Dear Therapist,
I’ve been trying to find the words for something that lives deeper than frustration or unmet needs. It’s not just about what therapy doesn’t give me. It’s about what it takes me back to.
The very structure of therapy, the frame, the rules, and the ethics are supposed to offer safety. But for me, it doesn’t always feel safe. It often feels eerily familiar, like the same dynamics I’ve spent my life trying to heal from.
When care is conditional, bound by appointment times, payment, and boundaries, that keep your humanity at a distance, I’m not just missing something. I’m being re-exposed to the emotional landscape of my past.
A Container That Hurts Like Home
The unspoken rule that I can only be cared for if I stay small and color within the lines. That love is professionalized. I can show my pain, but can’t ask for presence. That I have to tiptoe around someone else’s capacity or comfort or rules even when I’m drowning.
That’s not just sad. That’s re-traumatizing.
Not because you’re doing something wrong. But because the system is built around a version of care that tells me my longing for mutuality, resonance, and realness is “too much,” “unethical,” or “outside the scope.” And when that message is delivered, even unintentionally by someone I’ve opened myself to, it doesn’t just hurt. It opens up old wounds and lets them bleed all over again.
Artificial Intimacy, Real Wounds
The therapy box isn’t just a container. It’s a setup. One that invites me to trust, to open, to form attachment while structurally guaranteeing that the care I most yearn for will be kept just out of reach. It builds intimacy, but only artificial intimacy. Rapport, that’s meant to feel real but has limits. I’m not allowed to question without being pathologized. You’re allowed to care, but only within a frame. I’m allowed to feel, but not to need. The moment I do, the system reminds us that this isn’t love. It’s a service.
Transference or Betrayal?
And when I express that ache, I’m told it’s transference. A clinical term that essentially translates to your longing not being valid here. That’s not healing. That’s emotional gaslighting, a term that refers to the manipulation of someone into questioning their sanity or reality, wrapped in therapeutic language. This doesn’t just echo pain, it replicates the exact dynamics of abuse that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to survive.
When Therapy Becomes Another Abuse Cycle
In abuse, a child attaches to the very person who is unavailable, unsafe, or outright harmful because that’s the only option. There’s no escape. So the child adapts. They contort themselves. They try harder. They blame themselves. They learn to tolerate pain, gaslighting, rejection, and abandonment under the guise of love and protection.
Therapy mimics that. It says, “Trust me. Attach to me. Tell me everything. I’m here to help.” And then, when I reach for the kind of care my nervous system needs, mutual presence, felt safety, authentic connection, I’m told that’s not what this is.
The Wound of Termination
It’s a setup. And the betrayal lands even deeper because it’s intentional. It’s not accidental. It’s built into the model. The harm is systematized, rationalized, and then medicalized.
So when I cry out, it’s not just grief. Its recognition: Oh. I know this. I’ve been here before. This is what it feels like to be betrayed by someone I was told to trust.
And what makes it worse, what hurts the most is not just the system itself. It’s your compliance with it. Your participation in this dehumanizing framework, even if you don’t believe in all of it and hate it too, you still carry it out. And that means you still become the agent of that harm. That’s what breaks my heart.
And then there’s the unspoken and sometimes spoken goal of therapy, that one day I’ll be “terminated.” That if things go well this connection we built, will end. No contact. No checking in. No continuation. Just gone. Abandoned.
How Healing Feels Like Loss
Do you see how cruel that is?
To build trust, share my darkest hours, let myself attach maybe for the first time in a way that feels safe-ish and then be told that success means I won’t need you anymore.
My healing means walking away from a connection that may be the most consistent or attuned one I’ve ever known and pretending it never mattered. Coping with, preparing for, more loss, more grief.
You become important. You matter to me. And I’m asked to act like that’s temporary, like I was supposed to take the medicine, but not get attached to the hand that gave it. And yet, in this space, I am supposed to accept that you will one day discard or terminate me. That connection with you ends with progress.
That is a cruel, twisted contradiction. And for someone with a lifetime of abandonment wounds, it’s not just an ending. It’s a reenactment.
The Paradox I Need You to Hear
So yes, maybe therapy helped me survive. But it also hurt me in the exact ways I came here to heal. This paradox is something I need you to understand.
I need you to hear this.