For ten years I have been a practising therapist and in that time I have heard dozens and dozens of horror stories. No, not about the lives of clients… but about other therapists. There was the one who fell asleep when their client was talking. The one who cut their client off abruptly when they were 24 hours late with a payment, despite giving her prior notice that on this one occasion she couldn’t afford to pay exactly on time. ‘We were in the middle of a really important stage in my therapy,’ she told me. ‘I’d uncovered some horrific stuff about my father and I was in bits. I really needed her support but then…she just told me she couldn’t see me again.’ This wasn’t just a one-off cancellation, but the end of the relationship forever. Then there are the stories of inappropriate remarks, propositions or even touching. My blood runs cold when I hear these ones. I had a new client, Josie, come to my office near the City of London recently, and what she told me in that first session shocked me. ‘I’d been seeing my therapist for about a year,’ she said, ‘and I started getting feelings for him. He was the only man who had ever been kind to me.’ Josie was now 26, but her childhood had been difficult, with parents who argued all the time and a home life that often made her feel frightened. As an adult, without much idea what a happy partnership looked like, she embarked on a series of disappointing and even abusive relationships. She had a tendency to go for overtly controlling partners and had really begun to wake up to the fact that she was often a victim of what would now be called coercive control. Wanting to get out of this pattern, she looked for a therapist and found one close to where she was living. But when, as part of the therapy, several months in, she admitted her complicated feelings for him, he did something completely against the code of conduct to which therapists are supposed to adhere. ‘He told me he had feelings for me too,’ she said. Things came to a head when the therapist, who was in his 50s, suggested they meet outside the therapy room. At this point Josie realised she was being sucked into her pattern again but this time with the very man who was supposed to be helping her out of it. She had trusted him to look after her emotionally, not try and date her. ‘I left and never went back,’ she said, ‘but it’s really messed me up.’ When therapy goes wrong, it can be ruinous. People find it hard enough to pluck up the courage to start, and then find it even harder to know what kind of therapist to see. When they’re let down by a bad therapist, it wrecks their faith in the very concept of therapy and makes them question whether they can ever get better at all. I also know of a very high-end therapist who works in a business context. He gets paid more than £1,000 a day to go into the offices of big corporations and talk to the staff one-on-one. ‘It’s in-house therapy,’ he told me. ‘A perk for the employees.’ The people he sees are, of course, led to believe that what they tell the ‘in-house therapist’ is confidential. All therapy should be confidential unless stated otherwise (the exception to this iron-clad rule — as set out by the professional body the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) — is if you’re concerned someone is about to take their own life or commit an act of treason). However, in reality, this therapist is often asked to divulge information about the staff he sees to their employer. ‘It is not overt,’ he says. ‘It’s more like questioning me — for example, do I think Mr Smith or Ms Jones would be mentally robust enough to do a certain job.’ This obviously puts him in a horrible ethical dilemma. If he knows that Ms Jones is having a difficult time at home or Mr Smith is struggling with anxiety, what does he say? Especially since he enjoys the job and loves the money. ‘I get asked all sorts of stuff that is actually inappropriate to ask a therapist because it’s breaking the boundaries of confidentiality… I tell the employers I can’t divulge information, but I do know on some level that is what they’re actually paying me for.’ He says he tries to hedge it, but it does bring up some genuine worries about people’s welfare. ‘What if I am concerned about someone’s capacity to do a demanding job because I know they have a life at home that is falling apart?’ Part of the problem with therapy is the obvious power dynamic. The therapist is the person ‘in charge’. Clients come to us with problems and they are hoping very desperately that we will help them sort it — this is what they are paying us for. But one of the unspoken truths about therapy is that very often the therapist has gone into it because of problems or issues they’ve had themselves — and you’d better hope they’ve worked through them well enough. We are not known as ‘wounded healers’ for nothing. When I was training, a co-trainee was having a difficult time in her long-term relationship and was talking about it in the therapy sessions we all had to have as part of the course. Over a few weeks, however, her therapist started telling her about his marriage. Then he started talking about the affairs he’d had, and the types of women he was attracted to — all of whom sounded pretty much like her — and my co-trainee began to feel very uncomfortable. The final straw was when he touched her hand as she went to leave a session. ‘It was as if an electric shock had gone up my arm, but not is a good way,’ she said. Who knows what he was up to, but one of the suspicions has to be that he enjoyed making her feel so deeply uncomfortable. My own experience of therapy was similarly difficult. I started therapy at the age of 29 and started seeing a lovely man in a room above a shop in Oxford. Several months later, however, I wasn’t really sure if we were getting anywhere. And the day he suggested that I crawl through a knitted ‘womb’ in order to be re-birthed was the day I started to think very hard about the not-insignificant amount of money I was handing over each week. Therapy can be weird and wonderful, but only if you’re happy to do it. How do you know when therapy has gone right? In my experience it’s when someone starts to feel better about their life and stops needing you. This is a good result. I always let my clients know they are welcome to come back any time, and I also run therapy MOTs for people to check in once a month or so. This works especially well with couples who do a set of sessions with me and then go off and see what it’s actually like to be a couple rather than being stuck in therapy for ever. It’s very easy for a therapist to become a third person in a marriage. I’ve even heard of one who turned up uninvited to the wedding of her clients. The groom told me he looked across the congregation, just as he was about to say ‘I do’, and saw the therapist sitting in the pews. ‘It was very off-putting,’ he said, with some understatement. It made him feel as though he and his new wife were in some form of therapeutic thruple with their therapist. ‘In hindsight, I should have got someone to ask her to leave. But I felt completely powerless, as if she had some right to be there, as if we owed our now harmonious relationship solely to the counselling we’d had with her. But it was really off-putting and actually rather creepy.’ I’ve also heard many stories of counsellors telling couples to split up, which is very much not their job. Worse, I’ve been told of a therapist pulling one member of a couple aside and privately telling them they should leave their partner. And worse still, I’ve also heard of a couple splitting up and then the female therapist getting together with the male half within a matter of months! That crosses so many ethical red lines that actually the therapist should be struck off — if she was ever on an official register. That’s one of the problems, of course. Unlike medical doctors, membership of professional registers like those run by BACP or the UKCP (the UK Council for Psychotherapy) are purely voluntary. Anyone can call themselves a psychotherapist or a counsellor; there are no statutory regulations. The lack of consequences when something goes wrong is one of the reasons why relations between therapist and client can get very muddy, but there are plenty of other ways. Another of my therapists told me within two sessions that she’d met my father and what a charismatic and wonderful man he was. Actually he was a chronic alcoholic and a large part of the reason I was sitting on her sofa, so she shot herself in the foot there early on. I’m ashamed to say I simply ghosted this woman. When she wrote me several emails asking why I was no longer in touch, I couldn’t even bring myself to reply to her. I saw her in the supermarket about a month later and had to hide in the pet food aisle, forgetting of course that she had a dog, which she had also told me endlessly about. When she saw me, she came beetling over — and I literally ran away. This is not what you are supposed to feel about your therapist. Yes, some clients do want to ignore me if they see me ‘in the wild’ and I respect that because we’ve already talked about it and agreed a strategy. But in general no therapist wants to inspire feelings of dread upon sight. Back to my own experience above the shop in Oxford. It all came to an end finally with my father’s death on the day I was supposed to be having a therapy session. I rang the therapist and told him I wouldn’t be attending because my father had just died, and was lying downstairs in his bedroom. When the therapist uttered those immortal words, ‘and how does that make you feel?’, well, that was it for me. Because sometimes just saying how you feel, endlessly, doesn’t cut it. You need more from a therapist. I left and never went back. How To Have Extraordinary Relationships (with absolutely everybody) by Lucy Cavendish is available to buy on Amazon (Quadrille £16.99)
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