Resources and Support for Healing
Consent requires that a person have all the necessary information to make a decision and the power to choose and have that choice respected by others. The possibility of authentic consent rests upon equality of power in a relationship. Consent should never be confused with submitting, going along, or acquiescing. – Marie M. Fortune SEXUAL …
For much of the past week, even longer really, I have been trying to draft a post on the topic of consent. As in why there can be no real consent for sex between a therapist and a patient. No small task, that. But for some reason I felt compelled to take it on. At …
Like every victim of therapist abuse, I have wondered whether I was in some way responsible for what happened. Even after almost four years of recovery work and having at least five therapists tell me that this was not my fault, I still have my occasional doubts. I do now understand that I showed up …
Telling was a scary thing. As someone freshly out of an abusive, highly manipulative situation, I needed an extraordinary amount of validation. Here’s what you have to keep in mind: I didn’t know that I was being abused and exploited until someone told me—afterward. I had basically been in an altered state (I think of …
Only once, as I recall, did I come right out and ask someone why they had never asked me anything about my situation. As it turned out, it was a big mistake. Both of us, I think, left the conversation feeling really bad. I never dared ask the question again. Here are a few attitudes …
When I dropped the bomb and began telling people what had happened with my ex-therapist, it seemed like a lot of them didn’t really want to know too much about it. At least, that was my perception. At the time, I was in the midst of full-blown PTSD; I was traumatized, anxious, worried about whether …