Dear Rachel:

You are welcome. Regarding your current therapist, I agree: “there’s a difference between learning about healing from a book/school and having lived experience”.

Likely, your therapist didn’t resolve her own relationship with an unloving and abusive parent, still in contact with him or her, maybe even living with the parent, still exposed to abuse. This is very common to adult children of abusive parents, including certified psychotherapists.

She probably, I am thinking, convinced herself that her parent is not all bad (“no one is all good or bad”), that her parent loved/ loves her “and just did some harmful things sometimes”, that it wasn’t really abuse (she wouldn’t call what your ex did abuse) and she convinced herself that her parent does care about her, therefore “she was sure my boss did care about me” (how could she possibly be sure, never having met your boss…).

“I just want to be known and seen on a deeper level and I’m just not getting that from her”-

A therapist who may very well still be engaged with an abusive parent can help a client only so far but not beyond it. For one thing, every therapist who listens to a client without interrupting the client and nodding her head in sign that she is indeed listening, that alone is helpful. But to get help  on a deeper level, I don’t think she is capable of doing that because she didn’t help herself yet.

Regarding your ex, I have no doubt that you should have no contact with her whatsoever.

You wrote: “she had haunted me with her horrible words… she just said ‘well, you  said stuff too'”-

– I understand that you are confused and feel guilty. I will ask you a question (and maybe more to come,if you are willing) in effort of helping you remove that confusion: what horrible words did she use (you can use *&** to disguise profanity, for example f*&*) and what stuff was she referring to in her comment?

anita