When therapy harms a client, the first question people often ask is whether the therapist meant to do it. It’s the wrong question.

Intent matters when we are judging a person’s character. It doesn’t decide whether the practitioner did their job safely. The Psychology Board of Australia’s current code of conduct says that ‘in law and ethics, the client is always considered to be the vulnerable party in the psychologist-client relationship, and it is the psychologist’s responsibility to maintain boundaries.’ The code doesn’t make that responsibility depend on the psychologist’s intent, and it couldn’t. A code of conduct exists to protect the public from harm. It sets a standard that a clinician’s conduct can be measured against, and it tells the public what they can expect and how to recognise when they aren’t getting it. If it applied only when a clinician meant harm, it wouldn’t protect anyone. I said some version of this to my therapist more than once: what is intended doesn’t erase impact.

The principle is then fairly simple. Once a clinician identifies that a boundary is eroding, or that a client is attaching, correcting the frame is their job. Identifying it and not correcting it is a failure of that responsibility and falls short of what the code expects. Whether they intended harm changes nothing about that.

A client can’t hold the frame. I tried. I told her, explicitly, about my transference towards her and my attachment. It wasn’t something left unsaid for her to guess at. I told her I needed an electric fence or a concrete fort when it came to boundaries. I relied on the person with the training and the authority to act on it. What I got was what I experienced as years of intermittent reinforcement and informality.

I can’t know where in the series of decisions things went wrong. An experienced clinician should have seen what was happening and corrected it somewhere along the way. I don’t know what supervision there was, or how thorough it was, and that is the point. If it was thorough, this got past the safeguard that exists to catch it. If it wasn’t, the safeguard wasn’t doing its job. Either way, the failure wasn’t simply one person’s judgment in one room. What I can know is that it went wrong for me, and I’m the one who has paid for it.

A practitioner who is the subject of a notification may well be distressed. I don’t doubt that. Shame and fear for their professional future are real, but the consequences aren’t symmetrical. She had the training and held the power. I brought the vulnerability and trust. A notification is a process that follows harm. It has a beginning, a decision and an end. The harm doesn’t come with any predictable sequence.

What it cost me wasn’t the loss of one person. It was slowly understanding that what I took as care was a relationship nobody was managing. It was coming to feel that my feelings didn’t matter. It cost me my sense of what was real. I don’t know what those hours were for her, and I can’t ask. The one place where my distress settled was also the place I didn’t fully trust, and I can’t separate the two. I’m now left questioning my own reality and my own judgement.

It shows up in my body. A sick feeling in my stomach, heartache, rage, and an urge to hurt myself to make the pain stop. That urge isn’t only an aftermath, either. It was part of the relationship itself. I was hurting myself in an attempt to numb pain that came from it. Only now, with support, can I see how closely that fits what is often called a trauma bond. I’m saying it because it’s part of what this did to me.

It cost me my sense of safety. Therapy was meant to be where I learned who I was. Instead, I was shapeshifting to suit who I thought she needed me to be, masked in that room because real vulnerability felt dangerous. Over three years, that became how I understood myself and what I could say. I have less idea who I am now than when I first walked into that room.

If you’ve been hurt by a therapist who seemed kind, you don’t need to prove they meant it. The question is what they knew, and what they did once they knew. This is why I no longer carry guilt about my decision to raise this formally. I spent years adjusting myself to how she might feel. I’m no longer willing to let that dictate my life.

That’s the reality of therapy harm.

If you’re struggling, in Australia, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.