To the therapist that ruined a friendship.
You will never see this. I know who you are and where your office is, but I can’t go to you and confront you or drop off a letter. Patient confidentiality laws mean you would be completely unable to respond while I ranted at you, and that is not what I would want. What I really wish is that we could have a conversation about what really happened, but that will be impossible. So instead I will write here, and deal with this on my own, and neither of us will ever get the full story.
I spent the last few months watching my roommate and friend get worse and worse. Anxiety to the point of extreme paranoia began to develop. She became afraid of everything, including me. I know she was under a lot of stress from the pressure she felt at work. She felt a lack of support and was afraid to do anything about it because she thought there would be repercussions. Her paranoia extended to the point of fearing that she would be blacklisted and never work in her field again if she merely dared ask for even the tiniest bit of help on anything. Nothing I could say would reassure her, and she didn’t believe me when I told her that the campus mediation services could help and protect her in situations like this. She claimed she was working on this with you, but nothing ever came of it. No ideas for how to proceed, no changes in her outlook. What were you doing, exactly? How were you helping? Or was she just not even telling you about this at all?
Nevertheless, as the stress from this situation got worse, so did everything else. She eventually began accusing me of treating her badly, being generally angry and mean toward her all the time and targeting her specifically in ways that I was not doing to other people. Obviously I was baffled and saddened by this since I was doing no such thing. She claimed she was working on this with you as well but there was no improvement. In fact, she got worse, and began to demand that I modify my behavior because I was triggering her. She ultimately claimed that you had said this was a reasonable demand. I’m not sure what she told you to make this seem reasonable, or if perhaps you actually believed that I was genuinely treating her badly. Forcing me to change who I am, and use extra energy that I don’t have modifying my behavior for something I am not even doing, is absolutely not reasonable, and I can’t believe a trained therapist would even suggest it. When I refused, she immediately made it clear that the friendship was over and she was moving out.
I don’t know what she really told you, or how much of it you genuinely believed, and I never will. But by encouraging her behavior and viewpoint, you destroyed a friendship. When I suggested that her mental problems might have something to do with the way she was perceiving me, she became very upset, but perhaps if the idea had come from you she would have been willing to hear it. But instead you encouraged her to do things her way, which involved demanding that I change rather than treating her own problems, and pathological lying “to protect herself”. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to know how she feels or what is going on or how I’m supposed to respond to it if she is lying about everything constantly, so when she then got more upset with me for being frustrated and confused by this strategy, it was extremely unfair. I can’t read minds! If she lies and tells me things are fine, I am going to believe they are fine and not change, and get upset when she is then mad about something that was not actually fine.
I’m not going to lie. I do blame you for a lot. I can’t blame you for everything because I know she probably wasn’t completely honest with you and that probably affected your viewpoint and treatment of the situation. But some of the choices that you made (assuming that any of it was ever you, and she wasn’t lying about that too) were completely unprofessional for a trained therapist, and I do wish there was a way for me to communicate that to you.
