About the 3lack 3ox.

In 2020 I was a trainee therapist, and therapy was mandatory as a part of our course. Though I could have waited until September, when the final three years of my training began, I made the first appointment to speak with him less than a month after my husband of 25 years, had left me.

I was not in a good state of mind.

Casting my mind back my decision to choose Kit as my therapist makes sense; in his bio he’d put that he specialised in PTSD, and I was a shattered wreck. He said that he liked to use music in his sessions. I liked the idea of that. More importantly, he wrote as if he was a Buddhist. I speak that language. Compassion is important.

But by the end of therapy I understood exactly how important it is that therapy has been chosen by the person entering it; that it must be a cooperative and collaborative undertaking. And that despite his best intentions and training he wasn’t collaborative at all! If therapy had not been mandatory I would have ended my therapy with him after 4 to 6 weeks but if I’d found another therapist I’d have to start again, and I didn’t want to start again.

And then things started to become weird.

My pattern recognition had the quad (Quake reference!) my unconscious mind was in overdrive after four years of catastrophe and chronic stress. This process led to something Erik Davis calls emergent numinous phenomenon (ENP). My chronically stressed state of mind allowed a clearer intertwining of conscious and unconscious images and sensations, these would resonate or intrude, and I welcomed them. In December of 2020 I felt that I’d stepped into something with the therapist - with Kit. And the real world correspondences with emergent images, were just too strange, and compelling to ignore.

I kept getting a really strong impression of his other life, his real passion. It intruded as fleeting visions - and then I saw him on YouTube...and once again I was struck by how accurate my visions had been. It wasn't possible to guess this other life of his from anything he had said, or his room.

And if my impressions - about my husband's after school activities, and about Kit's other life - were so accurate, what else was I being accurate about?!

It was a real problem that I couldn’t ask him if he had stepped into weirdness too. What language could I use for that? Worse, our dialogue was confined by the rules of therapy.

And slowly and insidiously I began to feel increasingly attracted to him.

This was a real problem! 

Once I became fully aware of my feelings I didn’t know what to do. I felt that the feelings could be mutual because we seemed to genuinely get on well together. But, as a trainee I knew that this ability to just get on well with others isn’t as significant as it is in ‘normal’ life. But in body language, and some things he said? I simply couldn’t tell what was happening.

So I stopped thinking of him as my therapist, because it was beginning to feel unethical! And stopped defining myself as a client from the first intimations that I was falling for him. I asked to shift our sessions into a different format, to Mentor and mentee. I wanted real, authentic dialogue. And I was too fragile to leave. My doubt about my feelings, and the ambiguity of the situation was just too difficult for me.

After a year I told him about my feelings…

And the effect of his text book implacable good behaviour was to metaphorically leave me in a heap of rubble, a mess of conflicting emotions contemplating suicide. 

This begs the question, what exactly is ethical behaviour…

That was May 2022.

It has taken me until this year, 2025 to get over it enough to begin to ask questions.

This blog is my view of our sessions, published with the aim of creating an understanding of what happened to us, and why it happened in this way. I've avoided any details that might reveal his identity. I will refer to him through this blog as Kit Marlowe.

Thank you for joining me on this journey...In many ways this is a love story, because I am still in love with him, no getting out of that because there is no real hope of finding closure.