She came back, but not for me.
I kinda hate her. Those are strong words, but it describes a feeling I don't think I can introduce otherwise. Expressed in a more polished sentence, I would say how deeply I resent her chameleon self-disclosures, the feeling of safety she created when she couldn't guarantee its durability, and the bubble she created around us that made it so hard for me to ever acknowledge harm.
I couldn't talk about her for years without instinctually defending her to whoever raised concerns about the follow-up. I knew she spoke a lot about herself, that she drew a line at hugs, but that she seemed unaware of the impacts of the attachement she fostered outside of our meetings. Our observant nature and instinct to flip the roles when her self-disclosures took up space went unacknowledged.
She buried our incomplete memories by labelling them as symptoms. Those were some of the only elements we knew she documented in detail in our notes. It hurt, knowing that this content is conveniently pre-packaged for dismissal. We were bound to her analysis, and we didn't realize it then. A maternal therapist is hard to reconcile with authority.
That feels a bit too cerebral, though.
We still try to convince ourselves that our memories are a display of our own madness, to dissolve them from the profound cruelty they represent. In those moments, I always remember what she said.
She met him. We had a strange session altogether, followed by my own individual one. She noted that we were suicidal when that 1-1 came. She raised her concerns with him, and told him: "be her voice when she can't be her own." (He was.)
Eventually, we stopped seeing her. She came back from burnout, having made the decision to stop working with trauma. We had only just gotten the chance to start sharing, a few weeks before she left, tearful and apologetic. This came as a rejection, and I can't forgive that she asked about resuming, knowing full well that the weight of what had happened would be a taboo. She couldn't make space for the worst things we didn't choose. She couldn't handle hearing what we were expected to manage well enough to keep out of session. We had been growing room for her for years, but our vulnerability was disruptive no matter what. We would have to protect her with a level of vigilance that would simply erase us.
We would be the perfect, blank slate client.
Fortunately, that crossed a line. Fawning isn't as comfortable when your presence itself feels like a threat, no matter how hard you try to shift its shape.
I don't know how I feel. I just know that I'm hurt.
I didn't think I'd hear her name again in such an unexpected context. I didn't think I'd be reminded of her again. We were, and now we're starting to piece together one of the most scrambled memory clusters we have. I'm aware of just how much we were being brutalized outside of our sessions. Those timelines have joined.
I don't think I can figure it out. I think she'll still be a confusing period of our life, because she did actually mark those years that much.
I shouldn't be softly comforting our system kids when they hear her name. They tried to warn us, and we couldn't listen.
And she couldn't hear anything.