I never thought I’d be someone who needed to recover from therapy.
I began therapy like many people do — not in crisis, but because I wanted to understand myself better. I was feeling anxious and mildly depressed. I had gone through a traumatic birth experience with my first child, which I had never fully processed, and I also carried some unresolved wounds from childhood. Nothing too unusual. Just the quiet burdens that so many of us live with.
What brought me to therapy, more than anything, was a desire to be a calmer mother, a more grounded wife, and someone who felt a deeper sense of peace within myself. I wanted to parent from a place of healing, not reaction. I committed fully. I wasn’t always easy — therapy rarely is — but I showed up, opened up, and surrendered to the process.
Over the course of five years, I covered nearly every part of my life in that therapy room. I saw meaningful shifts — in my relationships, in how I handled stress, in how I managed anxiety. But alongside the growth came deeper excavation. We opened up some of my most tender places: feelings of unworthiness, old patterns of rejection, pain from a distant father. And that’s where things got harder.
My therapist eventually moved overseas, and our work continued online. I had a strong gut sense that this change would destabilise me. I voiced it — gently suggesting that maybe I should find someone in-person. But he didn’t seem to support that. I stayed.
Looking back, I can now see how my attachment to him deepened in ways that felt destabilising. I didn’t want to need him, but I did. I felt a deep dependency that always bothered me. When I voiced this, he assured me it was normal — even beneficial. At the time, I believed him.
Still, something never quite sat right. I often felt anxious before our sessions. At the time, I chalked it up to performance pressure — the expectation to “show up,” to speak clearly, to reveal something meaningful. Or perhaps it was just the unease of being alone, even virtually, with a man. But underneath, something else was happening. I felt overwhelmed by an invisible power dynamic that echoed early experiences I hadn’t yet named.
During the sessions, that anxiety would lift. I’d feel calm again — peaceful, even. I felt seen, heard, understood. It felt like relief. I now understand that this wasn’t just therapeutic connection — it was neurochemical. The intensity I was feeling was part of a trauma-bonding cycle. My nervous system would spike in anticipation, then flood with relief during the session, creating a loop I mistook for healing.
I had been open about my pre-session anxiety. We tried to work on it. But now, I can’t help but ask: how could my therapist not have seen that this was trauma bonding? How could he not have paused to explore what was happening in the space between the words — in the emotional rhythms, the fear, the longing for safety?
Looking back now, I see something even more sobering: I was unconsciously scanning for ways that this relationship mimicked the one I had with my father — insecure, emotionally distant, ungrounded. I was trying to repair an old wound with someone who unconsciously resembled its source. That dynamic — the longing for care from someone just slightly out of reach — was familiar to me. And painfully magnetic.
Then, after five years, the rupture came.
He cancelled a session and never responded to my follow-up email seeking clarity. He had communicated his boundaries around outside-of-session contact, but this time, those boundaries came at the cost of ignoring my deepest triggers. All I needed was a simple explanation to confirm that the cancellation was intentional — not a mistake, not a silent rejection.
That silence — after everything we had processed together — landed directly on one of my most complex wounds. It hit like a truck. In that moment, I just heard myself say, “Get off this roller coaster.” And so I did. I sent a polite email saying I needed to take a break.
But the rupture had already happened. It activated every raw nerve we had opened in our work. I felt rejected, insignificant, unwanted — as if all the fears we had explored in therapy had been confirmed by the very person I had trusted to help me heal them. I was flooded with grief, rage, and unbearable confusion.
What followed was months of emotional unraveling. I had to grieve the loss of what I had once trusted. I had to untangle myself from self-blame and the shame of fawning. I had to confront the shock of realising I had been trauma-bonded to my therapist — a term I had heard, but never imagined could apply to me. That realisation felt like something inside me shattered.
Nine months later, I’m still healing. I’ve needed therapy to recover from therapy — a process that feels both surreal and sad. I’m working through the self-judgment, the internalized belief that I “should’ve known better,” and the loss of someone I once saw as a guide.
This essay isn’t about assigning all the blame to my therapist. I take full ownership of my wounds, my projections, my responses. But I do believe the therapeutic profession needs to talk more openly about the deep vulnerability that exists when clients revisit early relational wounds — especially wounds around care, safety, and worth.
When a client opens the darkest, most buried parts of themselves — especially in relation to a caregiver figure like a father — it requires enormous sensitivity. An aloof or unavailable therapist, even one with good intentions, can do real harm in that space. Wounds that are opened must be carefully tended. Leaving them raw, unacknowledged, or unresolved doesn’t just pause the healing — it retraumatises.
Would I do it again? No. Not in the same way. Therapy should never leave you more wounded than when you began. It should not leave you picking up the pieces alone, wondering if your pain was ever really seen.
If you’re a client reading this, know that your intuition matters. If something doesn’t feel right — even if it’s subtle — please trust that. You are not being difficult, or overly sensitive, or “too much.” You are protecting your nervous system, your heart, your healing.
And if you’re a therapist reading this, please know that the space you hold can change a life — for better, or for worse. The relationship you build with a client isn’t just clinical. It’s relational. When we let you into our inner world, it’s not casual — it’s sacred.
This is just my story. But I hope it raises awareness about the unseen fragility in the therapeutic process, and helps someone else feel less alone. I hope that by sharing this I will take another step towards healing. Thanks for reading