An Angry Love Letter: Exploring Boundaries and Autonomy in Therapy

Therapy is kind of crazy. Being a therapist is absolutely absurd. The standards by which one judges whether one is a #goodtherapist are constantly evolving and frankly the more I learn, the more I support diversity of practice and being a limited human as a therapist. There is not just one way to be a good therapist. That being said, I'm about to launch into a critique of my experience in a particular therapeutic interaction which I believe should be taken not as an attack on this therapist, or even a critique of the intervention necessarily, but as a facet of my personal growth and reflection of my own processing. No therapist is perfect, myself unequivocally included. 

I have been in self reflection around my need for and challenge with establishing boundaries for myself in relationships that matter. My brain works in memories, analogies, and emotion - and so, I came to an awareness through a memory and an anger that arose around this experience. 

… 

I was in my early or mid twenties. I was single and entertaining a romance of sorts with a younger man. He was unconventionally beautiful and interesting and woodsy and Jewish in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I enjoyed him. I was a working professional with a nice apartment and a bed on a frame. He was a vagabond with a futon mattress on the floor. I sat in my therapist’s office and explained the bind I was in - he had invited me to spend the night with him but I was reluctant to give up the comforts of my relative privileges in exchange for his company when it felt like he could just as easily be brought in to those comforts rather than me having to relinquish them. I agonized - because I agonize over all decisions - and sought support for my indecision. The therapist chuckled, responding in some emotional way that caused my heart to stop and to feel like I was foolish somehow. She said something to the effect of, “this is what he has.” While I don’t remember the exact words, I do remember that essentially she was telling me to accept what he had and make him feel accepted and comfortable by making the choice to go to him. Which I did. 

I am now in my early thirties and I writhe with anger when I remember this interaction. More than ten years into my therapy career and a deep commitment to autonomy, awareness of how my history imbued me with a procedural strategy of repeatedly compromising my comfort and preferences in order to make someone else feel comfortable, along with awareness of how the overculture reinforces misogynistic practices like expecting women to sacrifice their comfort and preferences to “settle” (while simultaneously telling them to never settle, resulting in a frenzied confusion). I’m furious. 

I’m not sure I have any regrets about the woodsy vagabond man. I have fond memories of the time I spent with him. But also, I’m grateful that it ended. I know that the night I spent at his place was not especially fulfilling or meaningful for me and in a way, I am only realizing this now. Because I have been conditioned to make others comfortable and accept what’s offered to me, I’ve had a good deal of meh experiences (that I was unable to label as such at the time because it would be “bad” to label what someone has to offer as “meh”). I also understand that meh experiences have value. There’s a time and a place to endure a meh experience or even welcome it. You can’t learn new things or find a new wonder without experiencing a lot of meh or even actively unpleasant things. The problem here is that for me, and others like me, it can be excruciatingly hard to know when to embrace the meh experience and when to walk away. This might be a redeeming factor for my then therapist, because I know she didn’t mean to do harm and in this circumstance there was not an option for enduring compromises to myself.

Recently, I’ve seen the effects of this propensity to endure for others' comforts in a situation apparently without end, with the explicit intention to not have an end. I experienced more than just meh but active discomfort and strain. Depression, anxiety, explosive anger. Things that we usually categorize as “bad” that I find I’m deeply, unspeakably grateful for. Yet at the time I was going through them, I was desperate to find a way to change their being -  I was sure the problem was me - I was sick and needed help! The only thing I really couldn’t consider was my circumstances - it was a lack of fulfillment in my preferences and comforts because I’d exchanged them for trying to make someone else feel welcome and comfortable. In retrospect I can now see that in addition to making myself miserable, my sacrifices were also woefully ineffectual in creating the desired outcome for this person’s experience (of course!).

So, you see, my anger at this therapist and this particular therapeutic interaction is not about the actual situation that occurred but about something deeper and more obscure. She reinforced the cultural message that I’m supposed to accept what’s offered to me. There is an aesthetic to being a “good person”, a “caring person”, and that gets increased triple-fold when people know you’re a “therapist”. That aesthetic involves self-sacrifice, centering other peoples’ experiences, and making compromises for the sake of relational endurance. I can see all sides of the experience and the other person’s experience makes sense to me. Other peoples’ experiences making sense to me is a bit of a superpower as a therapist. 

So, then, how is one to set a boundary? For me, it’s pretty easy to walk away from someone in the beginning of getting to know them - “oh, that doesn’t work for me. OK! Bye!” That’s not the case for everyone, but for me, I’ve gotten pretty good at this. It’s also pretty easy to end a relationship when someone has clear bad intentions. But how is one to know when to walk away from a situation or relationship when the other person is not CLEARLY AN ASSHOLE? And this is why I’m on my knees, grateful for my mental health crisis. I - the driver of my body and choices, the decision maker - could not find a means through the expectations of what it meant to be a “good person” and a “good partner” to prioritize what it would mean to be a good steward to myself. I didn’t know how to find the thought “this isn’t the right circumstances for me” amid all that judgment. But my body, my spirit, my psyche - the ineffable unconscious that brews and communicates in physical and emotional pain? She knew. Heaven bless her, she knew. And she rattled at me until she found a way out. 

I see now that this post, which started off as an angry letter to a former therapist, has become a love letter to myself. And an affirmation of the kind of therapy I’m committed to providing for others - one centered on helping them discover the wisdom of their own body, psyche, and spirit. Because I will never know what the right choice is for someone else. Nor can they ever know for me.