Therapist touched me after I said no, but I liked it at the time. Am I justified in feeling anger years later? *MNHQ adding content warning for SA*

A part of you may have enjoyed it because we are all social creatures and enjoy interaction with other human beings. The whole point of a therapist is to build a trusting, therapeutic (but also strictly boundaried) relationship with their client.

There may be many psychological things that come into the equation in this particular instance. A lot of the times therapists can become a 'replacement' for important people in your life that may have hurt you / told you things that were untrue or made you question yourself. This enables a client to begin the healing process from a place of safety and to begin to transition to advocating for themselves and to develop their self worth/ love and to understand what a equal, trusting but boundaried relationship looks like. The counsellor is there to model this so that it enables you to repair / look at / care for or just listen to what you need.

This therapist violated all of this. You could not advocate for yourself regardless of what actions you took. Your therapist held the power and she used it to her advantage. This is absolutely disgusting and not okay

Any good therapist holds unconditional positive regard, empathy and concurrence. They will not and should not judge you or place blame on you. They may encourage you to report it, but they cannot make you do anything you don't want to do.

If your current therapist thinks you're a weirdo when you tell her, she's a shit therapist. I mean it. She is not there to judge you.

I am a trained therapist, I genuinely do not judge clients. I have been privileged to have been trusted with clients deep secrets, fears, feelings, and am aware of how much of a privilege it is. Who am I to judge anyone? I'm at least as messed up as anyone else, therapists are messy fallible imperfect humans like everyone else!

Don't talk yourself out of telling her, if you feel like telling her will help you ( and it sounds like you do feel that). This was not your fault, it's not your secret to carry.

OP, you should definitely tell your current (presumably better!) therapist about this, if you feel able to. She won't judge you one little bit, and it will probably help her to understand you better as a client. You deserve so much better than all this guilt and shame you're feeling - and your therapist will understand that.

If somebody told me what I'm talking about on this thread, I would definitely judge the person. I wouldn't say it but I would automatically think they were very vulnerable and wonder what else had been happening to have created a situation where they did not walk away when the first red flags were displayed.

I would definitely not be judging them as anything bad, but I would be judging them as vulnerable.

That's not 'judging' though. That is simply a therapist trying to understand a client better so they can work through the issues in therapy and help them. That's what a therapist's job is. Trying to get to the heart of the client's issues and helping them overcome them is what they are there for.

If you were going to the doctor about, eg, headaches, you would expect them to ask questions and listen to you in an attempt to figure out what was causing your headaches and how you might be able treat/avoid them in future. The same applies to seeing a therapist about an emotional or mental health issue.

My brain can't really understand how this works, how therapists have zero judgement. Am I just a very judgmental human being?

No one can have zero judgements, including therapists, who are only human. What it means is that in their training therapists spend a lot of time on their own self development, recognising and unlocking the judgements they make about themselves and others - eventually you come to a place where you understand that people always have their reasons for the situations and choices they make, which takes away a lot of the judgement because we’re all simply trying to get by.

In the situation you describe it was your therapists job to hold their professional boundaries fully and they failed to do so. Nothing to blame you for at all.

Gosh, this is an awful thing for your previous therapist to have done to you. I initially misread the OP and thought you meant that a massage therapist had inappropriately touched you, and it was still very clear to me that they were 100% in the wrong. I've now read all of your posts properly and it's even worse that a therapist who had no cause to be touching you at all, touched you below your breasts! The touching on the face, kissing and I love you's are also so far beyond inappropriate I'm struggling express that to you.

She would say her boundaries were really poor with me and it wasn't like that with others and get quite aggressive, like it was my fault. Almost like "look what you made me do".

If this were a man, you would I think be more readily able to accept that this was clearly abusive and inappropriate for a therapist to say to her client. Therapists have supervision (therapy with a more experienced professional) which is the place where she should take any feelings she had for you or about you "making" her do things. If she "couldn't control herself around you" (yuck), she should have referred you to another therapist and terminated her therapeutic and any personal relationship with you. Under no circumstances is any of what she did ever ok in a therapeutic relationship.

If somebody told me what I'm talking about on this thread, I would definitely judge the person. I wouldn't say it but I would automatically think they were very vulnerable and wonder what else had been happening to have created a situation where they did not walk away when the first red flags were displayed.

I would wonder what had happened earlier in their life, why they didn't have a proper fully functioning 'shark cage' at that time.

Is it really that awful if your new therapist thinks this about you? You were very vulnerable when you were in a room with a therapist, bringing up and processing memories of things that had happened to you in the past. We all are - I've done therapy and it's fucking hard, and it's fucking vulnerable too, you have to be prepared to be vulnerable in front of a therapist to a certain extent, otherwise there's no point in seeing one. That's one reason why it's on the therapist, not on you, to maintain professional boundaries and code of conduct. They exist for a reason. You have had things happen to you earlier on in your life that contributed to you being vulnerable to a sexual predator of a therapist, particularly when you were in therapy to discuss those things and process them!

Falling for your therapist is more common than you think, and again, the onus is on your therapist to handle that if you brought it up. I really want to be friends with my therapist, and I think we would get along very well, but I am confident that if I tried to be friends with her outside of therapy 1) it would be really problematic for my therapy, and 2) she would rightly gently say no, because it's inappropriate - she's my therapist, and as such knows things about me that I might not have chosen to tell a friend, particularly a new one, and the therapist-client relationship would make it impossible to have a normal friendship. I trust that she has those boundaries, and we should all be able to trust our therapists to have those boundaries too.

An ex friend of mine is a counsellor and she took on a mutual friend of ours against therapeutic guidelines. Mutual friend ended up closer friends with her, spending far more time together and doing a lot of unpaid labour for her. Needless to say it ultimately didn't end well, because the therapeutic relationship should not be mixed with a friendship or a romantic relationship, and it is always the therapist's job to hold those lines.

Oh don't get me wrong, in life I judge the shit out of people's choices! But in therapy, no.

That's not for me to do, who am I to judge a client? I don't have to live their life, I'm not in their head or their emotions so who the fuck would I think I am to think I could judge them?

I might think they were vulnerable, as you say, but I wouldn't judge them for that. I wouldn't be thinking what they should have done instead of what they did, who am I to think I know better?

I promise you that all the training you do as a therapist means that when you’re in session you have to be completely non judgemental. You almost need to take yourself out of your own body and be in the other person’s world and not let you own judgments and views get in the way. It’s skilled work and that’s why personal therapy and reflection is such an enormous part of the training.

I’m so glad for you

That's great OP, it's not easy and I'm so glad it was positive for you

Good therapy is amazing!

Definatly report this 'therapist' before they try it on with you any more as their morale compass is in idiot mode and for over-syepping boundaries.

Put the complaint in writing as well as verbal, they could be struck off and damn well should be.

I don't know much about the process and I suppose it depends which professional body she is with. The BACP professional conduct stuff I've seen talks about complainants statements, nothing about being cross examined or anything like that, it's not a court. I don't believe the complainant is present at any hearings, just the therapist being questioned. You can probably look up professional conduct notices on the professional bodies website, like this: https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-us/protecting-the-public/professional-conduct/notices/