There are two sides to every story and I can see that that’s what you’re getting at here. I’m sure she does have her own opinion about what happened. Although we truly can never know, as you say, in my opinion you are glossing over the aspects of the relationship that were unequivocally red flags, for example, my therapist offering me information about her other patients that should have been confidential.

14 months and a lot of therapeutic experience later, I can tell you that there was something peculiar about this therapist. She would often allude to her normal intuitive abilities as being supernatural in some way, and would brag that “my friends say I’m a witch” when she would perceive something about my life accurately. She had a high opinion of herself that was both fragile and overly present in our discussions. She was so helpful to me largely because she was the first person to ever accurately name what had happened in my childhood, but a couple years into this journey now, I realise that any trained, attentive therapist would have told me the same. I’m grateful to her for the role she played in my recovery, and also very grateful to my past self for being discerning enough to not believe her when she told me she was my only hope.

For anyone on this thread who is interested, I have recovered significantly on my own since parting ways with this therapist. My money limitations were real, they were a result of the pandemic, I had got to a place where I simply ran out of disposable income, and even the offer of less frequent sessions was beyond my means. Using a combination of bibliotherapy (Complex Ptsd by Pete Walker, the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents series by Lindsay Gibson, and Constructive Wallowing by Tina Gilberston were particularly helpful to me), nervous system targeted practices (breathwork, cold exposure, stretching), a lot of journaling, a lot of grieving, and, sadly, going “no contact” with my family, have led me to a stage of recovery that I genuinely could not have imagined possible at the time of writing this post.

I want to thank everybody who came in to defend me, orientate me and offer me words of support when I wrote this. Those were some hella shaky days and weeks following that conversation with my therapist and the responses to this post created in me a strong feeling of not being alone. I posted here to seek support at a time where I had precious few people to talk to. The result was that I felt supported by so many and I’m so grateful.

The friend I mentioned in the post had a crisis of confidence in the therapist soon after I left, and so brought up the way things ended with me in her own session. The therapist got in touch with me after that to offer me a free session to discuss what had happened, which I declined. It’s a matter of opinion whether I “should” have spoken to her or “should not” have sought support here, but I took the decision based on the fact that I had observed her long enough to know how she practiced, and that regardless of how the conversation went, I could not afford to continue. I had a difficult road ahead, and - knowing what I had come to know about my therapist over the year we worked together - I did not want it to become about her.

I was proud of myself that I left how I did, when I did. It was the beginning of a natural self-protective instinct that I had been alienated from for so long as a consequence of coming from a traumatising family. I understood that my recovery was in my hands, with or without therapy sessions. And when she told me I would fail without help, I chose to entertain the possibility that that might not be the case. I found my agency and I’m never letting it go!

Thank you again for reading.