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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 659977" data-attributes="member: 18958">I was always intent in healing. And I began therapy at around 24 or the first time. My intention.Eventually a co-worker who was a friend, an older woman, then about 59 or so, told me about her psychoanalysis.  Because of it's intensity and duration, I decided that I would do this. Already at 27 I knew that I was different: afraid of relationships, men. Afraid to be attractive.Vulnerable Damaged.The co-worker got a couple of names from her analyst.  That this woman was several social classes above me, her husband was a professor of engineering, with money and resources that I did not have, did not one time enter my mind. I wanted to heal.I chose a name and visited him first.  He was the moment I saw him, what I had thought I wanted in a life. Assured. Warm. Intelligent. Successful. Handsome. Jewish.Immediately, I had a positive transference, as they say.  Nothing could have convinced me not to continue with him.And at the same time, I was alerted to danger. He reminded me in some way I could not understand, of my father.I felt more fear. Because I knew, already, I could not leave.I went through the motions of seeing the analyst who was the other name. I told him of my misgivings about the other. At that time these men were friends. He is competent, he said.Psychoanalysis is a strange phenomena. It is an immersion. Cedar, you have mentioned before of the dependency, need and want, that emerges when the session ends, and one must leave. Swallowing your feelings, making it to the car. Sitting there, until you can drive.I went 4 days a week, paying him 60 percent of my gross salary.  My first student loans I took out going to school at night, and used to pay him.At the very beginning I cut out a newspaper article about therapists betraying their patients sexually. Who knows why. It would be many years before I faced memories of my own trauma with my father.Perhaps, that therapist interpreted the article as a wish, I do not know. But I never did lay down on that analyst's couch. I would never turn my head away from watching him and what he did.There were many things that happened along the way.Had it not been for him, I would not have had the courage to separate from my family. And I would not have most likely gone back to school. Other things, too.But he also hurt me too. Blaming me for my feelings. Blaming me when I became angry at him, that I was not better. Blaming me, is what I felt. Someday I might have the courage to say what happened.But I always watched him. And I saw sexual stuff.And there came a time when I realized and had to accept that I had sought to recover. Help to overcome horrible things that had happened to me. And I had landed in the hands of another abuser. Who I did not feel strong enough to leave. And I ate this. Something broke inside of me.And nobody would ever believe me. I went to other psychoanalysts to consult. Nobody believed me. They all thought and said it was me.The thing I want to say right here is this: When I finally adopted my son, maybe 14 years after I had began with this man, I was able to stop.I kept in touch with him, and over the years saw him from time to time. The relationship with him had lasted longer than the time I had been at home with my parents.  He had become a strange kind of family to me.In the interim he had risen to royalty in the psychoanalytic community. He was the leader of the community in which I lived. And he was internationally recognized. How he thrived on his power and the esteem he was held. Self-satisfaction does not come close to what I came to see in him. I had known him now for 25  or 30 years.I had a friend who had completed psychoanalytic training. A friend of long duration, about whom I have always been ambivalent. We went to lunch. This was during the time I was living in Latin America.As our wine arrived at the table, she told me she had difficult news to share (she loved to share difficult news). This man had been accused as having affairs with at least one patient, while continuing to charge her and while continuing to treat her. For years.And he was battling along with his allies to remain affiliated with the same institute that he had led.He had renounced his medical license. And he would be dismissed as a member of this institute.I am such a heroic woman, I think. I have so tried to overcome the damage and harm and betrayals that I have suffered. But I have not prevailed. I have failed.I feel sadness for this person who I am who hoped so grandly, despite everything that had happened to her, and even as she tried to heal, was betrayed, again.Cedar, thank you for having the courage to speak about your psychologist. However sad I am to write these words, I believe in some way it may be a good thing.Thirty years I think it was. Youth to late middle age. The center of my life.  And I was betrayed. By an impostor who betrayed everybody. But especially me.But who was the betrayer? Was it not I, of myself? I knew. And when I saw the truth of it, I could not let myself leave.I knew everything going in, on some level. And I did it anyway.  And I could not leave, when I knew.I am trying to figure out how to end a life such as I have had. What will give this all meaning?I do not know.That is what I am looking for. Something that I can sustain.</blockquote>

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