The Bitter Taste

You know what I hate the most about my bad therapy experience this year?

That it left me with a bitter taste toward the profession at large.

When I hear the words clinician or therapist, I sometimes scuff internally in the same way I do about religion. And that bothers me, because I’ve had a long-standing issue with how I judge religion and people who are religious. I find it hypocritical to lump an entire group of people together in my mind and treat them as one and the same.

And yet, I can feel myself doing exactly that in one part of me.

I do still allow myself to get to know people as individuals, but there is a difference now, in my baseline level of trust, in how I interact, especially with people I don’t know. Most noticeably in online spaces. It’s subtle, but it’s there. And I don’t like that version of myself.

What makes it more confusing is that this reaction isn’t universal.

I’m fairly fond of a coworker who is deeply religious. I don’t scuff at my current therapist. I don’t scuff at my first therapist. So I know this isn’t as absolute or as rigid as it could be, but it’s still present enough to bother me.

Because I’m not someone who gets pleasure from being angry at a group of people for something not all of them did.

I’ve also been asking myself why I feel so strongly about not receiving an apology or seeing accountability from this person, when so much of my life can be summed up as being harmed and never receiving accountability. And strangely, those experiences don’t all affect me in this same way.

So I keep asking myself:

Am I viewing this through a distorted lens?

And honestly, I don’t think I am.

I think I’m seeing what happened pretty clearly. Still, I plan to work through it in therapy in a detailed way, because I want feedback. I want to know if there are things I’m missing, not because I want to absolve her, but because I want clarity.

The way I understand it right now is this:

She reacted like a human in the moment instead of like a therapist.

And I know how that sounds.

It can sound like I’m saying therapists aren’t human and that’s not what I mean at all. What I’m saying is that a therapist who is human made a human mistake. And that mistake caused harm.

A mistake that shifted the entire weight of the situation onto me.

A mistake that went unacknowledged.

And honestly, worse than that, a mistake that was subtly reinforced by the way I was reacted to online afterward.

I’m angry.

And I’m hurt.

And I’m sitting with the grief of it.

I’m also having a hard time moving on, which makes me angry too, because I don’t want to be stuck here. I don’t want to be trapped inside this experience anymore.

I am so angry with her for being so careless.

And I’m really confused about this:

I don’t understand why I can be okay with zero accountability from the people who abused me, but feel such a deep need for accountability from someone who made one mistake with me.

Why does this feel so intense when most of the time I feel almost nothing about my past?

Why am I more angry with her than I am with them?