Received a strange request in the post

[tmreunion]

I received a letter yesterday in the post to the 'current owner'.

We bought our house 15 years ago from a normal family - mum, dad, teenage daughter and younger son. Been very happy here.

I received a letter which reads -

'Dear current owner,

This is a very odd request and I completely understand and respect if you do not feel comfortable with this and therefore, there is no need to respond if that is the case.

I grew up in, what is now, your home. I experienced a lot of trauma in the home and have been working through this for the last few years. I was wondering if I would be able to come and see the house again, as part of my healing. This was suggested to me by my therapist and I feel it would be beneficial. However, as stated, I understand this is an unusual request and my healing is of no importance to a perfect stranger, so please do not feel pressured to agree to this.

If you were to kindly allow this, I would of course expect to be accompanied round the house and this would take no more than ten minutes.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and if you would like to contact me my name is 'name' - 'contact number'. If not, I wish you and your family well.

Best wishes,

Name'

I added the number and it is indeed the teenage daughter who was part of the family we bought the house from. She is now in her 30s. I feel really odd about it and almost distrustful. I also don't like the thought that she experienced trauma in our home, almost like she's trying to taint it.

My husband thinks that although it's odd, she is clearly doing some inner work and why wouldn't we help someone who is in need?

What do you think? WIBU to ignore or should I text and feel it out from there?

I would definitely respond and permit this.

When my previous childhood home was put up for sale, I discussed with my brother that we might pose as potential buyers and walk around. I hoped this might help me in dealing with some of the traumatic abuse I suffered there at the hands of our mother.

However, in the end I decided I just couldn't go through with it. I was worried I would have a panic attack in front of the estate agent.

It would be a real kindness.

Not something I would be comfortable with and I also find it surprising a therapist would suggest this!

Thank you, but I still don't understand how visiting a house with different decorations and furniture, i.e. completely different place, would help people heal, they would need an extremely good imagination, and why wouldn't they use elsewhere? So I would be inclined to refuse her in my house.

Nope.

It more than likely isn't a scam, but when I see how many posters immediately think "be kind" & of course they would, I can see how people easily do get scammed.

It is not a respectful letter, a respectful letter would’ve just said I’d love to quickly visit my childhood home and not mentioned abuse. It’s a manipulative letter.

It's not a different place, it's the same place.

An old saying is 'put the ghosts to rest'.

It is extremely common to visit places of emotional significance in all human societies across all times.

I accept you can't understand it, but it is a very understandable concept.

Why would she lie about the therapist - remember anyone can call themselves a therapist so no one can say what this therapist would or would not have suggested.

Why make all that up when she could just turn up at the door and ask - we've had it happen to us! Asking her to prove this had come from a therapist would be very, very odd IMO. What difference would it make if it had or if she was just embarrassed to ask and so was saying it was a therapist's idea?

I think it's very strange though to feel that she could somehow taint your house - if your child had MH issues would you not want them at home in case they tainted the place? What if you developed MH issues at some stage in your life? That is a very odd view and knowing she is who she says she is I would happily show her around.

I had an awful childhood and when we were moving house, my childhood home came onto the market, I went to view it with the idea of buying it and making it a far happier house than I'd known. The new owners had made several changes, but my bedroom was still the same. It did help me to appreciate that I had managed to make a good life for myself, and I'd moved on. My husband came to the second viewing and didn't like it, so I let the dream go.

I hope you are able to allow this person to visit to help her with her healing.

Also there are a lot of people saying "no therapist would ever suggest this", is that coming from actual therapists or is just people talking out of their bum? I said no reputable therapist would suggest it.

Think about it.
This is a woman who has, according to the letter, suffered trauma in a particular place. The therapist knows this woman through her interactions, and having been privy to the talk of her trauma, is advising she write to total strangers, who she knows nothing about, who could be abusive as well for all she knows, to ask to have a look round their house?

In theory the receiver could just throw the letter in the bin.

But now someone who might not be a nice person knows her name and address and could, for all we know, be a threat to her.

The OP isn’t, but let’s face it not everyone is nice.

It just wouldn’t happen that a therapist would think that was a good idea.

OP has the persons name.
She doesn’t have nor would she alone be capable of truly verifying her identity. Unless she works for the police or something that can check id.

As one previous poster has already said, doing a site visit in trauma focused CBT is very common and often very helpful indeed. It helps the patient to ‘update’ their memories of the place, and to see that the trauma is no longer happening. With PTSD people have ‘reliving’ symptoms, like flashbacks, that indicate their brain hasn’t been able to put the memory in the past properly, so it still feels ongoing, and their body responds to this sense of ongoing threat. Seeing for themselves that in fact time has moved on is therefore very helpful. It may be hard for people who haven’t had PTSD to understand why this would work, but this is an evidence-based intervention.

Yes, I am qualified to say this. I couldn’t read the thread and see so many people saying ‘No therapist would suggest this’ and not comment.

Having said that, the therapist may not have said “why don’t you write to the current owners and try to visit”, they may have just let the patient know that part of the treatment protocol, where possible, is revisiting the site and the patient may have decided to try and see.

I agree , this is now a family home for someone else and her life there is done . Involving strangers into this is really selfish . I think it could seriously effect the OPs life there . I would have binned this letter straight away before it could cause me to have negative thoughts about my home . I feel sorry for the person but there is no way I would do this .

My own interpretation would be that the PPs upthread donning the mantle of the expert are conveniently leaving out a particularly pertinent point.

Which is that in every field of expertise there's contestation. For instance, CBT is still the go-to therapy - at least on the NHS - for PTSD and trauma. They'll give EMDR, but you have to know it exists and actively push for it. For some people CBT works absolutely fine, if they have the self-discipline and the presence of mind to keep on employing the techniques - and let's face it, this is a difficult thing to sustain long-term.

There are also patients for whom this form of therapy is actively detrimental: who report being in an even worse place after they've had it than they were before.

My own (wonderful) therapist suggested that CBT was never designed to be a catch-all treatment for the many varying forms of trauma that exist. It was, apparently, designed for use in a controlled environment - not to be put out there in the wild and the patient simply left to do their thing and get on with it. And, from the cursory bit of scanning I've just done on the subject, the form of 'exposure therapy' that would take in going back to the scene of a trauma and other similar issues, would likely fall under the banner of CBT.

Recent literature does show EMDR to be a singularly effective therapy which can, in some cases, go as far as to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD. Gone are the days when those who have it know they'll have to live with it forever, albeit the way their minds are now wired will probably always ensure that they process trauma a little differently from other people.

But touting the 'exposure therapy' as a go-to that's always beneficial to the client is potentially harmful because it fails to take account of the complexities and contestation in the field. Particularly when this advice is coming from self-professed 'therapists'.

As the old meme goes, on the internet no one knows you're a dog.

She knows what the person looks like, she knows what she looked like as a teenager, she's hardly going to let her into the house if she looks like a different person, and how do you think this scam would work? Try to think about it logically from the scammer's point of view. How would you scale up the "teenage daughter of previous owner" scam? How would you leverage it into money? It makes no sense.

Still wondering whether the talk about what therapists would/wouldn't do comes from people with any expertise in the area.

I would.

it is a very understandable concept.

Obviously not. And how exactly you can tell it's the same place if everything has changed and the place has been completely transformed? In any case, she wouldn't be allowed in my house, What about the places that have been demolished? What would they do to heal? Or would they never heal? I am pretty sure the are different ways to heal without invading other peoples' houses.

I feel like this about my old family home, have you tweaked the details slightly? This could be a sibling of mine, feels eerily similar 😬

I had a lot of traumatic experiences in my grandparents house when I was a teenager. About 10 years ago (in my early 30s) i started having recurring dreams about the place. My dad still owned the house, but he wouldn't let me access it as he hadn't maintained it and was ashamed. I actually ended up climbing through an easily opened window.

I'm glad I did it and I stopped having the dreams after that. Obv the circumstances here are different and I'm not recommending anyone breaking in! But it was quite a healing experience for me.

She’s buried something under the floorboards and needs to get it.

It doesn’t say anywhere in OPs thread that she ever met the daughter 15 years ago, just that there was a mum, dad and teenage daughter there.
We re selling our house and prospective buyers never see my children and I’m doing the viewings.
Most estate agents do viewings and having moved 5 times I’ve never met the previous owners but I do know if they had kids as estate agents tend to tell you those things and it’s obvious sometimes .
There may have been photos around the house when you’re viewing but who remembers what some random person looked like in a photo 15 years ago. (Unless they have photographic memory of course )

So really, as it stands, it really could be anyone.

almost like she's trying to taint it

Jesus Christ.

Still wondering whether the talk about what therapists would/wouldn't do comes from people with any expertise in the area.

They might very well have experience of the kinds of ethics all professionals have to abide by.

Failure to conduct risk assessments when working with vulnerable participants, diverting traumatised clients to homes that could belong to anyone without conducting proper checks, failure to consider how the dynamics of abuse can attract abusers, or that the dynamics between therapist and client can be problematic and this might easily transfer itself onto the home-owner, divesting their responsibilities as a therapist onto a completely unknown and uninvolved bystander: all these are rudimentary issues that it wouldn't take any 'expertise' in a particular profession to know are highly dodgy and not exemplars of any kind of 'best practice'. Any ethics committee would have a field day with this.

It's far more likely that the 'client', if such there is, has at best embellished their situation to elicit sympathy and persuade the home owner to do what she wants. As a PP above points out, this alone is problematic because it's manipulative, and therefore bodes nothing positive for either the traumatised woman or the OP.

If I knew for certain that any counsellor or psychotherapist was behaving in such an unprofessional manner, I'd report them.

I think it took her a lot to write that and would say yes. It’s personal choice maybe your husband can show her around.

I appreciated the sarcasm, but she has buried something in HER house, now it's someone else's house, so chance are there nothing under the floorboard, so that proofs my point - no need to visit

Is it possible you feel a bit vulnerable at the moment?

I ask this because you said the following:

’She is now in her 30s. I feel really odd about it and almost distrustful. I also don't like the thought that she experienced trauma in our home, almost like she's trying to taint it. ‘

This woman’s trauma can’t taint you or your home.
It may feel sad while she’s there but that’s her sadness and you can always say no or get someone else to show her around.