A Predator Seeks the Unprotected...

It’s peculiar how life can take a drastic turn when least expected. On a day that seemed not unlike any other day, my life changed in one short encounter with my next-door neighbor whom I’d never met.

            It happened late one afternoon when we were both at our mailboxes in front of our homes. We engaged in small talk, but then I felt her eyes on me. Studying me. I was 32 years old, and she was ten years older. She told me she was a psychologist in a town close by. I told her my husband and I were in the advertising business. I felt her staring at me again. So uncomfortable. I ended the exchange by turning to leave and go into my home. I remember having an uneasy feeling of having been in her presence. I now realize that was my intuition.

            Some time later, I bump into her again at our mailboxes. I said, “I’m looking for a therapist. Any chance you could refer me to someone, or see me yourself?”

            She answered by handing me her business card, “Call me for an appointment.” At that point, I was unaware of it being unethical for her to accept me as a patient due to being her next-door neighbor. The reason being was that it had the potential of blurring the therapeutic boundaries between counselor and patient.

            In a matter of days, I was in her well-appointed office paying $300 dollars a session. I told her my presenting symptoms were marital trouble, and the fact that I’d been relinquished at birth by my birth mother and placed for adoption. Additionally, I shared that my adoptive parents were excessively controlling, and physically and mentally abusive.

            From the start, my next-door neighbor/psychologist would hug me after each session. The hugs were seemingly innocuous at first – but then they grew to being intimately hugged by her before and after each session. She would tell me to “think of her as the loving mother I’d never had,” and that I should trust her. This repeated phrase, followed by her penetrating stare through her intimidating doctor eyeglasses, was that I was also to stop being resistant and become completely vulnerable with her. She’d say it was the only way to have my breakthrough and that she was the only one who could help me.

            Among the many red flags, was how much of an interest she took in me since our first meeting. But I’d whoosh away my internal warnings each time thinking how much I wanted to believe in her and her ability to help me. I quickly developed an emotional dependency upon my doctor who’d given me the privilege to call her any time, or even have impromptu visits to her home next door where she would envelop me in a hug and calm me after difficult sessions.

            My already stressed relationship with my husband suffered immediately after entering therapy with my counselor. She provided marital sessions that only served to drive an even deeper wedge between us. Afterward, when alone with her, she’d point out the things he’d said in session were proof that my marriage would not survive and that “he was no good for me.” I soon found myself keeping secrets from my husband and an even deeper icy chill had formed between us. When he'd question me about spending so much time with my doctor, I would become infuriated and take it as evidence that he was the enemy. Just like she said he was.

            I was no stranger to controlling, authoritative relationships. First with my cult-like adoptive parents, and then my marriage to a man who was manipulative, narcissistic, and 20 years my senior. The imbalance of power was familiar and normalized by me.

            The boundaries of the therapeutic relationship became non-existent when the visits and invitations to my doctor’s home became social. My husband and I would be invited for dinner with my therapist and her partner of eight years. After dinner, my therapist would take me down to her office for a “session.” It was during one of those sessions that my therapist told me her plan of splitting with her partner, and her desire of me leaving my husband, so the two of us could become a couple. When I’d resist, she’d use punishment/reward tactics meant to hurt and confuse me. Her emotional hook was imbedded so deep in me by then that I felt I’d do anything to keep my connection with her. No matter the cognitive dissonance I was feeling.

            My world felt as though it had shifted into a colossal tilt and that I no longer had agency over my life. I managed to resist her demands that I leave my husband even though I knew this was making her angry. This triggered my deep abandonment issues caused by being left by my birth mother at birth and then having been given to strangers to be raised by. My doctor bided her time about me leaving my husband until one day, she phoned while I was at work, saying, “I’ve done what you’re not strong enough to do.” After asking what she meant, she said, “Remember when you gave me your house key to feed your cats while you and your husband were away that weekend? Well, I used it today to MOVE ALL YOUR THINGS INTO MY HOME. YOU’LL LIVE WITH ME NOW!”

            The therapy had long before become sexual. While I’d never had lesbian tendencies, somehow, I accepted her sexual advances to be closer to her. There’s a hormone secreted during childbirth called oxytocin that is termed the “love hormone” essential for mother and baby to bond. Since my first mom had never held me before handing me away, I had been oxytocin deprived since birth. I was experiencing a psychological transference, that had been fostered by my doctor, to attach to her. My therapist, one-on-one cultic leader, had effectively love bombed, isolated, confused, deprived, controlled, and stripped me of all my autonomy to resist her goal of having total domination over me.

            I lived with my psychologist for over a month while I convinced myself that I was acting of my own accord. Even though I felt I had utterly and completely gone mad. Once under her roof, where she started exercising total control over me, little slivers of clarity started seeping into my consciousness. My psychologist’s demeanor had shifted from being someone who made me feel loved, to more of a “master and slave” relationship. Feed my dogs. Pick up my cleaning. Clean my kitchen. All these demands started waking me to the reality of my situation. The big finale came when her behavior started becoming hostile, punitive, and horrifying. She started resembling my emotionally hurtful, physically abusive, adoptive mother. While I was still cognitively impaired, my fight or flight instincts kicked in long enough to successfully escape her prison one day while she was away from the home.

            Undeniably, after my escape, I needed help to be deprogrammed. Not many in the counseling profession are equipped or have the training to help with this phenomenon of being exploited by a therapist. With feeling as though I had nowhere to turn, I reluctantly returned to my husband. I felt he was the lessor of the two evils. He was also abusive and controlling. However, he was my advocate during that time and helped educate me on the horrors of what my therapist had done to warp my mind.

            It’s now been 29 years since my cultic relationship with my therapist. I reported her to the board of ethics (her psychologist license was revoked, but she still practices as a Social Worker in good standing) and filed a civil lawsuit against her (won a settlement of almost $100,00). I was convicted to do my part to assure she couldn’t do this to another of her patients. All the while, I kept saying to my attorney, “I was to blame, too. I did it of my own free will!” I couldn’t fathom that I’d been absolutely duped. Just as is the nature of any sociopath, she admonished me all through the relationship to never report her. She said it was to be our secret. She had even shared that she’d had many affairs with her patients, but it was OK because it had been true love. I felt such shame at what I’d done and wondered who I thought I was to try and get her license to practice revoked. It wasn’t until I sought addition therapy from multiple reputable therapists that I truly began to “come out of the fog” of how I’d been in an abusive, cultic relationship. And, to finally work on my core issues that had brought me into therapy in the first place. I educated myself on what healthy therapeutic boundaries are and was able to see how my exploitative psychologist had crossed the therapeutic boundaries – one calculated step at a time.

I got out.

~Emma Stevens
Author of “A Fire Is Coming” and “The Gathering Place: An Adoptee's Story”.