Dropping a Therapist: When You’re No Longer Your Own Worst Nightmare

In early 2019, I started looking for a therapist because I figured they might be a useful tool in my quest to become less verbally abusive and hypercritical to my husband. After much fuckery with insurance, I found a practice that had the office hours I needed. The woman I met with was actually a good fit: she was incisive, sarcastic, funny, kept up with my wit, and wasn’t afraid of my intensity. She even had personal and professional experience with queerness and nonmonogamy, and some familiarity with BDSM.

Tragically, we only met twice. Her adolescent daughter’s clusters of physical symptoms had finally been diagnosed. It was incurable and horrible (but not terminal), so this therapist was dropping all but her longest term clients. Totally understandable; I wish her nothing but the best. She told me she was referring me to a woman who was the one she would talk to when she had problems; a woman who was “sarcastic and funny and cut right to the point.”

This was the first of many lies.

During my first appointment with my new therapist, I flashed back to my time at the female-dominated workplace and its denizens. These women were horrifically controlling and nosey, happy to smile to anyone’s face and report to HR and managers behind our backs. They were all overweight, taking advantage of their husbands having better jobs, helicopter parenting children who rebelled just to have a breath of fresh air, and drowning their general sense of self-worthlessness in a combination of overbearing office politics and wasteful office parties.

This therapist had all their features: dumpy body, the bottle blonde, the grey shawl wrapped around her… the most unique thing about this 30–40yo woman was her voice. Imagine Fran Drescher, but with a Midwest accent.

“Okay,” I said to myself as I sat down on the over-cushioned loveseat drowning in pillows, “I’m going to try to keep an open mind. I have a specific goal and I can get her to specifically help me with it, and I don’t want to be seen as a therapy-shopper by people who know I’m here.” The practice hadn’t granted her access to my previous therapist’s notes, so it was perfectly practical to do the assessment questions again. Thing is, having just been through their assessment, I knew these weren’t those questions. She was going down the checklist for Borderline Personality Disorder!

Now, with what I came in for, how I described myself, and the fact that I brought BPD and Narcissism up from my own research, it was a reasonable move (I guess? Despite not having my notes?). However, in the second session she demonstrated such incredibly strong researcher bias that she thought I couldn’t hold a job. Half my out-of-college years have been at the same job, the other for the same temp agent.

And then she asked me, “Why aren’t you in college?”

Now, I’m sure she thought my offended and incredulous answer was a pompous overreaction, but I’d told her in the previous session I had a BA, and my previous therapist and I had talked about college. That therapist had even noted it as a key to come back to, with good reason. So, this is how I found out that Fran Drescher still didn’t have my notes, two sessions and three weeks in. We laughed it off, backtracked, repaired, and she sent a message requesting access again. But… she never quite picked up that my BA is in Psychology, or that my academic track record existed, let alone indicated that I’m consistently a high achiever and outlier for anything that can be assessed.

After that second appointment, my husband was telling me to drop her even more urgently than after the first session. In that first session I said, “Live and die by Google Calendars,” when we were scheduling our next appointments. She replied, “Oh, god, I know. I have one on each of my three devices, and one in my dining room and one on my desk at home. And one here.” I barely avoided laughing at her disorganization and inefficiency. My saintly husband did it for me. He knows I am nothing if not pragmatic, and that was his first sign to tell me to find someone else. He was also the one who suggested we look her up on LinkedIn: her experience was mainly battered women and stereotypical BPD people. My husband said those things really didn’t fit me, and I’m inclined to defer to his judgement.

Since I trust the person who knows me most intimately, I called the office two days after my second appointment, and asked who else they might have to see. I admit, I was awkward because it was the middle of the day at work and finding somewhere private enough was dicey. I ended up saying, “Well, maybe if she sees my prior therapist’s notes it’ll improve. I know two sessions is a bit short to get to know someone.” I shouldn’t have discounted my gut feeling, but at least I’m getting a full-length article out of it. And, of course, the secretary immediately granted her access to those notes.

Enter the third therapy session. I figured the assistant would have forgotten to tell the therapist, and that she wouldn’t know unless the system was automated. So, I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t bring it up. She asked me how my week had been, and I said, “Before that, did you get access to my notes?” Her face went sort of expectantly blank. “I called last Thursday or Friday and they said they gave it to you.” Her eyes widened slightly, and I could see the wheels turning like any kid who forgot their homework. She decided on a half lie. “Oh, yeah, I got that notification,” she said quickly, looking at her tablet. “I forgot about it,” she brought it up and read the first two lines and concluded she would read it in full later.

In all fairness, I should have walked then and there. I don’t know why I stayed longer. Maybe I just wanted my money’s worth since I thought I would be charged a full session either way. She asked me how my day was, so I told her about work. I tried to dismiss it as “typical manufacturing megalomania,” and she kept digging in to it. Finally, she said that we had planned on talking about my ex. I responded that I had processed through that a lot more and only needed him back in my life if the fallout from my surgery proceeded to the point that it required corroboration and witnesses. Naturally that led to us discussing the surgery, and then to her focusing in on my phobia of needles.

We started with the fact that the anesthesiologist looked me in the eye and lied to me after absolutely no one had taken notes despite my openness about what I needed to manage my phobia and get through shoulder surgery. Waking up with that thing in my arm was bad enough. Realizing he had lied when he said I wouldn’t wake up with anything in me was so very much worse. Cue the first full blown panic attack I have ever had in my life: within 10 minutes of waking up from anesthesia, my heart rate was 140BPM and I was screaming his job review at the top of my lungs. I am eternally grateful to my ex for being there, and I couldn’t have asked for someone better in that situation than a professional bouncer. Later, a nurse said, “Most people do that for attention, but you really do have a phobia. Your heart rate went right down when we took it out of you!”

From this injury and insult, the therapist and I walked back to any bad experiences I may have had to become phobic. I always felt dismissed and uncared for in the medical field; I tried to be succinct to get us back on track with discussing my relationships. She probably felt the same way, but took a very different and seemingly uneducated tack. She railroaded her way past relating my phobia to my temporary dependency on my ex and the eventual breakdown of our relationship as exacerbated by the surgery and subsequent caretaking. Instead, she wanted to get right back to her field of interest: Borderline Personality Disorder.

Midwestern Fran Drescher asked me, in the most carefully modulated tone of concern, “So, you feel helpless and out of control when you feel manipulated?”

The five second pause on my part didn’t do justice to the myriad of problems with her statement racing through my head. A panic disorder generally manifests as being out of control, and I was fresh out of anesthesia. Why would that have anything do with manipulation? I was helpless in the face of medical staff manipulating my unconscious body, but that was why my ex was there. I had done my best to communicate my needs at every visit, but had been ignored. And again, I was being ignored. This was, unfortunately, the last straw.

My animated storytelling snapped into deep incredulity as I asked her a question that I knew would end the session that never should have been. “Are you *aware* the *definition* of ‘phobia’?”

It was Fran’s turn for a pause in which I could see her 8 years of student loan debt lighting her internal flames. “Did you… just ask me… if I’m aware of the definition of ‘phobia’?”

My respect demolished at this point; I delivered my “Yeah!” with the tone of a teenager who’s lost their last shred of patience.

Before I go any further, the definition of a phobia is “an irrational fear.” Not only was she trying to relate the abuse I’ve given and taken in life to a medical phobia, she was doing so by trying to rationalize something definitively irrational. She’s specialized in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, not Exposure Therapy, which I had great success with on my own. I was already worried that she was specifically working with BPD patients to write a book or thesis, and this wild grasping for a relationship between BPD and a phobia gave my estimated probability significance.

I don’t remember what she said next because I was too busy laughing at the inevitable misfortune of not trusting my own judgement. In trying to salvage her financial security, she claimed she was trying to figure out what I came in for.

“I told you just like I told my previous therapist: I want to be less verbally abusive to my husband and less hypercritical.”

She had the gall to reply, “Well, we’ve been talking about work and this medical stuff…”

My laugh gave me time to think on the utility of telling her she just gaslit me, so I instead said, “You asked me how my week had been and I told you!” My incredulity never crested during the exchange and has only continued to mount as I’ve rehashed it. She was expecting me to do her job and keep the discussion “on topic!” When I told her I had called and gotten her access to my file, she had firmly yet obfuscatingly conveyed that I had crossed a boundary because “that’s my job to do that.” I wasn’t surprised not to get a “thank you” for getting her and her practice’s shit together for them, but the fact that she felt so threatened by it told me about both her fragile ego and security in her assumptions of my motivations.

For a second, I thought about conveying the above to her, and then I thought better of it. If she was so blinded by the book she wanted to write and its necessary stereotypes, she was immune to any personal growth that might come from an exchange. Due to this pondering I straight up ignored whatever she said next, and flipped my internal switch to leave.

I started laughing again and then said, “Look, I knew this was going to be our last session when you told me you hadn’t read — had * forgotten* to read my notes.” I stood up and grabbed my coat. “I know you have a lot of people demanding your time; we’re all busy. I think- I think imma letcha just- take care of those people. Yeah.”

She stammered, “W-well can you- can you just stay for a minute because- I feel like this is all very abrupt and- I didn’t get any impression from the previous sessions that you were-”

With a dismissive shrug and my coat half zipped: “Eh, yeah, sure. I already paid for the hour anyway.” I sat back down on the loveseat, coat on.

I began with her checklist of BPD symptoms and subsequent bias. Her take was that, “Well, we all have biases and we aren’t aware of them. I never meant to make you uncomfortable and I didn’t go into this to make people uncomfortable.” The fact that she thought I was “uncomfortable” really demonstrates how willfully off base she is. What I said aloud was, “Yeah, researcher bias is almost always unintentional and unconscious. It still kept you from remembering anything about me.” More accurately, it was making her overwrite the facts that I’m educated and can hold a job. The BPD stereotype is someone is someone who screams at their bosses and bounces around employment while complaining that their genius is underappreciated.

She admonished me that her assessment process “takes a few sessions” and she “doesn’t just jump right in to treatment.” Not only is the outline of talk therapy a high school psychology level question, it’s also common sense that a problem can’t be cured without root causing it. Again, she dismissed and insulted my knowledge and demonstrated that she hadn’t listened to a word I had said. Not a single problem I brought up indicated that I was some schmuck “just looking for a cure.” But, as usual, she heard what she wanted to hear.

I had to interrupt her waffling to tell her my other major issue with her. Every time I tried to explain my motivation or basis for a position, she cut me off with a clearly practiced statement: “I’m not a detective; I’m not here to determine if you’re lying or not.” Her delivery was so scripted and impersonal that she looked at the ceiling as she said it! In so many words, I called out her hypocrisy in claiming she was trying to assess me when she just kept cutting off any explanation I tried to help her with.

I forget exactly what transpired next, but I remember laughing into my hands and muttering that I should bring up the “fucking calendars.” Whatever she thought she heard prompted her next rehearsed, hollow-meant-to-be-firm line: “I will not be abused my you.” The fact that she couldn’t even tailor textbook boundary setting to a specific situation in real time tells me that she probably took up the BPD treatment mantle to try to cope with her own abuse. That thought and her robotic nature made me laugh again, and I got up. I kept chuckling because of the irony of that statement after she asked me to stay. I had already lost my respect for her, and I know that’s an “on switch” for the abusive tendencies I’m trying to reshape. Talk not fitting well with your therapist!

For some reason, as I slung my purse over my shoulder, she tried again. “I guess I’m just really confused because it didn’t seem like you had any of this in our prior sessions.”

I turned to her with a half-smile and non-incredulous (dare I say genuine?) energy, and said, “Yeah! I was trying to keep an open mind.”

I will preserve her bewildered look in my mind and conjure its image on rainy days when I need a good laugh.

With suddenly rekindled yet bridled anger she asked if I wanted a referral. I said, “Yeah, I guess. I want to work on my problems, but I need someone I can-” respect “-connect with. And it’s hard to find practices with the hours I need.”

At half an hour into my 50 minutes, I was out the door. I’ll never return, given that the entire practice is shot. After all, to any new therapist there, I’m just the summary of my notes: BPD. Three letters, all stigma.

Throughout the whole experience, I just couldn’t stop laughing. I was laughing at her fragile ego, I was laughing at my misfortune going against my own and my husband’s best instincts, and I was laughing at finding exactly what I knew I would find. When a friend in the field turned me on to BPD research, he gave me a book titled, I hate you — don’t leave me. It was the definitive cumulation of borderline research and printed within the last 10 years. I binge read all 272 pages in two days. I think reading it traumatized me more. The anecdotes were horrifying, but the tone the researchers wrote it in was worse. It said that “borderlines are the patients therapists fear.”

Why do they fear them? Because they are “manipulators.” Once the accusation of manipulation is made, it is inescapable. Everything someone does becomes evidence of ulterior motives and controlling tendencies.

I mentioned this book to Midwest Fran Drescher within the first ten minutes of knowing her, as she ran down that BPD checklist. Her hopeful look plummeted off her face when I said, “The tone was abysmal! The stigma is so deep-set the authors probably didn’t even know they were doing it! Talk about discouraging anyone from interacting with borderlines, let alone encouraging hopes of getting help!”

It is surreal to have met, in spirit, one of those authors. On paper, I may fit a condition that’s demonized and billed as nightmarish, but the people perpetuating that stigma are the real devils. To claim people don’t seek help and then present this sort of stereotyping and stigma as help seems like gaslighting at its finest. There has to be a better way — like, maybe believing people when they have no reason to lie to you?