I can’t drink Yorkshire Tea anymore. I haven’t gone off the taste. It’s just that, thanks to my former therapist, every sip tastes like betrayal.

Every session, she’d make me a cup of ‘Proper Strong Yorkshire Tea’, the only tea worth drinking, according to her. It started after I brought my own tea bags to an early appointment, to make a terrifying clinical space feel a bit safer. When she took over making it, I felt chosen. Special. I didn’t care whether it was her genuine preference or just an easy way to build rapport. It was our ritual.

It didn’t take much for me to get hooked. A trail of little things: a quick ‘Looooove Stevie Nicks’ email in reply to a music video I sent. Her telling me she’d gone down a Yiruma rabbit hole after I played a song in session. We joked about football, traded banter, and made light of my food struggles, or my lack of eating. I thought it was a deep connection. What it actually was, was boundaries I could never predict.

The line moved, and I never knew when. One day a vulnerable email would get a warm, personal reply. The next, an email in exactly the same tone would get nothing. Radio silence. For an autistic brain carrying attachment trauma, that kind of intermittent reinforcement is kryptonite. My pattern-seeking brain went into overdrive hunting for logic that wasn’t there.

I spent years trying to solve the equation of her boundaries. If I could just work out what made her pull back, I could fix it, adapt, make it safe again. It took until the very end to see that the target was moving, and I wasn’t the one moving it.

The tea, the music and the banter built rapport fast and anchored my loyalty. But the second I pointed out the power imbalance or questioned whether something was okay, the warm confidante was gone. What I got instead was a defensive clinician asking why I was going over old ground and why I didn’t trust her.

That’s the trap with the Yorkshire Tea stuff. It feels like an equal, human relationship, but one person holds all the authority and the other carries all the risk. Warmth that isn’t consistent stops working as safety and starts working as leverage, whether anyone means it to or not. And you end up blaming your own nervous system for not coping with rules that kept changing.