There are a few things I’m convinced of as a survivor of long-term therapist abuse who has done a lot of reflecting and healing. 4 of them are:
1. It’s ok not to know or perfectly understand every single aspect of one’s experience of therapist abuse. Words and clarity help but in my opinion, some of the best psychologists and most intelligent people I’ve met have the foresight and humility to understand that there is a vast amount left to discover about the mind and body, so how can survivors of therapist abuse be expected to understand it all? Somethings may always remain a mystery.
2. You, above all, know your experience the best. You decide what, if anything, was helpful, even if it was all a lie and terrible. Even if no one else in the therapist abuse recovery community and beyond shares your experience.
You have final say. I believe this is less accurate when, for example, you’re trauma bonded and thus feel protective of the abuser or are otherwise unclear. However, even in the unclear moments, that’s your truth at the time and you get to have it. You can’t really look at and release something unless you have it first.
3. IMO, the legal system needs to stop condemning and punishing the rightful anger of therapist abuse victims and expecting them perform as demure, forlorn, sass-less wet blankets. (More on this in another post.)
4. The statute of limitations for suing abusive therapists and filing complaints needs to be extended. (But I digress.)
I believe that part of the drive for perfect understanding stems from the fact that, for the most part, ours is not a society that embraces nuance.
Nuance is often flattened into polarizing opposites: Right, wrong. Good, bad. Guilty, innocent. Upper class, lower class.
This is not to say that things aren’t wrong or that people are not guilty. Of course they can be. It’s just that sometimes, seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.
Visually, it might look less like a single axis with “good” on one end and “bad” on the other, and more like a Jenga tower.
Example? One of my favorite people in history is Martin Luther King Jr. He was inspirational and an agent of important change. He also happened to have as many as 45 extramarital affairs.
In psychology, such nuance finds some recognition in the concept of Jung’s shadow, in my opinion.
In theory, everyone has a shadow. The human collective has a collective shadow. Some people have more unintegrated shadow than others.
Too much nuance can also be a distraction, but for me, some of piecing myself back together after therapist abuse meant separating wheat from chaff.
There’s a film called, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (2019). (I love yoga. So much so that I became a certified yoga teacher. Not in Bikram-style yoga, though. It’s too hot and militant for my liking.)
This documentary is about a guy named Bikram Choudhury. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but to give you the short, short version (shout out to the wedding official in The Princess Bride), Bikram brought what we now know as Bikram yoga to the U.S.
He was worshipped by many. He schmoozed with celebrities. What he taught transformed the lives and health of many.
He also abused power enormously. He became psychologically abusive (often to the most vulnerable IMO) and SA-ed several of his devotees. Rather than face lawsuits and accountability, he fled the county like the little b that he is.
The curious thing is, what Bikram created was never originally his. He learned the poses from someone else named B.C. Ghosh who was the creator of them all.
The 26-pose series that is Bikram yoga came from sequencing some of the 500 poses taught to him my Ghosh. His success was parasitic. What helped people was never his, he just gave it a name and acted as a mouthpiece.
Immediately after I realized what my abuser was, I was reeling and shattered. I asked myself often if something so diabolically intended, so evil and intentionally exploitative, could have helped in any way.
From the vantage point of now, I can look back on my 11 years in abusive therapy and see all different kinds of threads.
Some of them contradict in the way that Bikram’s story invites you to reflect on separating wheat from chaff.
Bikram was a monster. Like my abuser he knowingly abused a position of power and exploited vulnerable individuals who he groomed to adulate and trust him. The yoga poses that he taught about also ended up helping lots of people but he only ever appropriated them. This does not at all cancel out the emotional and physical harm he perpetrated.
Nothing will ever change that my Santa Barbara therapist abused me and that she was/is an appallingly manipulative, sick psychopath with zero ethics or moral compass IMO. She should be locked up somewhere dank and silencing. That’s a fact.
Whatever was helpful was never hers. They were ideas from healers before her, appropriated and misused by a career criminal.
She always tried to take credit for good things in my life but she was never to be credited for them. I doubt the parasitic human trash that she is ever had an original thought in her meaningless, dull existence.
No, some things were helpful because of how I chose to integrate them, despite her. And there will be things in my life that never recover from her abuse.
In no way am I encouraging anyone to “look on the bright side” of being abused. THis is solely what I see now. If anything, I find toxic positivity cringe and suggest you “look” wherever you see fit to look.
Not that she wasn’t creepy and insanely inappropriate, but I was not physically s*xually abused by the psycho. I was abused in most other ways. I know my experience is unique to me so probably what I take away from it is, too. My perspective also helps me understand a thread of what brought me back (aside from her threats, lies, and emotional tantrums) though, of course, if I could redo it all, I’d get what was helpful from a person who isn’t a conniving demon.
I’m getting it this week. I thought she was adorable. This was very sad. RIP Goddess.
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