Dumping My Therapist

It's not me. It's you.

Trigger Warnings: Trauma and traumatizing subject matter, unnecessary cusses, run-on sentences and overuse of italicized and bold text. (Sometimes even both together!)

Photo by Stephen Harlan on Unsplash

Despite it describing something specific that no one should make light of, the word “trauma” gets thrown around so casually that it has completely lost its teeth.

This flippant use of important language makes life not only frustrating emotionally, but it makes it nearly impossible to communicate with the average person about the lived reality of struggling with C-PTSD. (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Of course, the average person isn’t equipped to fully grasp the impact of trauma, and it would be foolish to expect them to be. I generally try to avoid talking about this with others, as it seems like a huge waste of energy and a cry for attention. That being said, my behavior is greatly impacted by this disorder and I need to be able to explain why and how to my loved ones.

I’m well aware that I can’t police the language of others, and trying to “set people straight” isn’t something I think would be effective, even if I was comfortable doing it. Instead, I try to define what it means when I use the word. Even if I try to explain it to someone, they don’t seem to really grasp the severity of my symptoms. That is, if I even get a chance to define the word:

Jump in at any time, I guess.

Me: I've been thinking about all of this all the time because I'm trying to improve and I realized I should explain what I mean when I say “trauma”. The word is used to mean all sorts of stuff.

Friend: Well, I believe in a broader version of the term (broader than what?) because things that other people might not consider trauma can add up over time.¹

Me: I'm having trouble putting my words together. I may need a moment. You know start? Maybe later. I'm kind of overwhelmed.

---

Psst. That’s not trauma.

In fact, this assertion was so insulting and invalidating that I had to abandon my attempt to define something for the sake of future clarity before I was even allowed to begin. I was too busy worrying about how I was going to convince them that this is something to take seriously and please would you take it seriously for my sake because you love me?

Behind Closed Doors

I’m fortunate when it comes to my experience with complex trauma in that it didn’t develop during childhood, as it does for most people. Instead, it is the result of a decade of IPV² at the hands of my ex partner, meaning there is a distinct “before me” and “after me” that I have been able to observe.³

Even still, it took me nearly six years to discover that my “personal shortcomings” and failure to thrive were not, in fact, personal flaws but phenomena recorded in other victims of abuse. Note that I said that it took me six years. I then had to spend a session explaining complex trauma to my very own therapist on my dime.

This gap in knowledge isn’t necessarily her fault. It’s just another symptom of a culture that does not value women and children - those whose trauma is forged behind locked doors and perpetuated largely by men. It just doesn’t appeal to our society the way that big, tough guys being “brave enough” to shed a few tears does.⁴ Somehow the idea that being abused in the long term might cause trauma was beyond the comprehension of the psychiatrists in charge of such things because C-PTSD has yet to be added to the DSM as its own disorder. Until recently there didn’t seem to be a reason to separate the two despite the fact that complex PTSD is PTSD with additional debilitating symptoms.

While I don’t hold her personally responsible for not knowing what she doesn’t know⁵, this is a problem that needs to be addressed. People need real help for this condition because it actively ruins lives. Excellent trauma informed care is essential, especially for women and children, and it’s more difficult to find than it should be.

Before and After

I have plans to write further in depth about my experiences surrounding trauma, so I’ll keep it moderately surface level for now, as not to lose the plot: I once was a person who was struggling with mental illness, but not enough to upend my life. I started my first real job at 15 and had worked my entire life (even while attending college full-time), up until shortly after the break-up with my abusive ex-partner. I used to have a tight lid on my temper. I was patient and I could be sweet when I was feeling uncomfortable. I didn't do well in crowds but I could be around strangers. I could enter coffee shops. I was very enthusiastic about my creative hobbies and I loved to play computer games.

I went from being the sole breadwinner of a household, working 50+ hours a week in a stressful job to being incapable of working, except for some things I can do alone from home. Even though I initiated the break-up to escape, I didn't want to do it, and it broke me. I grieved in a way I didn't know was possible while my ex insisted on not leaving my life, further traumatizing me with fear.⁶ I lost my job as a result of emotionally falling apart in January 2020 and I haven't been able to return to work since.⁷ There are many things I can no longer enjoy. I have missed years of important life events such as weddings, funerals, and watching the children in my life grow up. These things were stolen from me.

I get triggered (actually triggered, not “Gen Z triggered”) and lose my ability to control my behavior in a way that genuinely scares me. I've felt a form of rage I didn't even know I possessed - and sometimes it has come roaring out of me in response to the smallest of inconveniences⁸. As an example (as ashamed as I am to admit this), once I was merging on to the expressway when a car cut in front of me and I screamed (not yelled) with such force that I physically damaged my throat enough to cause it to hurt for a couple of days. Imagine what happens when people actually do something directly to me. (I wouldn’t try it.) My nervous system has adapted so I stay safe, and this isn't something I can just immediately change, as much as I would like to. (Thankfully, medication has made my life somewhat livable. Most of my worst symptoms are now under control. If I stop taking it, though, it doesn't take long for these problems to return and disturb every aspect of my life.)

We can discuss some of the more interesting symptoms of my trauma soon. Before we get back to my therapist, however, I need to show you why I am the way I am, which is too difficult to work with in therapy.

A major aspect of my toxic relationship was the incessant gaslighting (again, real gaslighting, not “Gen Z gaslighting”). This person had managed to turn an intelligent woman against herself. I lost my capacity to trust my own perception of reality; instead allowing this man to determine for me what was real. In fact, he literally⁹ told me that he existed in objective reality while I was living in my own subjective world. So, of course I needed his guidance. I wanted to be better.

Like so many other women, I spent all my time wondering what was wrong with me, not what was wrong with him, and wasted years trying to navigate an ever-changing minefield of emotion. As you might expect, there was no way for me to win this fight.

---

As an aside:

I hope you can appreciate how humiliating it is for me to tell my story.

This isn't the sort of thing that gets you free victim points - I was actively perpetuating the abuse against me. It's hard to accept how pliable I was, and I'm still so ashamed of myself. I also know that this feeling is a part of the trauma. I’m not actually at fault here, but it really feels that way.

---

Even after I finally managed to rip the last tentacle of this desperate and abusive octopod off of me¹⁰, the confusion about what was real or not was persistent. When I found out that he was now “she”, it really fucked me up. Apparently reality is whatever goes and it makes sense no longer. Any progress I had made was immediately lost.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've only learned to truly trust myself again within the past year. (Remember, the break-up was July 2019.) With that said, I'm proud of myself for joining Substack and finding the confidence to share my opinions and experiences. I don't fear the invalidation like I once did.¹¹ I don’t need someone else’s approval to trust that I’m right.

C-PTSD did not make me a rational person; I already was. It does, however, demand that I protect myself from those people who make me feel unmoored from reality - the ones who believe that truth is subjective. (If truth is subjective, we can’t have science.)

This wasn’t much of an issue for the past year and a half that I have been seeing my therapist but once we started talking about transgenderism in any meaningful way, her refusal to believe in an objective reality stopped any conversation from being fruitful.

I can’t be fucking around with people who aren’t comfortable with objective truth. (Again, the medication I take has helped so much in this regard, as I used to majorly obsess over truth-seeking but now I can make it stop. Thank goodness.)

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As Another Aside:

One of the earliest things I said to my therapist about trans-identified men was that I think committing a violent sexual crime means you’re not allowed to be a woman. If you rape someone, you don’t get to “have womanhood”. I would say “we have higher standards on this side (of the sexual binary).” I remember how uncomfortable she seemed to be then and I found it concerning. I expected a nod, maybe a shrug, but not the look she gave me.

It is not okay for that fact to be controversial.

I'll declare now for the internet to hear: If you fuck someone without their consent, it's not okay for you to be cosplaying as a woman, not to mention trying to enter female safe spaces.¹²

If that makes me a hateful bigot in someone's eyes, so be it. I’ll wear that badge with pride.

But let’s be real: women don’t go around raping other women. #NotOurCrimes

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Reality is Whatever is Most Convenient

Before the last straw, there were a few other squabbles about reality.

The last time, I was trying to explain to her why I feel a need to obsessively reality-check as a result of my trauma, saying that my ex used this idea of us living in different realities to control me. I was trying to explain that reality is objective and we can’t pretend otherwise if we’re going to do real work in our sessions.

Apparently, I was wrong about that. I guess because none of us can accurately perceive objective reality, it ceases to exist. She explained it to me thusly:

“Imagine I’m jogging down the hallway, not looking at where I’m headed and I slam into someone. I don’t take the time to assess the situation, but rather carry on. I think this person was rude and purposefully ran into me, but I didn’t see their white cane. Turns out, they’re blind and they thought they bumped into a wall or something, not another human being.¹³ My truth is that some rude jerk ran into me and their truth is that they ran into a wall.”

You clearly do not know what the word “truth” means. Just because neither of these people are capable of perceiving capital T Truth does not mean it doesn’t exist. There aren’t two truths in this situation. There is one truth and two subjective experiences of it.

Imagine saying that my truth was that I was abused by my ex but his truth is that he didn’t do it. You know there is an objective reality once I say that to you. There’s an obvious piece missing and leaving it out means there’s nothing for us to work with. If you’re not intelligent enough to keep this straight, how can we work on my trauma? We can’t do anything if we don’t acknowledge a shared reality whether or not any of us is capable of perceiving it as it is. (Again, science doesn’t work without objective reality.)

Pulling this therapeutic relativistic bullshit on someone with serious trauma is a bad idea. I don’t have the luxury of pretending that the things I don’t see don’t exist. My brain won’t let me.

I Know You're Lying

The supposed transition of my ex was the incident that would eventually lead me to realize that this issue isn't as simple as I had previously thought. I had been an unwavering ally for the previous 15 or so years because I'm an open-minded, empathetic person who wants people to be free to be themselves. I could not have guessed that amount of damage this ideology has done to women, to children, and to the LGB community had it not been for his appropriation of my identity.

I then wasted four years allowing fear and shame to silence my very thoughts about the reality of what had happened to me. I'm ashamed to say that I could not just declare that this man - this man who abused me emotionally, sexually, and financially for a decade is, in fact, a fucking man. He isn't a woman at age 35 because he couldn't handle our breakup (I'm not blaming him for that - I couldn't handle it either).

It was only a few weeks ago that I accidentally referred to my ex as “he” rather than “they” in therapy and decided to make that the point at which I take my identity back from the person who used my very womanhood to destroy my life.

I don't really know much about my ex any longer because I'm terrified of him. Just hearing his name unsolicited can send me into an anxiety attack. Thankfully, I can talk about him if I control the conversation, like I am now. I have found out just enough to know that this person not only decided they were now a woman, but their personality has changed in some very significant other ways. This isn't the person I was in a relationship with any longer.

In our penultimate session, I spoke the truth about my ex by telling my therapist that no, there was no innate sense of womanhood that was always there but I never knew about it. There was not a missing piece that he only discovered after a majorly traumatic breakup by chance. There's no slumbering gender soul that can be awoken if things get shitty enough - there's only coping strategies to deal with trauma. There's only mental illness and toxic methods of moving on. I told her that this major set of personality changes, including the delusion that he can suddenly be a woman, was from the impact of the break-up. (Because fucking duh.)

My therapist has authority by way of her profession and needs to take that into account during sessions. Instead of holding her tongue, she informed me that only a “major, life-threatening capital T trauma can do that.” I don't even have to do any research to know that's a complete lie because we don't have that data.

We don't have that data surrounding trans-identified people. Even if you find someone who claims to have a study, you are a fool to trust it. Associating transgenderism with trauma and mental illness is one of the cardinal sins of the movement. You must never give anyone the impression that they are related or the whole house of cards tumbles. You don't have to be lied to in order to be misled. It is enough that many do not want something to be true.

She, however, lied to my face - further gaslighting me and undermining any authority she had left. Instead of admitting that I might actually be capable of putting two and two together to get four, she prioritized her feelings. She effectively told me that I didn't really know my ex and that obvious reality is a lie.

How can I trust someone like that?

No Safe Spaces

My terfiness was increasing as the sessions went on and I knew she was observant of that fact. Once, I handed her a piece of paper with the title “What is Womanhood?” I had a list for women and a list for men. The entire sheet was full despite the part about men simply stated the truth of “For Men: A feeling.”

She seemed genuinely surprised as she pointed out that none of the items listed seemed to be duplicates. When I told her that transgenderism effectively just funnels children into binaries again while erasing gay kids, I saw the light bulb. I thought I was making enough headway to be able to speak about this topic in a more honest way, but I was too hasty.

I know I sound like I was trying to “convert” her or something, but I was not gender critical at the time. I was trying to make sense of the confusion I felt. I was looking for someone to say, “Hey. You might be on to something here. You’re not totally crazy.” She would not offer that to me.

Despite what had happened in the past, I decided to keep trying because I genuinely quite liked my therapist as a person and I was willing to make it work.

On the day of our last session, I made it about halfway through before I told her I'd had enough and I needed to leave. I was trying and failing to show her how the trans movement impacts my sense of self as a woman.

At the apotheosis of irritation I was trying to ask her something along the lines of this:

As someone who suffered years of emotional abuse resulting in C-PTSD and an inability to trust my own perception of reality:

How do I live in a world that is gaslighting me 24/7 about fundamental reality and my worth as a woman? How do I deal with the constant reinforcement of lies? What about the necessity for me to lie against both reality and my strongly held personal beliefs? How do I not let the seemingly omnipresent reminders of how little I’m worth as a woman take me down? How do I deal with being disrespected and mocked all the time? How do I handle having my morally defensible opinions constantly framed as hate and bigotry? How do I deal with having to stay quiet in order to stay safe?

These are the various attempts she made at shutting me up:

• I care about you and your feelings.

• Your problem isn’t about this issue. It’s about not being healed from what happened with your ex.

• People have all sorts of opinions and there’s just nothing you can do about that.

• People display flags I don’t like, and I have to deal with it. (She wouldn’t give me an example. Unless she’s really offended by the national or state flag, there is no analogous example. No other flag is flown with anywhere near the frequency of the “progress” flag, at least where we live.)

• You’re worried about people hurting you physically (due to speaking out).

• You should be worried about people hurting you physically rather than focusing on this.

• You need to focus on other things.

• If you’re spending all your time online, of course it seems like a bigger issue than it is. (I don’t.)

• If you do advocacy work, you have to expect resistance.

• Pushback is the result of saying these things aloud.

• Everyone sees things a different way.

Then my favorite two:

• This is a compulsion.

• This isn’t an issue for me (as a so-called “cis woman”).

Instead of trying to listen to what I was asking, she instead deflected, and more importantly she implied that my bipolar disorder is what is to blame for this “compulsion”.¹⁴

SHE USED THE HYSTERIA ON ME!

She framed my legitimate concerns about the well-being of women as mental illness.

If I had gone in there with the same concerns as a trans-identified person none of that would have ever happened. Can you even imagine? No. For them, reality itself must warp. Women have to give up all of our safe spaces - including our own personal one-on-one therapy sessions (that we are paying for!) to men with big feelings. She prioritized the feelings of a small group of men who weren’t even in the room over my mental health. That is an unacceptable level of misogyny right there.

Just like the use of the word “trauma”, I can’t police what people think and say. I can’t force them to live in reality if they refuse for the sake of their own uncomfortable feelings. What I can do, however, is walk away.

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If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I started this account about two months ago and I didn't expect anyone to listen to what I have to say, let alone engage with the ideas I'm exploring. It's been an honor getting to know people exploring similar topics. I've been learning so much from you all.

Until next time, be guilty of thought crimes!

XMadFemX

P.S. I stopped using ChatGPT for most everything because it pushes this disgusting propaganda. I do use it, however, to read my writing back to me before I publish it.¹⁵ It refused to read my essay back to me because I was “targeting people.”

This shit cannot stand.

1. No.

2. Intimate partner violence

3. Although, as time passes it gets more difficult to remember who that old me was.

4. If crying was brave for women, I’d be a national hero.

5. I’m sure some people will probably think I should.

6. Basically stalking me by telephone. Once, he called 20 times in a row and it scared the shit out of me. Eventually he found a method of calling from a third party number to try and trick me into picking up the phone. It was a scary time.

7. Tragically, my initial plan was to be back to work within 3 months.

8. What I didn’t realize then was that these things seem like they arise from trivial matters but they are related to what you experienced (even if it takes a little while to figure that out.)

9. Literally.

10. This person seemed to think that skewing as left as possible politically was the way to be “good” and I started changing some of my more moderately liberal beliefs to align with his. The fact that I have been able to get to this point in my gender critical journey is proof that I’ve broken free.

11. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a man.

12. WHAT.THE.ACTUAL.FUCK.

13. This is really insulting to blind people. They can tell the difference.

14. Yes, I get hypomanic compulsive episodes but I know the difference between that and not that. She should trust me.

15. If this essay sucks, it’s Open AI’s fault.