Psychotherapist abuse: what made me the perfect target

Some things just come naturally

Psychotherapist abuse can happen to anyone—OK maybe not anyone, but a lot of people. OK fine, maybe it’s mostly just people like me.

Today I want to talk about three things about me that made me a perfect target for psychotherapist abuse. I’m not saying it was all my fault, but I am saying that when I first walked into the creep psychotherapist’s room it was like offering myself up on a platter. In summary:

1. I’ve never learned how to protect myself
2. I can’t tell when something is safe or not
3. I have a decades long history of mental health problems

All of these things made me a prime target for psychotherapist abuse and I’ll delve into each of them a little bit today. (Also, if you’re a paid subscriber, I’ve included another very sad clip from CP’s deposition in which he states that not all addictions are bad.)

I’m bad at protecting myself. I don’t know when I’m safe. I look to other people to tell me what’s safe. Sometimes I still get it wrong.

My experience of psychotherapist abuse is still with me every day. On good days I don’t think about it for a couple of hours. On bad days, I think about it pretty much all the time. The one thing I keep coming back to is “why me? What did I do?”

It’s not so much what I did, but more about where I’m from.

1. My scary childhood

“Attachment” is a very important part of childhood. It’s one of the first things you study in psychology.

Here’s a terrible explanation of it: If your childhood was pretty OK, then you can move through the world with some sense of who you are, what you want, and what is or isn’t safe. If you had a scary or terrible childhood, it can be hard to ever feel like you’re on solid ground and you spend the rest of your life trying to make up for that.

Here’s a much better explanation of “attachment theory” from Wikipedia:

Me and my dad at a place called “Patio Pizza” in Fort Meade, Maryland, where my father was stationed when I was 10.

My father was a special forces Vietnam War combat veteran. He did and saw terrible things. He had (and still has 55 years later) severe combat PTSD. He is 77 now and my mother said he recently woke up in the middle of the night and shouted “Where’s my pistol?” (He doesn’t have one anymore.)

“What do you need that for?” she asked, accustomed to these outbursts after 55 years.

“Someone’s trying to kill me!” he said.

55 years since he left Vietnam and he never really left. He was never physically abusive towards me. He was just scary AF. He didn’t sleep. He just walked the perimeter of our house every night waiting for another attack. I peed my bed until I was 11 because I was so scared of getting up and running into whatever he was so scared of. What I knew more than anything was that the world was a very unsafe place.

When I was 25, I learned that my dad had also suffered a traumatic brain injury in Vietnam for which he received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. I didn’t find out until I was about 25 years old because “didn’t feel like talking about it” until he was in the hospital because he had an unexplained spinal fluid leak that was causing “brain sag.” Was it from the old injury? Or a new injury he didn’t remember? Nobody knows.

When he thought he was dying, I asked him what happened in Vietnam. He still to this day the official details are “classified” but since he was maybe dying he admitted that he had trusted someone he shouldn’t have, and they betrayed his unit and blew up the building that they were staying in. My dad grabbed some other soldier and they both jumped out the window and into a ditch. They blew up the hut he was in and he grabbed another soldier and they both jumped out the window and into a ditch. He has shrapnel in his head from the RPG.

I mean, that’ll do it right? That’ll make you not sleep for the rest of your life, right?

He would explode into rages out of the blue. Once I was eating a McDonald’s hamburger off the paper wrapper and he said “Get a plate.” When I didn’t do so immediately he started screaming. “Get a plate! Get a plate!”

I think he broke something. I remember my mom huddled on a chair in the corner of the dining room sobbing.

That wasn’t the only incident, but you get the idea.

2. My low self-esteem

Another reason I was a great target for psychotherapist abuse was my extremely low self-esteem.

In addition to my scary home life, I also had a severe lazy eye when I was growing up. It made me a very easy target for bullies to ridicule.

Here’s a photo of me in 8th grade when I tried to hide my lazy eye with my hair. It did not work:

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And boys? Of course none of them would talk to me. Nobody wanted to be associated with dating a freak. The one kid who danced with me at the 9th grade dinner dance never heard the end of it and glared at me like I’d infected him with loser disease the next Monday at school.

Because of this, I was willing to be friends with anyone who was willing to talk to me. I wanted any human connection I could get, even if it was a pathetic one.

This meant getting into a lot of relationships where people used me, and I was totally comfortable with that as long as it meant they were talking to me, and acknowledging that I existed. If the only way I could make friends was by listening to other people’s problems, running errands for them, shifting all of my focus to their needs, then so be it.

If they were expecting me to pick up their dry cleaning for them, then they would definitely notice if I died because I wouldn’t have shown up with the dry cleaning. Maybe they would come to the funeral, maybe not. At least they would have to acknowledge that I had died, which meant I had existed.

“The girl who was supposed to pick up my dry cleaning died!” someone would say—perhaps to explain their lack of formal attire at a work or social event.

That would mean I had existed in someone’s life, if only briefly, and as a disappointment.

Just like with my creep psychotherapist. Never mind I was paying the guy $350/week to help me–I was the lucky one for him even being willing to talk to me. Part of me really believed he was generous to take on a loser like me–a difficult patient who was so difficult to treat. How fortunate that he allowed me to pay him tens of thousands of dollars to be allowed to be in his presence. I sure was lucky.

And when my creep psychotherapist expressed a sexual interest in me? When I was so fragile and talking about how the boys didn’t like me in junior high school? And now this “hottie” (he’s not hot) in a suit from Macy’s said he’d definitely bang me if he wasn’t my psychotherapist at the moment? Talk about lucky!

3. My history of mental health issues

Me on the T in Boston circa 1997 when I dyed my hair black to match my suicide attempts.

When I was 21 years old, about 15 years before I met the creep psychotherapist, I attempted suicide twice by overdosing on medication. I’m not sure if what I took would have actually killed me. The first time I did it, a friend call 911 on my behalf. The second time I did it, I told no one, but felt myself slipping into unconsciousness and I was scared, so I called for myself.

I went on to have some extremely helpful and supportive doctors and therapists attend to me and help me see that I had some value as a human being, and deserved to be happy.

But once you try to kill yourself–once there’s medical records that you did it–you’re in the “nutjob” pile at the doctors office for life.

Because I had a history of mental illness, the creep psychotherapist knew that I would be considered an unreliable narrator to anyone I told about his abuse. I was “crazy.” I’d been crazy my whole adult life. Crazy people aren’t credible. And this is how so many psychotherapists just like my creep get away with using and abusing people every day.

They are doctors with credentials.

We are nut jobs from the nuthouse.

The first lawyer I spoke to after fleeing the creep psychotherapist asked me if I’d ever been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and I said “no.”

He told me I was going to be—by the CP’s lawyer. That was his MO. He always claimed that victims of therapist abuse had Borderline Personality Disorder and that was part of his standard defense. I didn’t believe him until I did. That was ultimately the crux of their defense—that I had Borderline Personality Disorder. Like that would somehow make the abuse more excusable.

Neither the California Board of Psychology and the California Board of Behavioral Sciences has taken any action to protect vulnerable patients from him. Anyone could walk into his office and be violated in the same way I was. The system is devastating.

You can see another clipping from his sworn deposition below:

Here’s where he admits that when I told him I was addicted to him he said “Do you think all addictions are bad? You can be addicted to being kind!”

He knew I was addicted. That was his whole game, but….”You can be addicted to being kind?” Like even I started to poke holes in his statements at that point.

More next week.