Between Versions

When I look back on therapy before it ended, I can’t deny there was good.

I learned what regulation could feel like — not in theory, but in my body.

I learned what a week of being grounded looked like, what it felt like to exist in my own skin without floating away.

I learned what it meant to show up to a space that, for the most part, felt consistent, caring, and able to mold around my needs.

For a while, I had a space that felt both clinically skilled and deeply human — a rare combination. But when it ended, it ended by email. And for me, that changed everything.

I’ve thought a lot about how much I valued that space, and how much it shaped me. But I can’t deny how much it also broke something in me. I can only speak to how it felt — not as an objective truth, but as my own lived experience.

And to me, it felt like my voice — my story, my attempt to name what didn’t feel safe — was twisted and diminished. It felt like I was being erased for trying to speak up.

After the Email

I didn’t use any of the referrals I was given.

Partly because I no longer trusted the clinician who sent them.

And partly because none of them felt like a fit for what I needed.

The links I was sent looked like something from a psychology database — cold, generic, impersonal — not a hand-picked referral that considered who I am or what kind of care might actually work for me.

It didn’t feel collaborative. Every next step seemed made for me, not with me — like being forced into decisions I hadn’t agreed to. I wasn’t given space to be a participant in my own care.

The most confusing part is that, during sessions, she was often the opposite of that. She could drop her pride. She could hear me when something wasn’t working. She was willing to adapt when I needed something to change. And I think that’s what makes this hurt so much — because I never would have expected her to think this was an okay way to handle things.

The Downward Spiral

The months that followed have been brutal.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the edge of not knowing if I wanted to keep living. A flare-up of dissociative symptoms took over — spirals so strong I didn’t know if the shame running through me would ever fade.

I’m starting to feel a little more stable now, but stability comes in waves. It visits, it leaves. I can’t trust it to stay.

The dissociation has been the hardest part. It’s like being trapped in a dryer — tumbling around, disoriented, trying to find footing that doesn’t exist. Most days, I don’t really know who I am. It’s like I keep shifting, cycling through different versions of myself and losing track of which one is real.

Trying Again

The first therapist I saw after that lasted one session. I showed up to the second appointment just to tell her I wouldn’t be continuing.

The next one, I tried a different approach — I told her every horrible thing about myself right from the start. My logic was simple: if she was going to reject me, I’d rather it happen immediately. I never gave her a real chance, and about a month in, I ended things again.

Now I’m with someone new. I keep telling myself, just give them a chance.

But even the smallest things make me want to run. My body doesn’t know what safety feels like anymore when it comes to therapy.

The Weight of Mistrust

It’s hard to trust any professional after being hurt by one you believed in.

It’s even harder when you live at the intersections — when you’re trans, when you care deeply about social justice, when you need someone who can see both the personal and the systemic.

I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for humility — for someone willing to admit when they don’t know, when they could learn, when they could grow.

For someone willing to listen to the voices of the people directly impacted by their choices.

Because healing isn’t just about the person in the chair.

It’s about the space between two people — and what happens when one of them stops listening.

Still Here

I don’t know what healing will look like from here.

Some days I believe in it; other days I can barely hold on.

But even in the uncertainty — the shifts, the grief, the waves of shame — I’m still here.

Author’s Note

I know I’ve been writing a lot about this — about being dropped, about what it’s done to me.

For now, it’s simply what I’m processing. It’s what I’m feeling. It’s what I have to live through.

Some sentences may sound dramatic, but they reflect what this experience feels like from inside of it. My hope is that anyone reading can hold that without judgment — that you can witness my journey for what it is.

And if any part of it resonates, I hope it brings a small sense of solidarity.

This probably wouldn’t be as painful if it wasn’t echoing old trauma — if we hadn’t been right in the middle of trauma work, if I hadn’t already lived through so many forms of relational wounding. I had been giving it everything I had. I poured every ounce of me into trying to get it right this time. And I hate that it retraumatized me, because it makes me feel weak.

I want to be stronger than this. And god I feel so angry with her, because she knew my history, she knew my pain, she said the work was sacred and she knew what an honor it was to be trusted and she still chose to hurt me, she still chose the cruelest way to end things.