I first saw the plan for ending my therapy in writing over six weeks after shit had well and truly blown up in a dumpster fire. By then the decision had been made and the people around me had been told. I was the last to know.

I asked my therapist for transparency. Explicitly, two weeks before she decided to pull the rug from under me, I put it in writing that if something in the therapeutic relationship needed to change, I wanted transparency. Instead, my treating team was told before I was. The reason given was concern about risk. I can follow that reasoning. It doesn’t change the fact that the person the decision was about was the last person to find out about it.

The closest I can get to explaining how that feels is this. Imagine your manager at work. She has told you for years that she values you and will always be upfront with you. Behind the scenes, though, she has spent weeks talking to HR and senior staff about cutting your role. In your one-on-ones, nothing changes. You find out from a written summary sent by HR after the decision is made. You haven’t only lost the job. You go back through every conversation asking what was true, and you start looking at everyone who walked past you in the corridor and wondering what they knew. You start to question your entire reality.

It isn’t a perfect analogy. It doesn’t cover three years of weekly trust, with a therapist whose fundamental job is to be trustworthy, which is the part that makes this so much worse. To be honest, there isn’t an analogy that covers this fuckery. It does get the order right though: decisions being made and talked about, and only then do you get told.

What I needed was basic. I needed to be told by the person I trusted, before anyone else, through an open, honest discussion. For someone with PDA, that isn’t a courtesy. Being managed through what I’m told, or when I’m told, takes away the thing I most need to feel safe. Autonomy is the bedrock of my identity, and she knew that. Her theoretical understanding of PDA and how she applied it with me were worlds apart. In communication with my team, she seemingly felt that introducing a predetermined decision to me in stages was a way of respecting my autonomy. It wasn’t.

This situation would have been hard for any practitioner. After all, how do you tell a client that the boundaries have drifted for years and now need to be reset by pulling the pin? Nobody wants that conversation but hard doesn’t make it optional. It’s also not the conversation she has actually had. That isn’t a get out of jail free card. The better time to have it was early and often, in small, honest conversations, before the pressure built. Then maybe, just maybe, one wouldn’t end up in the situation my therapist found herself in. It includes small things. If you give a client something that carries meaning, say what you meant by it. I spent eighteen months turning one gesture over in my head. A sentence would have fixed that. Instead, I got silence.

The hardest part of this story is that people around me were worried, and some of them told me so at the time. I didn’t want to hear it. They just didn’t understand, I told myself. This is what a meaningful therapeutic relationship looks like, I told them (and had convinced myself of that, too). Others have since said they stayed quiet because they figured I wouldn’t have listened anyway. They were right.

I don’t know what to do with that, except to say that being the last to know isn’t only about what other people withhold. Some of it was me not being ready to hear. Regardless, the responsibility sits with the person who holds the trust and the power, to say the hard thing in a way I can take in. Both of those are true.

I was taught self-compassion. I’d have liked some from the person teaching it.