I wanted her to know how abandoned I felt, how ending therapy without so much as discussing it felt like a punishment; I wanted her to know how invalidated I felt, how I felt she’d invalidated my trauma after the previous session; I wanted her to know that this abandonment felt like one more person telling me I’m too complicated, that I’m broken, that I’m not trying hard enough, that I’m not worth putting in the effort. It was a hard email to write and a hard few days waiting for the session.

It took me six weeks in total to go back and even then, I didn’t feel ready. I woke up in the middle of the night – the night before the session – screaming and crying in pain, the trauma and hurt I felt about the whole situation overwhelming me even in sleep. Mum had to sit with me until I calmed down enough to go back to sleep but I could still feel the ghost of it the next morning, along with nausea and shaking. I wanted to skip it so badly but given how that last session had ended, not going back felt worse than going (although it was a very slim margin). I wanted to understand and, if this was the end, I wanted closure, even if closure meant learning that I’d never get the whole truth. I’ve been there before. Everyone I’d told thought I was mad, but I needed to try, despite how awful I felt. So back I went.

My fight or flight response was so intense when I arrived that I don’t know how I walked inside; my whole body was screaming at me to run and it almost felt like gravity was trying to pull me off my intended course. I sat down on the sofa but didn’t take my shoes off as I usually would; if I truly needed to escape – Mum was waiting in the car outside with Izzy – I didn’t want anything to slow me down. My whole body was shaking, so noticeably that my therapist actually pointed it out. For a moment, she seemed so like the person I remembered from before all of this but it didn’t last: the session was a complete mess. It’s tempting to say that it was worse than the previous one but in reality, they’re not really comparable: the January session was traumatic and although this one was a hideous experience, I didn’t feel traumatised by it. I don’t feel traumatised by it. It felt more like a battle of wills: each of us pushing, neither of us willing to give up any ground. (I don’t know if she’d think of it that way but all I could think about when she was – or more accurately wasn’t – answering my questions, was that she was scrambling, desperately trying to protect herself.) I was angry and hurt and she was defensive and reactive, repeatedly turning my feelings and questions back on me with statements like, “well, that wasn’t my intention” or “I can’t help it if you interpreted it that way” and so on. She didn’t outright make everything that had happened in the last session my fault but she was clearly avoiding taking any responsibility for the situation, despite being the therapist in our relationship. For example, whenever I expressed that I felt traumatised – specifically by how I’d felt pushed into a shutdown – her responses only left me feeling more distressed and invalidated, like she didn’t believe me. I felt like she thought I was throwing the word ‘trauma’ around casually, rather than using it to describe a very real emotional injury. When I asked her specifically about the verbal shutdown I’d experienced as a result of her pushing, she said that she didn’t realise how bad my distress was, that it didn’t seem worse than the previous times I’ve become distressed during sessions. I felt it was deeply, deeply obvious but we clearly weren’t going to agree on that.

In my anger, I ground out that I felt that not only terminating therapy but terminating it by email was a punishment for ‘not trying hard enough,’ for not meeting her expectations, for not getting back into the room in her acceptable timeframe (despite the fact that I had no help in doing so). I said that it felt like a manipulation to get me back into the room but she claimed that it wasn’t: she gave me her ‘reasons’ for terminating therapy but, in my opinion, not only were they very flimsy but they were things that she’d never mentioned to me. If she had, there were adjustments we could’ve made and things we could’ve worked on but how could I have done that when I never even knew that she considered these things problems? I’m skeptical that those were the real reasons; I think she had others that she just didn’t want to share. She said that she’d talked extensively about all of this with her supervisor and I couldn’t help thinking what I wouldn’t have done to hear those conversations. I tried to get some clear answers from her, get my most basic questions answered – about the last session, about terminating therapy by email – but it wasn’t long before her answers started spiralling and she couldn’t stop justifying herself. That, to me at least, implied that she wasn’t confident in her decisions but I can’t know that for sure and I’ll probably never know now.

She brought up the fact that she’s self employed, saying that me not coming consistently put her livelihood at risk. I think it’s worth noting that my sessions had always been cancelled in the accepted timeframe and, on the one occasion where I’d left it too late – because I’d really thought I’d be able to go – we’d paid her. That is my only responsibility to her financially; I thought bringing that up was not only unbelievable but also deeply unethical (and everyone I’ve described this moment to have been appalled too). She said that she couldn’t have a client taking “an extended holiday,” a phrase that seemed to suck all of the air out of me: I couldn’t believe that she’d just essentially compared my six weeks of trauma and dissociating to a holiday. The panic attack hit me so hard that I felt paralysed, shaking and hyperventilating. At one point, she asked if she could sit on the sofa beside me but I flinched – from the moment I walked into the room, I hadn’t wanted to be within reach of her – so, fortunately, she didn’t move. I don’t know how long it took but when I was eventually able to breathe and communicate, I told her that she wouldn’t like what I wanted to say. She said that that didn’t matter, that she always wanted me to share what I felt (which felt very ironic considering how the session was going). So I expressed that, whether she’d intended to or not, she’d just compared this incredibly traumatic experience to a holiday. She instantly, vehemently, and repeatedly denied it but it’s what she said; I wish she would’ve just acknowledged that what she’d been trying to say – regardless of it being an appalling point – had come out wrong. It still would’ve hurt but I think it would’ve hurt less. Or maybe the whole thing was already broken beyond repair at that point; maybe it was already too late and I was just trying to get some answers before fleeing the burning building.

I pointed out that, in terminating therapy and therefore abandoning me by email, she’d repeated a trauma that had devastated me at nineteen; it was an experience she knew a great deal about since we’d spent months discussing it. She forcefully disagreed and said that it wasn’t the same at all but apart from a few details, I can’t believe that she couldn’t see the screaming similarities; I don’t believe it. She said that she just needed to get me in the room and I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony: how was that not manipulation? That was another element of what felt like, to me, was her ‘scrambling’ to stay in control, of the session and the party line she was sticking to: she kept contradicting herself. Another example was, despite announcing the end of therapy over email, she repeatedly told me that I had agency, that continuing with therapy was my choice. I found that deeply confusing: one day she was dropping me as a client by email and the next, it was all up to me? I didn’t understand. But I wasn’t sure that it mattered in the long run: I was running through the consequences of everything I thought to say before saying it – on whether or not I should say it at all – because, having threatened to end therapy once, I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t do it again. I didn’t trust her and I didn’t feel safe with her anymore.

Possibly the only useful thing to come out of the session – apart from a sense of catharsis – was a short exchange about other types of therapy and what other modalities might be helpful. But then, when I said that every therapist I’ve seen has hurt me in one way or another – intentionally or not – and that trusting someone new feels all but impossible, she suggested that I’m letting them hurt me (or inviting them to hurt me – something to that effect). I was astonished that she could say something like that, that she could say – to my face – that it’s my fault that therapists have been traumatising me. I mean, I don’t even know what to do with that. And then she asked me how my dog was, as if she hadn’t just spent more than ninety minutes denying, dismissing, and invalidating the trauma that she was the source of. I was wound so tight that I thought something in my body might snap, despite the exhaustion weighing me down, as if my muscles had been replaced by sand bags.

I escaped to the car, relieved to see Mum and Izzy, who climbed up my body and around my neck; she’s a sensitive little bean, always wanting to make people feel better. I was so exhausted that when we got home, I went straight to the sofa, curled up with Izzy, and slept for the rest of the day. It was a long week; it was a lot to process. I had a lot of interesting conversations with family, friends, therapists, friends who are therapists, all of them horrified that my therapist had treated me the way she had and said the things she’d said to me. In the end, I decided that I needed to go back, most likely for the last time: my therapist had been so reactive and so on edge that I thought, with a week to process everything that had been said, she might be a bit less defensive and therefore able to answer some of my questions. She hadn’t really given me any answers, not sufficient ones anyway.

Before that final session, I emailed her with some thoughts and questions so that she would have time to think about them before we met to talk. I told her that I still didn’t feel clear about the traumatic session in January and how that had gone so wrong, why she hadn’t stopped pushing when I was clearly so distressed; how confused I felt about her terminating therapy by email only to turn around and say that I had agency over the situation; that I felt really distressed and invalidated by her response to how traumatised I felt by the experience. When we’d first met, she was confident that she could help me with this core fear that I was struggling with but suddenly she was saying that she didn’t have the skills and I didn’t understand what had changed.

At some point over the next few days, my Mum emailed her to officially and logistically tie things up. The reply insisted that she’d ultimately been thinking of my best interests, that she felt she didn’t have the skills to help me and that another model of therapy might be more helpful. It was only at this point that she expressed that she was “sorry that the therapy didn’t work,” something she never said to me; I know that an apology wouldn’t have changed anything by that point but it would’ve changed the story a little, to hear that she actually felt something about the crash and burn that was the end of our therapeutic relationship. To me, she’ll always be another mental health professional who abandoned me during a crisis because I was too much, because I was too complicated, because I wasn’t worth the effort. She never contacted me again, not that she necessarily had to as my now ex-therapist, but I can’t help thinking that, had I been in her shoes, I would’ve emailed to say goodbye, to wish me well, to… something. But as I said, now that all is said and done, she’s just another person who didn’t really care.

I’ve had many, many conversations with many, many different people since then and, of course, I’ve thought about it a lot. I even looked up the relevant ethical guidelines but, when I talked about it with another therapist, she advised me not to waste my time and energy: even if I had any proof, therapists have many more protections than their clients. And while the anger that still lingers is tempting, I know that I wouldn’t be able to prove it and my impassioned description of what happened is unlikely to change anything; stories like mine are far too common. I do think about her other clients though and I wonder what their experience over the last six months has been like. But I’ll never know and I don’t think knowing either way would help me.

It’s taken me a long time to write this and, to a certain extent, I’m still processing it; I know that this new emotional injury won’t heal for a long time. But writing things down has always helped me to make sense of my feelings and to let go of some of the weight that I carry. And posting it here… well, this is where I’ve documented the ups and downs of my life for almost a decade (where all of that time went, I have no idea). To leave it out… I might as well give up posting entirely.

I feel lighter already.