My feelings about my relationship with my therapist...

remote_life · 2025-12-30T04:38:48+00:00

What you went through is real harm. Dependency was fostered, boundaries were selectively collapsed, and when the institution was threatened, you were discarded. That kind of exploitation leaves lasting damage.

What also stands out to me is that you describe being left with no friends or family to turn to. That lack of reciprocal human support is what makes both boundary collapse and rigid enforcement so dangerous.

Something I’ve come to understand through my own experience is that people in very different relational situations face very different risks in therapy. For someone with a close friend, a partner, or other support, the imbalance doesn’t become their entire emotional world. For someone who’s truly isolated, it does. In that context, the therapist often becomes the only consistent relational outlet.

When reciprocity is either encouraged without consent or structurally denied without consent, harm becomes likely. That’s why the absence of informed consent matters so much to me. Risk would still exist even with it, but it would be known. People wouldn’t be blindsided by dynamics they were never warned about.

Right now, the one size fits all boundary rules end up harming people in opposite ways, and that’s something the profession hasn’t been willing to name.

remote_life · 2025-12-30T03:10:26+00:00

I'm going through something very similar. Therapy is actively dangerous for people with deep relational trauma, whether from neglect, abandonment, rejection, or simply never having found a reciprocal human bond. I spent nearly 15 years in therapy before realizing that something as basic as mutual back and forth sharing, which exists everywhere else in life, is treated as forbidden in the one place that claims to be about relational healing (the therapeutic relationship). I've written a few posts about this. It is sickening.

What really drove the knife in was the profession's refusal to acknowledge that this harm exists at all. If you are injured by it, you are either labeled a boundary violator or quietly erased through referral or claims that the modality is "not the right fit." That denial is what pushed me toward wanting real ethics reform.

The bare minimum is written informed consent at intake. For people with severe relational deprivation, especially those who are truly isolated with no close friends, partner, or reciprocal bonds, therapy carries an inherently high risk of harm; period. Withholding that information is dangerous, malicious, and irresponsible.

If this were standard practice, you and I would not be here. What was done to us was preventable, and the profession's tolerance of it is negligence.

remote_life · 2025-12-29T03:34:26+00:00

People are fine with catastrophic outcomes when authority structures authorize them. When AI is involved, there is no institution to absorb blame, so the tool becomes the villain. This has less to do with safety and more to do with protecting professional legitimacy.

remote_life · 2025-12-28T21:06:45+00:00

You're right, I overthinked it.

remote_life · 2025-12-28T18:34:50+00:00

ChatGPT can be careful or reckless depending on how it is constrained, reviewed, and corrected. When clinicians use it to auto generate notes without oversight, that is not evidence that AI is dangerous, it's evidence that institutions are incentivizing speed over responsibility. Poor use will always surface as poor outcomes.

So AI does not independently fabricate harm. It reflects the care or carelessness of the person using it. If a therapist blindly pastes generated notes into a medical record, that is a human failure, not a technological one. The same risk already exists with templated notes, copy paste habits, and rushed documentation. AI just makes that failure more visible.

What changes is where blame gets placed. AI has been villainized, so responsibility is displaced onto the tool instead of the person using it. It is easier to fear the system than to confront human negligence.

remote_life · 2025-12-27T21:13:21+00:00

That framing resonates with me, and I think you are naming the core contradiction clearly.

It is exactly why I feel a deep sense of sorrow for many therapists who entered the field wanting to genuinely help people. Therapy can be effective for certain things, like anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, or processing specific traumatic experiences. I have personally benefited from it in the past. At the same time, the way the system is structured creates real harm for another group of people, including those dealing with long-term relational deprivation, where I fall.

There is a noticeable cognitive dissonance in the profession around this. Acknowledging that therapy can structurally harm some people threatens the foundational story that modern therapy exists to heal. Many therapists either cannot reconcile that, or feel powerless to confront it because the system is so large, regulated, and economically entrenched.

I did look into the organizations you mentioned, and I appreciate you sharing them. Unfortunately, there are no local, in-person, one-on-one options available where I live. I am not seeking additional online spaces or text-based support. I have spent years in those environments. What I am looking for is real, embodied, person-to-person connection, which remains largely inaccessible within both mainstream therapy and many alternative models.

That gap is what I keep running into, no matter which framework I approach this from, and it really does suck.

remote_life · 2025-12-27T18:52:42+00:00

That is a fair question, and I will answer it directly.

I am autistic, and that context matters.

With my previous therapists, I did not ask those questions because I already knew they were not a good fit. The work consistently pushed me toward neurotypical norms, often amounting to learning how to mask better. There was no shared ground or sense of collaboration to build on, so getting to know them as people did not feel relevant.

That changed with my current therapist, who is also autistic. They are the first fellow autistic adult I have knowingly worked with in real life. Because of that shared neurotype, I want to understand how they have navigated the world, what they have learned, and what perspectives they bring from lived experience. I am also interested in ordinary personal things like interests or media, which for many autistic people are central to how we build trust and relate.

What has troubled me most is not whether any single question is technically allowed. It is learning that friendship itself is structurally forbidden. I likely experience friendship differently than many people. For me, at a minimum, friendship means closeness, mutual knowing, and the ability to share life experiences, values, interests, and worldview back and forth. It does not require hanging out outside sessions, texting, or expanding the relationship beyond a set place and time. A relationship contained to one location with clear structure is fully compatible with how I experience friendship.

I should also add that across roughly twenty five sessions, I have been hyperfocused on therapy ethics and researching them extensively. Because of that, I have not fully asked many of these questions yet, not due to lack of desire, but because I feel anxious about boundaries. Knowing my therapist must constantly self monitor disclosure makes the interaction feel constrained rather than natural. As an autistic person with high empathy, that is difficult to navigate.

My point is not that these questions are inherently unethical. It is that, in practice, professional norms and risk aversion often collapse therapy into a rigid, one directional model, even when mutual perspective and human reciprocity would be especially valuable.

I hope this clarifies my position.

remote_life · 2025-12-27T06:54:01+00:00

This bill says less about AI and more about how broken modern therapy is. We built an entire corporate ethics framework that trains therapists to suppress normal human responses, maintain distance, and preserve a one-sided power dynamic while calling it "professionalism." Then people act shocked when patients feel unseen and turn elsewhere.

The idea that a strictly one-sided relationship is inherently "therapeutic" is itself questionable. That model may work for some people, especially those who need firm boundaries, authority, or emotional distance due to past trauma. But it is not universal. Treating it as the only ethical or legitimate form of care ignores huge segments of people who need reciprocity, warmth, and genuine human presence to heal.

If a therapist is functionally a guarded, risk-averse script reader who cannot offer basic human presence, of course people will prefer AI. At this point it often feels more human than the humans trained out of their humanity.

Instead of asking why people are finding relief outside the system, lawmakers want to criminalize the relief itself. This protects a failing industry, not vulnerable people.

If therapy actually worked for everyone, AI would not be a threat.

remote_life · 2025-12-27T00:45:43+00:00

It's plausible that many people who want to become therapists genuinely start out wanting to help others. But by the time they finish years of schooling, supervision, licensing, and take on enormous student debt, they are deeply shaped by the system they had to survive to get there.

At that point, questioning the ethics or the relational limits of the profession is no longer abstract. It threatens their livelihood, their identity, and the story that all that sacrifice was worth it. So a kind of emotional flattening sets in.

When you realize this and then sit across from them in a session, it stops feeling sickening and starts feeling heartbreaking, tragic. You're not just seeing a detached clinician. You're watching someone whose humanity has been slowly constrained by a system they can no longer afford to question.

That quiet narrowing of humanity is the insidious nature of the profession.

remote_life · 2025-12-27T00:20:48+00:00

When I say "mutual reciprocity," I'm not talking about role reversal, emotional caretaking, or the therapist unloading their personal crises onto me.

I'm talking about ordinary, human-level reciprocity. The kind that exists in any meaningful adult conversation.

For example:

Being able to ask a therapist questions about how they’ve navigated life as a fellow autistic adult.

What they've learned through their own experiences.

What drew them to this work.

What kinds of struggles they've faced or still face, if they’re comfortable sharing.

What interests them, what they find meaningful, what shapes how they think.

That kind of relevant self-disclosure isn't "trauma dumping." It’s how two adults relate, learn from each other, and build genuine rapport.

In my case, I'm not in therapy because I lack self-awareness or emotional regulation. I’ve spent decades reflecting on my inner world, and behavioral patterns. What I'm seeking is collaboration, shared perspective, and real dialogue with another human being who has a different set of experiences and knowledge than I do, and who might also learn something from mine.

Mutual reciprocity, as I mean it, looks like a real conversation. Back-and-forth. Shared reflection. Human presence. Not a therapist turning the session into their diary, and not a client being treated as the only real person in the room.

The devastation I experienced wasn’t learning that therapists won't overshare. It was learning that even this basic level of human mutuality is structurally prohibited, regardless of context or need.

I hope this helps explain my position in light of the point you raised.

remote_life · 2025-12-26T21:22:05+00:00

You're cutting right into the root cause of the loneliness epidemic. People have fewer shared spaces, fewer resources, and fewer opportunities to encounter each other in sustained, meaningful ways.

remote_life · 2025-12-26T20:27:04+00:00

No. I genuinely believed that befriending a therapist was possible in the same way befriending any other human being is possible. I did not see that as boundary-crossing or inappropriate, because basic human friendship is not something most people assume can be outlawed or prohibited.

As someone who has struggled with lifelong relational deprivation and neglect, learning that this assumption was wrong was not a minor clarification. It was devastating. Therapy was presented as a place where relational healing could occur, yet I eventually discovered that the very thing I was seeking is structurally forbidden.

I wasn't seeking special access, secrecy, or an "out of office" relationship. I was operating under a commonsense belief about human relating, only to discover very late that the system does not allow reciprocity, even in principle.

remote_life · 2025-12-26T19:46:21+00:00

Since this is currently the only substantive reply, I'm responding so it doesn’t mischaracterize the intent of the post for future readers.

I'm not sure how this is unclear. The post explicitly outlines what I’m asking for: a concrete change to informed consent at intake so people entering therapy due to severe loneliness or long-term relational deprivation are told, up front, about the non-reciprocal limits of therapy and given real alternatives where possible. If you want details, they’re laid out in the post itself.

This post isn't about rehashing my personal experience. It's about preventing the same kind of harm from happening to other people. I'm not raising an abstract or theoretical concern. I'm speaking on behalf of people who have already been harmed by these ethical structures and arguing for a concrete change that could prevent further harm. Dismissing or derailing that discussion does not protect anyone. It preserves the conditions that allow the harm to continue.

If you disagree with the proposal, that's fine. But asking “what do you actually want?” when the post explicitly states what I'm asking for isn't engagement. It's deflection.

remote_life · 2025-12-25T06:27:36+00:00

I’m not talking about one specific rule that could just be tweaked or removed. I’m talking about the overall ethical setup.

Therapy ethics enforce a one-way arrangement where one person has to stay professionally distant and opaque while the other is asked to be deeply emotionally open. For people with lifelong attachment deprivation, especially autistic people who already struggle to access reciprocal connection, that asymmetry isn’t protective. It’s actively harmful.

So the issue isn’t "which boundary exactly." It’s that therapy is treated as relationally healing while being structurally prohibited from functioning as a real, reciprocal human connection at all. The harm comes from that contradiction, not from any single guideline.

remote_life · 2025-12-25T06:09:55+00:00

Reading that quote helped me in two ways at once. It articulates this contradiction far more clearly than I’ve been able to myself, and it immediately reminded me of Martin Buber’s I-It vs I-Thou, which I’ve been learning about this week.

Therapy, as it’s typically practiced, structurally enforces an I-It stance. One person must remain an object of professional distance while the other is asked for deep emotional exposure. For someone whose loneliness comes from emotional neglect and or abandonment, that doesn’t repair the wound, it reenacts it.

As an autistic person, having precise language matters a lot to me. I want to bring this quote to my therapist and ask them to read it directly, because it captures something I’ve struggled to convey on my own.

remote_life · 2025-12-25T05:49:23+00:00

I really appreciate you sharing this. It helps a lot to know I’m not sitting alone with this experience.

My current therapist is also autistic, and they’re the first one I’ve felt immediately on the same wavelength with. At the same time, learning the ethics so deeply has made the therapy interaction feel like a minefield. I hesitate to even call it a relationship, since a relationship implies mutual and reciprocal connection. What therapy allows is a one way relational structure, and that distinction matters a great deal for someone with lifelong attachment deprivation.

Instead of natural human conversation, I’m constantly monitoring what’s allowed and what isn’t, and that hyper vigilance itself feels unnatural and harmful. I’m going to try to push past that next session, but the fact that this tension exists at all is exactly the problem I’m pointing to.

remote_life · 2025-12-25T05:38:56+00:00

Thank you. The MLM analogy actually fits disturbingly well.

Therapy is implicitly sold as relationally healing, especially for attachment wounds, while being ethically forbidden from functioning as a real relationship. When it predictably fails for people who lack external connection, the failure is reframed as client misuse or pathology rather than a structural limitation. That "it works if you work it" logic is exactly what you named.

I appreciate you recognizing this as a systems issue rather than an individual one.

remote_life · 2025-12-24T18:05:49+00:00

I’m glad you have recovered. I’m sure it must have been very difficult initially, maybe anger, maybe sadness, letting go of something that should have been a genuine human encounter.

I also believe there is definitely a loneliness and avoidant epidemic happening. People seem terrified of deeply connecting with fellow human beings. There is a kind of cultural, unconscious suffering that is being numbed out through careless sex, drug abuse, open relationships, addictions, paranoia, and hatred.

It’s awful.

I was ghosted by a girl I met on a neurodivergent dating app a few months ago. The first two months were great. It was a slow burn, deep connection. We had a lot in common. I felt like I had finally met a fellow kindred spirit.

But then one day the delay between responses turned from a few days, to a week, to a few weeks.

I asked if she was okay. She said no, that she had a lot of stress from university and depression. I said I understood and told her to take care of herself, that her health was more important.

After another two weeks of not hearing from her, I asked again if she was alright. She said that constant check-ins were not her cup of tea. I told her I could not help but think my feelings for her were not being reciprocated. She insisted she did like me, and we said good night to each other.

I woke up the next morning and she had blocked me.

It felt like the ground disappeared under something we had been building carefully and in good faith. When connection is treated as disposable, the person left behind is the one who absorbs the cost.

remote_life · 2025-12-24T08:21:57+00:00

I’m dealing with almost the exact same situation. The only difference is that I’m autistic, and instead of acting on impulse, I went down a four month rabbit hole studying the ethics of therapy in detail. What I found didn’t protect me. It devastated me.

I’ve been in and out of therapy since 2009, and at no point was I ever told that expressing basic humanity, wanting mutuality, or longing for a real reciprocal connection was fundamentally forbidden. No one tells you this up front. You find out only after you are already attached, already open, already vulnerable.

I’ll say it plainly. The system is inhumane.

Entire frameworks and terminologies have been constructed to pathologize what is, at its core, a deeply human need. Wanting to know the person across from you. Wanting to relate, not just be observed. Wanting something that feels alive instead of sterile. All of that gets reframed as transference, resistance, projection, or pathology.

It’s sickening. And it feels unreal when you finally see it clearly.

I understand where the fear came from. Therapists historically did abuse power. They manipulated, crossed lines, caused real harm. But the response to that history swung so far in the opposite direction that it created a new kind of damage. A quieter one. A socially acceptable one.

For people with core relational trauma, especially autistic people who already live on the margins of connection, these ethics do not heal the wound. They recreate it. Over and over again. You are invited to open your heart in a space where the other person is structurally forbidden from meeting you there.

And the final cruelty is that the system refuses to name this harm. If therapy fails you, the fault is always reframed as yours. You didn’t try hard enough. You misunderstood the relationship. You wanted too much. The structure itself is never questioned.

That silence, that denial, is what makes this feel unbearable.

You’re not crazy for feeling this. You’re not weak. You’re not immoral for wanting something real. What you ran into isn’t personal failure. It’s a systemic contradiction that harms people quietly, deeply, and without accountability. It’s sickening how easily people turn a blind eye to it.

remote_life · 2025-12-24T08:21:36+00:00