Letter as the moon eclipses.

19:29.8/9/25. Got a notification from my phone, The moon was eclipsing.

I was writing a letter.

To be sent at the equinox?

The basis for an article?

It takes bits from my previous blog posts, this is why writing this blog has been useful...

Dear 'Kit',

This is a complaint, and this email is the first and the last time that my complaint is linked by your name to you.

If I was a client, I would tell her, I would tell me..that when a person who is supposed to help, ends up hurting you, the damage can cut even deeper, causing deep emotional and psychological harm. I would also say that it is institutional betrayal because this isn't just someone you trusted, this therapist is someone you were told that you should trust, by a system; by their ethical body, by your college, by their qualifications. Therapists are supposed to be the safe ones; trained, receiving supervision - so if something doesn't feel right it is easy to second guess yourself; and you were grieving, you had been in crisis and when you came to therapy you were trying to heal. Yet when you had doubts and tried to raise them, they were dismissed. You requested clarity, about underlying emotions and he told you 'that isn't how it works '..

I imagine Kit, that we both agree that therapy is there to help a person increase their autonomy, to support their wisdom; to enable them to reclaim choice? But instead I felt pressured into compliance, unable to let go of what was hurting me out of fear of worse. In retrospect, I see what happened during my sessions with you as a misuse of power, and it was not just betrayal, it was a re-enactment of trauma. 

On the third of January 2021, twenty one days after giving you a voice recording describing my feelings about you, I returned to your room. As I sat down I had no idea what your response to my request ‘To make sense of what is’ would be. 

I was expecting an honest discussion. 

I was not expecting to hear a request for my sympathy or justifications for your position. 

I tried to change the direction of the conversation towards the purpose of the recording, I said that my feelings were difficult for me to understand, I used the words liminal and assessment. And you interrupted to tell me that there was ‘only one part (in my recording) you didn’t understand’ the metaphor of ‘falling in love with your brother’. 

Sometimes I’d felt as if our conversations took part on two levels; as if there was something under the surface. The recording was an attempt to get this feeling into awareness and understanding. I was requesting a reciprocal level of sincerity and openness. And so I had no idea how to respond to what felt like avoidance, being delivered as education. And at the end of that session I felt condemned, positioned as being at fault for telling you the truth.

I’m writing now because it has taken me this long to dare to tease apart the factors that led to the hurt and harm of your biases. I might not wish to remember, but I do. I take unfinished business seriously. And I write because I am hoping that you will consider the hurt you caused, and make reparation.

When I left your room for the last time I walked in a daze back to my car. The sun seemed distant, a watery blue moon and so cold. I drove to the supermarket car park closest to the rail tracks, the place where my son’s friend had taken his life. I needed to be there to remind myself that I had promised at his inquest to become the kind of therapist who could help people in the same desperate agonised state of mind that led him to the tracks. As I left your room my promise felt violated and torn and I was in a worse state of mind than when I’d first started therapy. I left that final session carrying the full weight of pain, grief and loss from the four years before therapy with the addition of your lack of trust in my abilities as a therapist.

Walking towards the car I walked away from hope, as if the heat and life giving properties of the sun had turned to ice. 

When I arrived in Droitwich I didn’t have any strength or courage left. I was at the edge of my own disintegration; the air was thick with images of death and destruction under a heavy blanket of amnesia and fog - only my longing for it all just to stop, to give up and to give in. Staying inside the car I wrote out my feelings, capturing the cascade of images. I was powerless, feeling utterly, utterly worthless. 

And I was still without answers. 

How did it come to this?

Eros had arrived quietly, but by the fourth session I was aware that my feelings were not what I expected. It was confusing, but it was a pleasant problem at the beginning. By December 2021 it was too late. And by February I wondered if you might have similar feelings for me too? When you called me a minx (1/2/21), your smile, your tone of voice hit me like a bolt of lightning. Waves of shock and pleasure shook me and I was on fire, and so glad it was Zoom. 

I felt lost without any way to navigate, no way to make sense of this existed. 

In March I had used my phone to record myself as we spoke via Zoom. I wanted to know if I would be able to see my feelings for you in my face and movements? On playback I was shocked, because it was obvious in how I spoke. 

But two months later, I wrote in my journal:

31/5/21Him. Tight lipped - several times. Lectured at. Some disagreement about Brian Thorne but mostly I was feeling deeply, deeply hurt. Desperately got to weave something positive from the shredded mess of my heart. Should I be truthful, act as I feel when I next see him, I feel as if the light has gone out of me. Will I have any choice? After all the above I decided it really isn’t ethical for me to continue as a client, so I asked (sent an email) to change our relationship to mentor-mentee.

During that session your attitude towards me had changed, your replies felt heavy and authoritarian. I'd thought I was talking about SCoPed, yet the focus had shifted to the ethical framework. The way the conversation veered made no sense to me. But it was your tone of voice that really hurt. After that session I doubted I’d ever be open with you again, and therefore you couldn’t be my therapist. But I felt that I needed you. My answer to this was to ask you if we could change our sessions from therapist client to mentor mentee. You agreed, and so we embarked on a series of sessions in which we talked primarily about therapy. I was now clear in my own mind that I really hadn’t fallen for the psychotherapist. I concluded therefore that I must have fallen for the man. And if I’d fallen for the man, it might be limerence - but whatever it was, regardless of the amount of reality involved, it wasn’t going away and it was bad news unless we could find a good way to navigate this.

Between June and October 2021 I was processing as much of the ‘fall-out’ from my son and husband by using the recordings that I’d made at the time, and through listening I was beginning to get a clearer picture. Instead of taking all the blame I was beginning to trust myself again. At the end of October. I felt validated and strong enough to take any outcome from describing my feelings for you, to you. But I couldn't say them to you in person. And so I made a voice recording, speaking openly and from the heart. And at the end of the December session I gave it to you without any explanation.

Three weeks later I returned, and during that session by way of giving me an explanation, you told me that you had been badly affected as a student by a therapist who had broken the ethical code. In reply I was as kind as I could be, but I was also dimly aware that I had been positioned as having transgressed something too. Later I came to see that your feelings about your own experiences had been the cause of the catastrophic misalliance, from the end of May onwards. But worse, I didn’t feel that I was ever in any position to ask if this was possible. I felt disempowered, and silenced. 

As I believed that I could leave therapy after two years, I set an end date for May. 

Until my last session in May, I tried once or twice openly and at other times very obliquely, to bring the subject of Eros into the room. Even if you were unwilling to talk about the personal, it would have been possible for us to explore the cultural and institutional assumptions around the erotic. But the subject was impossible to talk about, instead the situation was framed simply as my transgression, and you explained to me yet again what you thought I didn’t understand.

Back to now. 

My feelings, my erotic feelings were never misconduct. Expressing my feelings for you in words, was not misconduct. But I believe that the way you responded to me was misconduct. It has taken me over three years to begin to understand what happened. That Eros enters therapy as a bridge, as a connection that indicates the possibility of a deep relational depth. I understand that I was not given the hermeneutical information that would allow me to understand my own feelings, and I was denied the information that would allow me to make up my own mind about what was happening between us. 

It had felt like prejudice.

As I left the last session I felt psychologically beaten, bereft of strength and courage. I had felt as if I had been forced into compliance, and so I did what I had to do - I appeared to keep my head. 

It was like putting the experience into cryo, for revival only when things are safe enough to process what happened. 

This of course preserves the pain, prevents resolution. 

Add to this my further complaint that potential safeguarding issues were never discussed. You asked about my son (but he wasn’t the danger). I felt unheard, you described me as ‘contrary’ and ‘tangential’, you strongly implied that I had acted in a way that is transgressive and disrespectful of the ethical code. I have no idea if I was experiencing countertransference. Or had you felt a countertransference? 

How could we know!

You told me that I'd 'brought up the idea that your feelings might be transference in order to then dismiss the idea'. In the recording I'd said that "I am not supposed to feel this way about you or if I do it is supposed to be some sort of transference - all those things were a possibility - But there is no easy way to shrink or reconcile or step out." And in the February session I said (referring to transference) "I dismissed the idea by looking at it - but if you now wish to go there, that's fine now, not at the time (meaning the January 3rd session)”. Let's be clear, you called me a minx, as if the emotional impact of what I was saying had gone completely over your head. There had been a soto voce comment I’d thought I’d heard around the minx time too. And so many comments after the 31/5/21 session that undermined my ability as a student. 

An example:

Me - "I felt as if I'd been shot through the head, basically"

He - "By what exactly"?

[When I returned to college] I felt as if I'd been shot, overwhelmed by a rush of impressions and flashbacks, panic attacks and despair. Why am I having to explain this to a psychotherapist? He doesn't ask for the texture, or quality of the experiences? 

He -"That sounds concerning that you were there all that time and were on a course and not learning. Or it could be concerning that you are on a course and you are not learning it"

'It sounds concerning because I wasn't learning'? I felt as if I’d been shot. Implying an act of violence, a catastrophic experience, but hey, none of that is significant, heaven forbid I talk feelings to him! 

I don’t believe that you ever understood how close to death I’d come before therapy, how much fear I was still experiencing, and I think basically I truly needed you to actually listen. and some part of me had thought that you could do that.

26th June 2023.

I began to study how Eros is regarded by therapists, and the nature of Eros itself.

26th January 2024.

A year later I realised that I needed to understand exactly what had happened in our sessions. As I noticed the dynamic I seriously considered making a formal complaint against you.

20th of February 2024

Almost two years after the final session I was able to admit the obvious. Your reaction to my honesty was harmful - I was harmed. I wrote to you requesting 'resolution' and to say that I was considering asking for my notes, and letting my experience become ‘freeware’ (I should have said CC Creative Commons). 

Your response - You told me for the second time, to never contact you again.

6th September 2025.

Three years and four months later this story is now CC. I want people to know that if they fall for their therapist and it doesn’t feel safe, if they feel demonized and blamed that this isn’t how it should be. Eros is a desire for a deep, secure, intuitive connection. If you as the therapist are working with someone who feels this way about you - bringing both the therapist’s and the client’s feelings into awareness where they can be spoken of, is not ‘pouring oil on the fire’. Eros is evidence of a relational bond, beyond conventional power roles and sexuality. The key to this is comfort with one’s own sexuality and an acknowledgment of adult erotic feelings. 

One thing Eros is not, it is not sexual misconduct. 

Ethical sexual conduct as I understand it from Tibetan Buddhism means refraining from committing any emotional, or psychological harm within the domain of sexuality. This is more complex than refraining from physical contact. By this definition sexual misconduct occurs when the therapist blames or otherwise disrespects the client for their erotic feelings, thereby causing emotional harm to the client. I know myself to have the capacity to hold such feelings securely within the boundaries of the therapy contract for my clients. I knew that about myself when I gave you the recording. My therapy with you has taught me only how harmful naïve moralising can be. 

I believe that whatever happened to you in your training certainly contaminated our sessions. And this email is an opportunity for you to acknowledge that despite your best intentions, I left that final session in a worse mental state than I’d started with. 

I believe that I deserve an apology.

[Sent 20th September 2025]