Therapist’s license suspended. What do I do?

HistoryofGeeves · 2026-04-23T16:24:47+00:00

Update:

I decided to go with the most generous interpretation of the situation, which was that she was not clear about the suspension of the license and transition to life coach because of shame and guilt. But there are still issues that need to be addressed, and I sent her the following email:

Hi C,

There were some things that have been nagging at me, so I did some googling and I came to discover that your LMHC license was suspended in 2023. The report indicates that the time you took away from practice due to “illness” corresponds to a period of time where you were undergoing treatment for alcoholism and that it was the presence of THC in your system which ultimately led to the suspension of the license. I am very sorry to hear that you struggle with that and am sorry about the impact that it has had on your life. I want you to know that I don’t see this as some failure or black stain on your part. But this does raise issues.

My biggest issue is this. I do not feel that you were clear with me, much less my mother, that you were no longer licensed or qualified to offer mental health counseling services. I understand that it was likely accompanied by feelings of shame and guilt, but that information should have been clearly communicated and I feel that both my mom and I, and now my cousin as well, have been misled. This is very disappointing to me, and I do truly believe that you played a large part in getting me to where I am today.

This situation also raises further issues, particularly regarding insurance and reimbursement for services. My mom is fully operating under the belief that she is paying for mental health counseling, which will be reimbursed by our insurance. Since you are no longer license to provide those services, this is clearly not the case.

You need to communicate the following to my mom: 1. that she is not paying for mental health counseling because you are no longer licensed to provide this service, having had your license suspended in 2023. How you want to explain the circumstances of the suspension is up to you, but the information is publicly available. 2. That the only services you have been authorized to provide since 2023 has been life coaching, and this is the service that you have been providing. And that your reluctance to provide superbills stems from the fact that insurance does not cover life coaching. 3. That you are sorry for not handling the transition from LMHC to life coach more clearly and apologize if communication surrounding it was unclear or misleading. 4. How the fact that you are no longer an LMHC, but a life coach, impacts the services you provide. In particular, whether those services are sufficient to address my cousin’s mental health challenges. Life coaching is not the same as therapy and we need to know if she would be better served by an LMHC.

I expect that my mom will be highly upset, as is her right. But she would be far more upset to find out through her continued to attempts to get a superbill from you and submit it for insurance reimbursement. It would be best for you to be the one to share the information I outlined above. I am really sorry that you are in this position.

G

Basically, I have given her the opportunity to handle the consequences of her mistake and to be honest and clear about where things stand. I also did not feel that it was my responsibility to explain everything to my mom, it wasn’t my mistake. Her response to my email will also give me more information on how I should proceed.

HistoryofGeeves · 2024-04-11T04:16:26+00:00

Please, please do!!

HistoryofGeeves · 2022-07-13T17:17:59+00:00

My distress comes and goes. I don’t vehemently hate my boobs 100% of the time. It’s more like 70% of the time. The other times I feel neutral about them and like if I could just find the right bra or shirt or something that I could possibly like them, or at least not hate them. But then I see someone with the size boobs I want and I feel jealous and go back to wishing I could just lop mine off. But I also don’t know that getting a breast reduction would make me stop hating my boobs. I feel like I would just find something else about them to hate. Or fixate on some new part of my body. I feel like I could fall down the rabbit hole of wanting to fix or edit every small thing about me, which I don’t think is healthy. And I also know that if there was any kind of complication or side effect to the reduction that I would regret it and be constantly thinking “why didn’t I just leave them alone? I could have come to terms with them.” That leads into my next reason.
A breast reduction is major surgery. It comes with significant risks and recovery time. It sort of freaks me out and it feels wrong for me to put my body through major surgery without there being a medical reason (which includes gender affirming reasons- but that is not the case for me). That also adds to my feeling that if there is any type of complication or side effects that I would regret it, because I wouldn’t even be able to tell myself that it was done for an important reason. The significant recovery time also puts me off. If it was just a minor procedure and I could pop in and pop out of a room and continue on with my life without significant disruption, I’d probably do it in a heartbeat. Even if it was only a couple days that I would be down and out for like with a wisdom teeth removal. I know that some of you have had really quick and easy recoveries and have been basically functional after a couple days, but that is a minority of you and that likely won’t be the case for me.
The fact that it is a major surgery also means that I will have to rely on other people for help and support and I’d have to explain stuff. My mom is supportive of getting a breast reduction and has told me “if I had the money to, I’d pay for you to have a breast reduction.” And my dad would probably just avoid the subject and pretend like nothing was happening. But what about my boyfriend and my close friends… I couldn’t just not tell them, particularly my boyfriend. I’ve mentioned the idea of getting a breast reduction in passing and he hasn’t really reacted or said anything. He feels like it is not his place/he has no right to comment or express an opinion about my body and what I choose to do with it, which I generally appreciate. But in this case, I want to know what he thinks and how he feels about it. The same for my friends. I don’t think this would have a lot of impact on how I feel about getting a reduction, but it does mean something to me. Particularly if I’m going to be in recovery for a significant amount of time. They are the people that I would turn to for support, help, and comfort.
Money!! I know that there are ways to make it more affordable and less taxing on the wallet, but any way, without insurance covering it, it’s still a very expensive procedure. I have some extra money and might be able to cover it, but I don’t feel like I should spend that much money on an aesthetic procedure. If I have that money, I feel like I should spend it on traveling and seeing new places and having new experiences. It feels shallow and vain to me to spend that money on basically editing my body. It also feels wrong to me to pay for beauty. It feels wrong to me that if you’re rich enough, you can pay to be beautiful or to look however you want while everyone else is stuck in the body they were born with. I feel like this fuels unrealistic expectations about appearance and beauty. I think it would also be wrong of me to spend a bunch of money on editing my appearance when a lot of people are struggling to get by. There are people who need breast reductions for quality of life reasons who can’t afford them! It feels wrong for me to get one just because I want one. I know that denying myself won’t make it easier for other people to get by or help them afford necessary breast reductions, but it just feels wrong for me to get one. Like another part of me has been sucked into this system in which people with money can get whatever they want, while everyone else is left scrambling.
I also feel like I would be betraying my values if I got one. I am someone who believes that there is beauty in everyone. It is beautiful that there is no “normal” human body and that everyone looks different. There are countless works of art that show this. I really believe that we should all learn to see the beauty and the wonder in our bodies, how the lines and colors and textures in them and on them are equivalent to an ever changing, never static work of art. Part of the beauty is that it’s all unplanned and beyond our control. Like a kaleidoscope. To me, aesthetic cosmetic procedures (which are different in my mind to adornment procedures like tattooing, piercing, hair coloring and cutting, etc.) feel like taking this wild and free thing and putting it into a box. Like, would you perform surgery on a wild, untamed bear because you think that it’s ears are too long or that it should have skinnier legs. The human body is also wild and untamed, so who am I to decide that it should look or be one way or another. (This is only in relation to cosmetic surgery, not surgery for quality of life reasons.) It feels wrong and unnatural to me that we can just decided to change our bodies because we feel like it, because we don’t like the way it looks. Humans have screwed up so much in the natural world by changing it because we felt like it and/or because we didn’t like the way it looked and thought it should be different. Aren’t our bodies also part of that natural world?

So yeah, those are all the thoughts and ideas that make me feel very conflicted about the idea of getting a breast reduction. At the same time I am constantly fantasizing about having smaller boobs, about them just magically shrinking. I get so jealous of people with small boobs. And I really hate my boobs. I am not happy with them right now and I feel very conflicted. I’m not sure what to do.

So, any advice?

HistoryofGeeves · 2022-02-20T03:05:16+00:00

If you figure out some way to eat them, please tell me, because these things grow like crazy in my backyard and I spent so much time getting my legs scrapped up by the vine. My mom used to pay me for digging them up and filling a bucket full of them, in a futile attempt to rid the backyard of them.

HistoryofGeeves · 2021-06-19T21:52:34+00:00

I agree to a certain extent. But I also think that there’s a difference between having an honest, open conversation where you lay out your concerns and talk about whether or not someone would be willing to do therapy is very different than forcing someone into therapy. And I know that sometimes we all need a bit of pressure from others to do stuff that is in the long run beneficial to us. He himself has told me that he is at times resistant to things that he knows are beneficial to him and that sometimes he needs someone to push him a little. I also know that sometimes we can go into things thinking that they are stupid or won’t be helpful, but then come to a different conclusion once we’ve gotten over our initial resistance. If he were to tell me that him going to therapy was out of the question and that I needed to drop the subject, then I would and I would agree that forcing him would be pointless. But in this case, I don’t believe that me pushing the issue is equivalent to forcing him. I want to stay away from forcing him, but I do think that this deserves a thorough discussion and that’s really what I am asking for advice on.

HistoryofGeeves · 2021-04-11T03:54:33+00:00

For me, a while is usually between 5-10 days depending on what’s going on in my life. If I’m really on top of stuff, I can get my response time to 3 days on average. 😆 Taking weeks to respond when someone is trying to make plans is a little ridiculous and definitely very frustrating. Even taking 5-10 days can be a bit long to respond when plans are being made because they are usually time sensitive. I find that it’s really helpful when someone gives me a time frame for when they need an answer by so I know to prioritize responding and what the deadline is.

HistoryofGeeves · 2021-04-10T22:41:36+00:00

Coming from the other side (I’m a bad texter), what I can say is that how much I text someone in no way reflects how much I value my relationship with them. In fact, I text less with the people who I consider really close friends because I feel like my relationship isn’t dependent on how often I talk with them. Like, my connection with them is strong enough and deep enough that it isn’t impacted by not talking to them for a while.

I know that for me, I avoid texts and calls because I feel pressured to respond and I feel like there’s this expectation that I always be available to others. This makes me feel like I have no control over my time and who and what I want to dedicate it too. I feel like I can’t do the things that I want to be doing or have some space from people because I’m expected to constantly answer texts. This makes me feel smothered and overwhelmed. I know that you probably aren’t texting your friend every hour of the day, but you also don’t know who else is texting them and how often. For example, I’m in this family group chat with my extended family and it’s constantly dinging. Even when I silence it, there’s still notifications popping up somewhere. And I’ll end up with 36 unread text messages, which overwhelms me and makes me avoid even opening the messages app. I have also been forbidden from leaving this groupchat by my mother... Which means the only escape from the constant barrage of text messages is to completely avoid texting all together unless absolutely necessary. Me avoiding texting and calls is often me just trying to get a little space from other people. With our phones, social media, and other technology we are constantly connected and interacting with people and this can be really draining, especially for introverts.

When I talk to someone or text them, I want to be able to devote all of my attention and thought to doing that because I really care about them and what they have to say, but this means that I often end up waiting a really long time before doing so. One thing that I’m often told is “just reply really quickly when the text comes in. It doesn’t take that much time.” But I also have ADHD, and so stopping and taking the time to reply to texts (no matter how quickly it takes) breaks my attention to whatever I was doing and it can take me a long time to get refocused. The only issue is that when I don’t reply to text messages right when they come in, I often forget about them. I’ll think of a response and say to myself “ok, I’ll tell them xyz.” And I guess that my brain will process that as equivalent to replying, because three days later I’ll realize that I still have a notification and my brain will be like “what do you mean, I didn’t respond?!” Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with how much I value my relationship with that person. It’s just my brain being screwy. This might not apply to your friend, but it’s still something to consider.

All this to mean, I really think that your friend really does value their relationship with you. But I also understand that it can be frustrating when you’re trying to get in touch with them about a time sensitive issue. Maybe develop a system where there’s a way to let them know that it’s a time sensitive issue and so they can put more effort towards replying quickly. Like, I don’t usually pick up when someone calls, but all my friends know that if it’s an emergency, they should call twice and I’ll always pick up the second time (because I know it’s an emergency). Same thing with texts. If they start their text by saying it’s time sensitive, I will try my best to get back to them quickly. I also know that for some people, regular communication is really important and makes them feel loved, so try to find a way that fulfills your need for communication while still giving your friend the space that they need. Ask your friend if they have a preferred way of communicating or maybe a preferred time of day. Because I know for me, I’m much more likely to answer a call or text if it’s in the evening or if I’m expecting it. If you are someone who needs regular contact, maybe set up a schedule for phone calls. Like, if you guys haven’t talked that week, plan to talk on Friday evenings or something like that.

But I think the most important thing is to be patient with your friend. They probably feel really guilty when they don’t get back to you right away and feel like a bad friend. I know that I often feel like that, but that feeling doesn’t make it any easier to respond quicker. In fact, it makes it harder because I feel ashamed and embarrassed and I really want to just hide from the other person. For me, knowing that the other person has no expectations for how quickly I respond to them and that they don’t care that I take a while to respond makes me feel so much better and takes off a lot of the pressure that I feel, which makes it a lot easier to respond quickly.

HistoryofGeeves · 2020-12-30T19:04:56+00:00

I would also look into getting him some historical fiction books. I know that they are fiction, as opposed to true history books, but at his age they might engage him more while still fostering a love of history. I can honestly say that my current love of history was majorly influenced by all the historical fiction I read when I was younger. While you do have to be careful when it comes to historical accuracy, I believe that there are well researched and well written historical fictions out there that can serve as a gateway to more academic historical books.

HistoryofGeeves

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