Today is the first day I haven’t sat with documents open on my screen, going over them with a fine-tooth comb. My OT asked me to look for the little glimmers. This is one. This is what progress looks like now.

When you’ve spent three years with a therapist slowly becoming the centre of your orbit, and only realise in hindsight how damaging the relationship was, progress gets small. For the past three months, the regulatory process has kept her right there in the middle. I’ve been trying so hard to stop rehashing my notifications all day long. It’s been hard.

What’s helped is listening. I’ve been working through podcasts about what I went through, from survivors of therapy harm and clinicians alike, and I’m starting to see the light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Writing a statement of impact helped me pull my feelings together. I’m realising that while my therapist may not have intended to ‘abuse’ me, the way boundaries were blurred led to an abuse of power. Whatever you want to call it, it resulted in harm to me.

One of those podcasts was with a clinician who is also a survivor of therapy harm. She talked about how little training therapists get on what boundary breaches and violations actually do to clients. The training, apparently, focuses primarily on what they mean for the clinician’s registration.

Sure, registration matters. It’s their livelihood, but is that seriously the most important part? Shouldn’t clinicians, and the people training to become clinicians, be taught why those boundaries exist in the first place? To prevent harm to the client.

My own case shows why that matters. I don’t believe the harm was intended. The boundaries got blurred over three years, and the harm happened anyway. My clinician was quick to spot boundary problems in someone else’s work. There seemed to be far less insight into what was going on in her own therapy room. Insight only gets you so far.

Here’s what I think needs teaching.

Boundaries rarely collapse all at once. They often erode slowly, one small exception at a time, and each one is easy to justify on its own. Supervision is supposed to be where that gets caught. When it isn’t used properly, or when a clinician’s ego gets in the way, the erosion carries on until the damage is done. I’m not saying that’s what happened in my case. I don’t know what went on in her supervision. I do know what slow erosion feels like from the client’s chair, though.

Clinicians should be taught what inconsistency does to an attached client. A boundary that’s only enforced some of the time doesn’t get clearer. It teaches the client to keep trying, because sometimes it works. Then the client’s attachment gets labelled as the problem, when the pattern feeding it was coming from both sides of the room.

They should be taught that managing all of this is their job. Clients bring their histories, their wounds and their attachment patterns into therapy. That’s the whole point of therapy. Holding the frame around all of it is what the clinician is there for.

I do believe therapy can help people, but boy can it fuck with a person’s head when it goes wrong.

I’m lucky in many respects. I’ve joked that I’m such a head case I needed a two-therapist solution. Alongside everything that happened with my psychologist, I had a counsellor supporting me. She’s one of the main reasons I haven’t lost faith in therapy, and moreover, why I haven’t completely lost the plot.

So, I did laugh when I read my psychologist suggesting, in her treatment summary and other documents, that I could benefit from therapy with a clinical psychologist. I read it as though, in the therapist hierarchy, my counsellor was the inferior option. She, however, isn’t the one I’ve had to lodge a complaint about.

Hierarchy noted. I’ll stick with the inferior option.