Something has wounded me at work and I don’t know how to explain it. It started with a couple who had a very emotional session at the beginning of the summer. There was a plan for next steps including a visit again in two weeks. When that time came the appointment was cancelled. I waited a little while before reaching out to them both, eventually two times via email. As time went on I reached out to him via text as the listed client in the records. Then via text I reached out to her.

I have a text line specifically for work correspondence. None of those times produced any response. Nothing to say they were not coming back. Nothing to update me on the outcome of this particular situation. Nothing to provide me any feedback on what had or had not happened. And all summer long I’ve had repeated versions of this in one form or another, a steady trickle of disappearances slowly wearing away invested parts of my heart and soul. So I don’t know. I can’t keep going like this.

I’ve changed the way I do my intakes. When we get to the informed consent section where we say that having a good fit and feeling comfortable with your therapist are important parts of the process, and when we tell them that they are always able to end at any time or leave or request to find a different therapist, I now say that we just ask if you’re going to do that you let me know and communicate with me your intentions. I know this is a job but I say that we are also people too.

So we’ll see if that helps. I never did feel like individual therapy was my strong suit but I do still feel the calling with couples to get better though the thought right now makes me feel slightly down and physically ill. I want to keep moving on from the severed ties with the former supervisor and throw up the toxicity that was my mind hooked on him. I almost asked him to explain to me why he didn’t hire me last summer and blindsided me instead with another girl. I knew then that wound was fatal.

And it is a similar feeling now. Like I am stumbling along and will be able to last a little longer. But something about the summer, with other things, has made an irreversible and lasting altering. It’s pretty to awful to think that this can happen with people in therapy too. I do not want to wound people, and I am not talking about those kind of necessary wounds that we all must experience if we’re ever to walk straight again. I mean things that hurt people in ways that didn’t have to happen.