Therapist Abuse Patients Gone Wild: The Enduring Rage He Left Me With
And why I scream at clipboard guys
I have anger issues. I mean really severe anger issues. Like, I’ve exploded screaming at people in public and never gone back to the place where it’s happened because I’m so ashamed.
Most recently it’s been the clipboard guys outside of the grocery stores who ask me questions like:
”DO YOU CARE ABOUT STARVING CHILDREN IN GAZA?” OR
“DO YOU CARE ABOUT PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM GUN VIOLENCE” OR “DO YOU CARE ABOUT VETERANS WITH PTSD?” OR
“LOVE YOUR SWEATER! CAN I TALK TO YOU ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN SUDAN?”
It’s happened twice to me in the past year that I’ve just unloaded on these guys in a screaming rage. I am ENRAGED when someone is trying to manipulate me. Yes, I care about starving children in Gaza and feel helpless. Yes, I send my son into a classroom every day wondering if he’ll get shot. Yes, my father is a combat veteran and our whole family has suffered with PTSD our entire lives because of it. Don’t fucking compliment my sweater. Get away from me.
Yes, I care HOW FUCKING DARE YOU even ask me. How fucking dare you imply that me giving you my credit card number to charge me $15/month to your charity with bloated administrative costs and no real plan to help anyone will make any of these things better. I hate liars and manipulators and people who use the most vulnerable people on Earth in their sales pitch with zero intention of helping them in any way.
Yes, I understand I should just walk away. Yes, I understand these people don’t know what’s happening inside me 24/7 and that I’m always on the verge of exploding. Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my rage and I can’t walk away.
A big part of that is because I have not healed from being abused by the Creep Psychotherapist. He clearly saw something in me that made me very easy to manipulate. I am on constant alert that others will do the same—even 8 years after getting away from him. I think I am someone that people view as an easy target. I certainly was for him. So instead of ignoring the clipboard guys sometimes I break down screaming. People lie and use and manipulate so easily. It doesn’t bother them in the slightest. I am not that way.
I’ve been told I’ve been through so much that I have the right to be angry, but whenever my anger comes out it’s in unacceptable ways. It’s exhausting. And the last guy I screamed out hangs out in front of the store that sells the only kind of pizza my son will eat, so now I have to drive twice as far away for the pizza or send my husband to get it, telling him “I exploded there last week. You have to go.”
When I started seeing Flute Guy, the therapist who helped me escape the Creep, it took him several months to realize the level and type of abuse I was enduring. But Flute Guy knew I was angry at the Creep, and he told me to tell him so. He said my anger was making me sick and giving me panic attacks. He wasn’t wrong.
Flute Guy said I should write the Creep a letter telling him what I was angry about and read it to him in a session. I did that, twice.
You can read one of the letters below. For some reason I’m still not telling you readers his name, so I’ve just substituted the word “Creep” where I actually wrote his name in the real letter:
Hi Creep-
There are some things that I’m angry about that I need to share with you, and I realize now that the whole reason I’ve been reluctant to do so is that I haven’t felt that I can trust you to accept what I have to say without telling me I’m not really feeling what I’m feeling. I’m truly unsure you can handle what I’m about to tell you. I do not have confidence that you will be able to take in my words and understand them, but I need to say them and holding them in makes me shop for guns on the internet. My baby needs me and doesn’t deserve to grow up without a mother, so I’m telling you these things anyway, fully knowing that you may not be able to handle them.
I have a visceral physical chemical reaction to your presence and desperately want to be with you. I am swept away with love and attraction towards you and fuck you for making me feel weird about it you douche. I'm not an idiot. I'm not a child. I'm a woman who feels deep love for and attraction towards you. This fucking SUCKS for me. It is NOT why I came to you. I did not come here off of a painful rejection to fall in love with someone that I cannot have. It has FUCKED UP MY LIFE beyond recognition for three years. But what sucks way WAY worse is hearing "you don't love me you poor thing. This is just a perversion of your childhood loneliness" Fuck you dude. I’m not your Freshman year psych project. Everyone falls in love with people for reasons that have to do with their past. When you tell me “you’re not really feeling this—you’ve just chosen me because you can’t have me and you’re just trying to show me what it was like for you as a little girl,” THAT’S invalidating my feelings—and that’s YOU recreating what it was like for me as a little girl.
My childhood was me saying: “THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG. SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT. I’M TERRIFIED. I DON’T FEEL GOOD. I FEEL UNSAFE. I DON’T FEEL LOVED” and both of my parents saying: “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG. YOU DON’T FEEL THIS WAY! EVERYTHING’S FINE! YOU’RE LOVED! YOU’RE SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY AND FORTUNATE. YOU’RE THE LUCKIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD. YOU GET TO LIVE IN A HOUSE WHERE YOUR FATHER EXPLODES INTO RAGES FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER AND YOUR MOTHER LIES IN BED STARING AT THE CEILING FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY YOU LUCKY GIRL. YOU’RE NOT FEELING WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY FEELING!”
Now I’m here saying “Oh my God Creep! I have these explosive loving feelings for you!” And you’re like “Great let’s talk about them!” And then I’m like “I have wild fantasies about you and I feel so vulnerable and I need a lot of support and to hear that this is OK and when you said you found me desirable it made me feel amazing and I just want to hear it over and over again. My heart is broken over you and it really hurts!” And then you’re like “Your heart’s not broken over me! You’re just upset about your dad! Stop being so needy and saying you need me to say that I find you desirable again! You’re never satisfied!”
FUCK. YOU. DUDE.
I don't need your fucking permission to be in love with you! You have absolutely no say in the matter whatsoever. Neither do I or believe me I wouldn’t feel this way. Just because I desperately want to be with you doesn’t mean I’m ASKING you for anything. I’m not ASKING you for shit. I don't expect anything from you. I’m not trying to manipulate you or seduce you or make you feel guilty or intrude on your life. I want you desperately and I’m not asking you for SHIT and I have zero expectations of you. Do you understand the distinction Creep? You can take some time to think about it before you respond if you need to, because I have some more things to say about the pain this experience has caused me, and I don’t want you misinterpreting that I’m asking you for anything. Do you understand that I’m not asking you for shit?
If I had any control over how I feel I would NOT have these feelings for you. They have fucked up my life beyond recognition for YEARS. I CRY about not getting to be with you daily. I count the fucking days and hours until I get to see you again, just because I want to be in the same room with you and share the space with you and look in your eyes and maybe have you accidentally brush my hand. THAT’S how much I like you. I spend money I do not have to come here and I’m in horrible debt and now even worse debt because I need to go to Will in addition to you to deal with my misery over you. I never miss any appointment because this is the ONLY thing in my life that I look forward to—these brief sessions with you. Then I come here and try and soak in as much as I can and watch the minutes tick away with dread because I know my time with you is running out and I just want to be close to you because you have a pleasing effect on me physically. I think about you all the fucking time. I have lost YEARS of my life in deep, deep pain lost in fantasies with you, lying to everyone I talk to about why I’m truly depressed. You didn’t know me before I was depressed. I had light and humor and joy and resiliency. My feelings for you have reduced me to someone who spends all day choking and suffocating and feeling like she’s drowning. It fucks up my productivity. It distracts me from time with my beautiful baby and the husband who worships the ground I walk on. These feelings are ruining my life because I don’t know how to deal with them. I want to reiterate that I’m not ASKING you for anything. I keep these feelings inside because when I bring them up you keep misinterpreting them and invalidating them.
I’m not an idiot. I would never expect you to give up ANYTHING for me. I fantasize about you wanting me enough that you would, but that doesn’t mean I’m expecting you to do it. You seem to think that I need to be educated on the fact that I don’t get to have everything I want in life. I don’t know why the fuck you would think that. The experiences in my life where I’ve gotten what I wanted have been very few. I DO need help with learning how to cope with not getting these things. THAT’S why I came here. To learn how to cope with the searing pain of rejection. I thought you were going to help me with that, but instead you’re like “You don’t get to have everything you want! This is all I can offer you! Deal with it!”
It’s YOUR discomfort with my feelings that causes you to tell me that my feelings aren’t real and that they’re just about being sad about my father.
Here’s the other huge thing I’m angry with you about. I’ve told you multiple times how incredibly painful for me to be rejected by you and you say: “I’M NOT REJECTING YOU! I FIND YOU DESIRABLE! I JUST CAN’T BE WITH YOU CAUSE I’M YOUR PSYCHOTHERAPIST. YOU JUST WANT TO LABEL THIS AS A REJECTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BEAT YOURSELF UP!”
FUCK YOU CREEP, YOU FUCKING FUCK.
You are absolutely 100% rejecting me. You will not kiss me or hold me or fuck me or run away and start a new life with me. You are REJECTING the shit out of me. It’s not the SAME rejection I’ve dealt with from a dozen other men in my life who didn’t want to be with me because they don’t think I’m attractive, but it’s still a rejection.
This is not about me twisting the therapy around and turning something that’s not a rejection into a rejection. This is YOU not being able to handle the fact that you’re deeply hurting me by rejecting me. YOU can’t deal with being the rejecter, so you’ve turned it around on me because YOU don’t want to deal with YOUR feelings about rejecting me. That’s not my fucking problem dude. That’s YOUR fucking problem! You’re supposed to have these feelings handled. You specifically told me “You don’t need to worry about my feelings, Liz. I’ve got them handled.” Those were your exact words. Then when I tell you how much it rips my heart up to be rejected by you, you say “I’M NOT REJECTING YOU! YOU’RE DISTORTING THE THERAPY TO SHOW ME WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR YOU TO BE REJECTED BY YOUR DAD!”
YOU’RE the one that’s recreating my childhood by telling me “I’m not rejecting you” just like my mother told me “Your father’s not rejecting you. No one cares more than he does. No one’s more upset about your suicide attempt than he is. No one’s more upset about John’s dog attack than he is.”
YOU ARE FUCKING REJECTING ME CREEP. But it makes YOU feel bad to say that, so you put it all on me—it’s my crazy fucked up brain that’s twisted it all around. You’d prefer to say it some other way, because YOU’RE more comfortable with it. THAT’S something my dad would do, and that’s not how this is supposed to work!
Please stop. It gives me panic attacks and I can’t financially, emotionally or spiritually afford to have them anymore. That’s it.
Thank you for reading this. I welcome all comments, feedback, personal experiences whether you’re a therapist abuse victim yourself or just a reader.
I’ll post a new chapter of “My Psychotherapist Was a Creep” every week. To start this Substack from the beginning, go here
Thank you, Liz! Your honesty is hitting home with me. I appreciate you.
This is amazing. And I would add: FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF.
I have my own hair trigger about boundaries and feeling manipulated, and also have big reactions around people invalidating/dismissing/diminishing my feelings. My reactions are way out of proportion to the incidents, and I often end up bawling on my floor and then feel traumatized for a day or two. I keep hoping that I'll eventually get less reactive. But so far that's just meant I'm wrecked for a couple of days instead of a week. I guess that's progress?? Sigh.