My therapist became my best friend

[MyTherapistMyFriend]

In therapy for 2 years
friends for 3 years now

Both aware this is unusual and usually considered unethical. But for both of us it felt 100% right. Obviously she is not my therapist now and we discuss nothing that was discussed in our previous relationship.

OP, I hope you're ok. I can imagine you might feel a bit attacked (including from my posts).

It's not my intention.

I feel quite outraged that someone in a position of trust could have behaved this way, but it's not intended to be judgmental of you or in anyway blaming you.

It's after the therapy has finished? People are just people. Therapy is just therapy.

Can I ask is she a Psychotherapist? Not a counsellor?

It doesn't make a difference. Neither are protected titles so anybody can call themselves either. Neither working ethically would do what this one has.

Op, if you are still reading, I'd be interested to know how this experience has influenced the way you've chosen and related to the therapists you've had since.

Personally, when I chose my therapist, I went for someone who I might have wanted to be friends with in different circumstances but i get a lot of security from knowing that can never happen. There's a lot of freedom for me in that.

It's after the therapy has finished? People are just people. Therapy is just therapy.

What point are you trying to make? As this makes no sense.

Yes of course they are people! (As opposed to what - gorillas?)

There's a professional ethical responsibility, including after therapy, which has not been adhered to.

That's the point.

Another great point. It sums up my experience of two counsellors I've worked with.

I’m in exactly the same situation: I feel like I could’ve written this thread word for word.

Posting resurrecting this zombie thread for some companionship. Really not sure how I feel about my situation right now.

How are you doing @MyTherapistMyFriend ?

I'm a therapist. There's no way, in any universe, where this situation could ever be ethical.
It's completely wrong.
I would never ever transgress from therapist to friend, even when I've really liked my clients.

Agreed. It is so wrong for a therapist to exploit their position of authority over their client in this way.

How did you become friends @Eloisae?
Is your therapist a member of the BACP?

I followed her on Facebook after we finished, where she has quite a big following / posts quite often.

I lurked for a bit - it was nice content - then it crept up into ‘likes’, DMs, reciprocal ‘likes’, social ‘how are you doing chats’ & then deeper conversations.

@Eloisae

How do you feel about how it's panned out?

I've definitely felt curiosity about my therapist and sometimes wish we could be friends but I think I'd lose respect for him if he actually violated that boundary.

I don’t know how I feel. That’s why I posted really.

I still have the deepest respect for her as a person.

Possibly it’s an issue that she’s easier to chat to than ‘regular’ people - hence some
weeks she’s the person I speak to the most. Although it cuts both ways - that I’m more emotionally open and able to verbalise since I’ve know her.

Some bad stuff happened to me in the post-therapy period, and she was an emotional anchor for me through it. Just having someone ‘around’ who ‘understood’ was reassuring and stabilising.

One of our therapy topics was about her supporting me to support my SEN child. I loved being able to continue to update her on how the kid was progressing. It helped me to have perspective on the longer journey - and to take straightforward pride in our achievements, even if they didn’t ‘sound’ like much .

She does now chat back more about the challenges in her own life and her political views and her family. She acknowledges
but skims over my ‘stuff’ rather than really enaging with it. It is different to ‘therapy’ .

However, the fact remains that I am more emotionally locked into her than she is into me. She’s genuinely a kind, chill and consistent person - but if she wasn’t - I’d be very vulnerable. Knowing that isn’t entirely comfortable.

It's not comfortable, I'm afraid, because it's an absolute violation of professional boundaries that are set for a reason. It's absolutely horrific that she's done this, even if you don't feel she's abused you.

Think of it like a mature for her age, 14/15 year old girl getting into a relationship with a 30 year old male. He could be really lovely, really gentle, really kind, genuinely care about her. He could help her with homework, buy her sweet gifts, make sure she's home on time. He could always be conscious of consent issues. He could make her wait until she's of legal age to have sex (make love) to her. He could be the least manipulative man in the world. And STILL it would be morally, never mind legally, wrong for a good reason. Why? Because no matter how genuinely nice and kind he was, he could never actually properly take care of consent issues with her because she cannot consent! The power/age imbalance makes it impossible, so there's a law to protect her.

The comparison isn't about infantilising clients, it's about the power dynamic between two people that CANNOT be escaped.

The fact this "therapist" appears nice is irrelevant. She's abusive and she's actually unsafe to be around because she does not know when to stop. In my mind she's at least as bad at the older male with the teenage girlfriend. And she should have legal ramifications for what she's done.

Finally, remember that bad people don't show up in dark clothes with scary faces. The most dangerous people come in stealth mode.

There's no law to protect clients. It's absolutely

She sounds predatory and you sound vulnerable.
Shame.

Can I ask, absolutely not challenging anyone's points about ethics generally, I'm just interested. Would this count with all therapy or just more in depth types?

As in these short courses of 6 sessions of CBT provided by the NHS don't lead to much knowledge of the person or their vulnerabiliies, just enough to suggest strategies to manage their issues which may be quite situational.

If this type of therapy practitioner and patient were to meet later in different circs, would that necessarily preclude a friendship (or relationship)?

I don't know by whom they are regulated. I'm not in that situation, btw, just wondered whether posters would say the principles apply same as to a more searching course of say, psychotherapy.

I’m not sure.

There aren’t any actual ‘rules’ I don’t think.

I guess the more ‘power’ the therapist has over the client, potentially the more dangerous and ethically problematic it becomes.

@Eloisae

Why did you seek her out on social media in the first place? Did you find yourself thinking about her a lot when you were in therapy?

No judgement on you for this - it's totally normal but your therapist should have maintained the boundary to protect you. The fact you're here, asking about it shows you know it's not right.

That’s a breach of ethics too. How worrying that some therapists behave like this.

Well, yet it’s a basic requirement for a good ethical therapist. I hope OPs therapist is no longer a counsellor. She certainly isn’t fit to be one.

The comparison isn't about infantilising clients, it's about the power dynamic between two people that CANNOT be escaped.

This. It's always going to be an unequal relationship, because it was first founded on one party making themselves intensely vulnerable and revealing a great deal of extremely personal detail about themselves, while the other holds back completely and makes almost nothing of herself known. That drastically unequal foundation is always going to be under the surface of any friendship and has the potential to rear its head whenever conflict arises or something happens to one party. Therapists relate differently to a person than friends do. They're supposed to have unconditional positive regard for a client. Therapist-as-friend being unable to support something client-as-friend does could quickly be read by client-as-friend, reverting to the principles of that early relationship, as a massive betrayal (although that would b misconceiving unconditional positive regard). Therapist-as-friend might withdraw if she's going through something hard because she's supposed to b the helping one and not the one in ned of help. And those are two of the more innocuous scenarios that can happen.

@wutheringkites - I looked her up because I missed her.

On the socials she had the same affirming positive tone - but in ‘broadcast’ mode to a large and mixed audience - so it felt pretty benign to ‘hang out in the crowd’.

I get why it’s problematic. However -
life is messy. When my post-therapy ‘stuff’ happened, I was very unsupported and under huge pressure. The bigger problem isn’t that she let herself be pulled back into my emotional world - it’s how society/ extended family / social supports / regular MH system just wasn’t there for me.

I did try to find a new therapist at the time. A few didn’t click … one seemed to … until she turned around and told me that my problems were too complicated for her, and she was left feeling so overwhelmed by our sessions that she couldn’t work with me any more (!).

That honestly left me feeling so low - that I flumped into the ex-therapists DMs saying “Really?!? Am I really that impossible?!? “ - to
which she said “How ridiculous - you have a lot going on - but you’re doing really well with it all”.

And the truth was that I really didn’t need a £100 per hour therapist to try to ‘fix’ me and then get cross and bothered when I wasn’t responding to their interventions. And I didn’t have bandwidth to keep looking for new people to flake out on me and be unreliable. I needed a sympathetic, stable and non judgemental ear. Telling the ex therapist all the stuff and getting an ‘mmm hmm’ back was ‘enough’ to keep me glued together. And chit-chat - I could still see her social media ‘broadcast’ things - learned about her and asked her questions about her stuff, to which I got more honest responses than her ‘public’ face - it blurred into a social thing - though she’s always been the ‘senior’.

Maybe going forwards I need to step out of the relationship - because she does matter to me hugely - it is weird - I’d be worried about a family member in this situation.

But I can’t see her as a ‘bad person’ for that she let it get messy and get real and get human.

Neither of us should have been in that situation - but that’s how it was.

I needed a sympathetic, stable and non judgemental ear. Telling the ex therapist all the stuff and getting an ‘mmm hmm’ back was ‘enough’ to keep me glued together. And chit-chat - I could still see her social media ‘broadcast’ things - learned about her and asked her questions about her stuff, to which I got more honest responses than her ‘public’ face - it blurred into a social thing - though she’s always been the ‘senior’.

She let you re-initiate, essentially, the therapeutic relationship outwith the bounds (and ethical safeguards) of that relationship. I think you've (both) used the fact that you ask her about her SM stuff to dress it up as being about friendship now. But the last part of the last sentence I quoted is very telling. It's not your fault, though. It was for her to tell you kindly that she couldn't engage with you on that level because of her past role as your therapist.

The thing is - my birth family - we didn’t ‘do’ therapists; we distrusted anything medicalised and ‘establishment’.

However - we had a very well established ‘wise woman’ culture. Our one was two hours drive away. We’d visit her once or twice a year. We’d roll up with a car rammed full of food and gifts and her favourite cheese (she really liked cheese!). Sometimes she’d have other guests, sometimes it’d be just us. We’d stay in a B&B and pop ‘in and out’. There’d be lots of stories from the war and the old country. Sometimes someone would pull out a guitar. Cheese would often be eaten.

Always during those visits there was an hour or two when she’d disappear with my mum. My mum would come back red-eyed, but lighter.

Even as a child - I saw this old woman as basically the person who kept my mother alive.

That’s what my ex-therapist made for me - she is my wise woman.

I care about her on a human level and know her to an extent - and that doesn’t contradict that I accept that she’ll always be ‘senior’.

I think the clue there is in 'established culture' (and it does sound wonderful to an extent - I assume there are strong cultural norms around confidentiality etc?). Therapist/client 'culture' doesn't have that. Would your ex-therapist similarly describe herself as your 'wise woman', and is she happy to take that role? How does she see this as fitting with the ethical principles she would have learned in her training?

I think with therapy it can be hard to enter into the level of extreme (and extremely one-sided) intimacy required, and it can be hard to give that up (believe me, I have this particular T-shirt). I am very sure it can feel easy, afterwards, to slide back into that intimacy in some form. But 'easy' doesn't always mean 'right' (ethically, for her, for you).