When Help Has Hurt Before

Some people come to therapy never having tried it. Others come having tried a version of it they didn't choose, in a building they didn't want to be in, with someone who held a file on them. Those are very different starting points, and the second one deserves to be named.

The particular injury of being failed by the thing meant to help

A hospital, a treatment program, a school, a caseworker, a courtroom, a church. Somewhere there was an institution whose stated job was to help, and what it did instead was lose your file, talk over you, decide who you were from a form, or make a promise it had no intention of keeping.

That lands differently than harm from someone who never claimed to be on your side. It teaches a specific lesson: asking for help is how they get something to hold over you.

People carry that lesson into every waiting room afterward, usually without naming it, often while being described as difficult or noncompliant for having learned it.

What it looks like from the outside

Arriving early and sitting where you can see the door. Giving short answers. Reading the clinician before saying anything real. Agreeing with everything, then not coming back.

Knowing the vocabulary. People who've been through systems often know the terminology better than people who've never been in one, because fluency was protective.

None of this is resistance. It's a well-trained threat assessment, and it was right often enough to stick.

What trauma-informed has to mean here, or it means nothing

The phrase is on half the therapist profiles in this city, mine included, which is exactly why it needs specifics behind it. Here's what it changes in practice.

You set the pace. Nobody needs the whole story to get started. We can work for months on sleep, anger, or your relationships without you narrating the worst of it. If and when you want to go there, you choose the day.

No surprises. I tell you what I'm doing before I do it, including why I'm asking a question. Being handled without explanation is what a lot of institutions did, and it isn't a technique I'm interested in.

You can say no. To an exercise, a topic, a referral, a question. Declining doesn't get logged as a lack of progress. Having choices honored is itself part of the repair.

I'll be straight about my limits. Where confidentiality ends, what I'd have to report, what goes in a record. You get that information at the start, not after you've already said the thing.

The relationship is the part that has to be different

If the injury happened inside a relationship with something that was supposed to be safe, then it doesn't get resolved by insight alone. It gets worked on in another relationship, over time, where the small things turn out to be true.

I start the session when I said I would. I remember what you told me in March. I say I don't know when I don't know. I don't get defensive when you tell me I got something wrong, and you will, and that's a good sign rather than a bad one.

That's slow and unglamorous. It's also the mechanism.

About testing

People in this position often test, consciously or not. A late cancellation. A hard question about my background. An uncomfortable truth dropped at minute forty-eight to see what my face does.

That's fine. It's a sane way to gather data about whether this is safe. I'd rather you test early than take my word for it.

Where to start

You don't have to arrive trusting me. That would be unreasonable and, frankly, a little concerning.

You only have to be willing to find out, slowly, with the right to stop at any point. If that's as far as you can go right now, it's enough to begin with. There's a free fifteen-minute call where you can ask me anything, including the uncomfortable questions, before anyone commits to anything.