I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with the wreckage of therapy harm. Nobody in my life has had their trust taken apart by the person they paid to keep them safe, so the advice defaults to the only script anyone has: maybe you should talk to someone about it.

The official prescription for therapy harm is more therapy. Say that out loud and it sounds like a joke, because it is one.

I emailed new clinicians. I told them exactly what I needed to work through. Most didn’t write back at all. It turns out even therapists don’t know what to do with iatrogenic harm or they don’t want the liability of touching another practitioner’s collateral damage. I don’t completely blame them for that. It doesn’t change what it’s like to send that email into that vacuum, more than once.

The only place that has actually felt like being believed wasn’t in a consulting room. It was an online survivor group. A scroll of strangers describing, almost word for word, things I thought only happened to me. I read those posts at midnight feeling sick, because it meant none of this was rare. It’s a pattern. A whole quiet architecture of it.

Four complaints lodged now. Nowhere left to send anything. Months of forensic work, and I’m left with all this adrenaline and cortisol, and nowhere to put it. I’ve printed t-shirts (they’re good, genuinely), written thousands of words, and I still don’t know where the rest of it goes.

Here’s the part I keep hitting: none of the official channels were ever built to give a client accountability. The Board isn’t interested in whether I get closure. It’s interested in risk mitigation. If she says the right things in the right order, she keeps her registration and walks out with little more than a slap on the wrist. The ombudsman can’t force a private clinic to change how it operates, because it lacks the powers. Then there’s a civil case which, if I even had the stomach for one, just turns what happened into a number. A settlement isn’t her standing in front of me and saying what she did. It’s a cheque instead of that.

None of it makes her look me in the eye.

We’re taught to treat therapy like a kind of secular sacrament. It’s as though you hand someone a master’s degree and a small office and suddenly, they’re allowed to tear apart your psyche for three years, and when it goes wrong, the fix on offer is to trust that same kind of person to put it back together. I don’t know how to make that make sense.

I keep coming back to something the psychotherapist Farhad Dalal wrote – that therapy often runs as a political argument dressed up as a scientific one. It takes something happening to a person inside a system and turns it into something wrong with the person, rather than the system. Strip the language back and what it’s actually saying to someone falling apart is: think differently, feel differently, comply.

That’s what happened to me on paper. I have a twenty-page Treatment Summary that does exactly this. It reframes what was done to me as evidence I was always the difficult one, the dysregulated one, the problem to be managed, with no mention of how blurred the boundaries had been for the better part of three years. It’s a closed loop, and not just in my case: the system breaks the client, labels the break a symptom, and sells more treatment for the symptom it caused.

If therapy itself can be the thing doing the harm, going back into another room with another expert isn’t recovery. It’s just returning to the same machine and asking it to be gentler this time.

What’s actually helped so far: people who believe me without a title next to their name. Saying the truth out loud, together, instead of filing it somewhere only a board will read. I don’t need a room full of people in lanyards to tell me I’m allowed to speak.

If the system won’t give me accountability, I’m done waiting for it to change its mind. I have the pattern-recognition, I have the record, I have the words I already know how to use, and none of that institutional fuckery gets to keep happening quietly, not with me watching.

If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.