When therapy turns into indebtedness
We ended things with our therapist. In a rare turn of events, we decided to end it ourselves, which I’ll admit felt strange, sad, overwhelming, anxiety-provoking. But also, unexpectedly, validating. This is the first time in our entire life that we have ended with a provider and told them why instead of just disappearing. Usually, providers discontinue care with us. This time felt different.
I keep searching for the right words to explain it, but explanation feels like part of the problem. Because it wasn’t one thing. It wasn’t a moment or a mistake or a boundary crossed. It was a feeling that built over months. Our body had been sending distress signals related to therapy. The therapy room didn’t feel the same anymore. We noticed we were spending more time outside of session planning how to protect our therapist’s comfort than actually tending to our own healing.
Safety and trust don’t usually disappear all at once. They erode. Quietly. Politely. In ways that are easy to doubt and even easier to blame on yourself. I think the shift here is that instead of blaming ourselves, we put ourselves first and named where harm was happening.
For a lot of systems, therapy is more than a place you visit once a week. It is a relationship that either helps your nervous system settle, teaches your system new ways to mask, or straight up reenacts old trauma cycles. Dissociation does not respond to good intentions. It responds to repetition. To someone showing up consistently in ways that do not require us to manage their reactions or anticipate their limits in order to stay safe. I say that easily. Finding it is another story.
In our situation, there was good intent. At times there was real care and real attunement. Flexibility that mattered. Moments that felt like relief. I need to say that because erasing it would be dishonest. But something began to shift slowly. The time started to feel off. A little icky. Sessions felt more focused on them than on us. We often left feeling defensive, like we hadn’t explained ourselves the right way, like our values were somehow up for debate. It was difficult to name, which is probably why we stayed longer than was helpful. We truly believed we just weren’t doing the work hard enough.
Things became clearer when our provider offered flexibility with payment while we were out of work. The offer initially felt dangerous. We learned early that generosity often comes with strings attached. With debt. They reassured us, framed it as therapeutic support, and we accepted with cautious hope. We relaxed. We felt seen. That’s when things went from subtle to overt.
Sessions increasingly shifted away from our material. We could feel their anxiety in the room. Appointments became more scarce, with cancellations that weren’t rescheduled for long stretches of time. Life happens. We get that. It wasn’t about the logistics. It was the vibe of rejection. Rejection that landed during a significant period of destabilization for us.
We needed support. We thought it was there. And then we realized that in order to receive even small amounts of it, the primary task had become co-regulating our therapist so she felt comfortable, while we sat there feeling like too much. Not the first time this has happened. Probably not the last. Still deeply gross.
Therapy began to feel like something we owed back. The work stopped being about healing and became about reverting to old survival strategies for system safety. Not exceeding. Not being loud. Not being big. Not being emotional. Not crossing invisible lines. Hypervigilance masquerading as self-awareness. Performing “a good client.” Losing any sense of direction or goal other than staying tolerable.
Mental health care often seems to last only as long as we remain manageable and compliant. “Doing the work” without protest. Without destabilizing the room. Without needing more. What does “doing the work” even mean anyway? It’s such a loaded phrase, tossed around like a moral standard, usually by people with far more privilege and far less trauma.
What unfolded was a slow reenactment of the very patterns we went to therapy to work on. Care that stabilizes at first and later becomes something we are made to feel guilty for needing. Withdrawal that is never named but deeply felt. A nervous system that recognizes the pattern long before the mind is ready to admit it.
Boundaries matter. Of course they do. But boundaries without transparency and attunement turn into confused fuckery wrapped in professional language. How many therapists do you know who actively work to reduce systemic barriers for their clients? Who show up with intention and action to interrupt old relational patterns rather than replicate them?
That is what we are looking for. A therapist who is human and grounded. Boundaries that take into account the level of support we actually need. Not boundaries that feel punitive. Not being reminded we went one minute over session time because payment only covers X amount of care and therefore that is all we are allowed.
I get it. What we are looking for is rare. Clinicians are burned out. Insurance systems are brutal. We live in a hellscape. Systemic oppression is real and alive. Everyone is stretched thin. All of that is true. And still, none of that belongs to us to carry as clients trying to build a meaningful, manageable life.
I get jealous of people who go to therapy for a few months for mild depression and feel better after twelve weeks of meds and journaling. It takes us twelve weeks of talking exclusively about our cats before we can even begin to test whether a provider might be able to tolerate one percent of the stress we carry in an average week.
Plural-informed care is not limitless. It is clear and honest. It does not frame support as a favor that later becomes proof of excess. When we asked for a few weeks of increased session frequency during a mental health crisis, we were not asking for something unreasonable. We were asking for support.
Eventually, we could no longer ignore what had been happening for months. Staying meant disappearing parts of ourselves. Staying meant regulating our therapist’s discomfort in real time. Staying meant pulling ourselves back whenever things felt close to the edge so the space could remain tolerable for them. Staying meant holding our own activation quietly and becoming so hypervigilant that we could predict what was available on any given day. That smells like childhood.
Ending this therapy was not clean. Real support did exist at times. This was not some empowering mic-drop moment. It was anguishing. It involved grief, doubt, and a lot of internal negotiation. We questioned whether we were overreacting, whether we were being unfair, whether this was simply the best we could hope for in a therapist. Walking away from subtle harm is much harder than walking away from something obviously bad.
After sitting with it for a few days, it feels clearer. Sometimes leaving is not regulated. Sometimes it is necessary. And necessity still comes with grief. With anger. With the weight of knowing how hard it will be to try again, if trying again is even possible. It means mourning not only the relationship, but the hope we had invested in it.
It is incredibly hard to find competent, dissociation-informed, plural-affirming care. Truly competent. Not “has read about DID.” Not “is open to parts.” Someone who understands dissociation deeply. Who can engage with headmates in real time. Who does not flinch or freeze or center themselves when intensity shows up. Many systems search for years. Many settle. Many stay far longer than they should because starting over feels unbearable and the bar is already painfully low.
The strange silver lining is that the growth we hoped would come from therapy still happened, just not in the way we imagined. We thought it would happen in a therapy office. Instead, it happened through internal collaboration, through naming what wasn’t working, through choosing not to implode or disappear. We wrote a kind email. We took a day to bed rot. We learned more about what we need next time.
Still sucks.