Ask a Therapist

If your therapist has hurt your feelings and you’re no longer sure if you can trust them, maybe you’re wondering if you want to carry on working with them. Let’s agree, your feelings are legitimate and this isn’t a figment of your imagination. Perhaps you felt misunderstood or misrepresented by your therapist, perhaps they forgot a piece of information that felt really important to you, or they made an error of some sort. Maybe you felt challenged by them in a way that felt insensitive or judgemental. Anything that causes you to feel hurt and less trusting of your therapist needs to be brought into the session so that together you can discuss what happened. Now, that might feel truly daunting to you and even the last thing that you want to do – but here’s two reasons why it’s really important that you try to do it.

Firstly, it’s a way of you respecting yourself and how you feel. Bringing what happened and how it left you feeling is a form of healthy entitlement that you can practice in the safety of the therapy room and then take into the outside world and your other relationships.

Secondly, it’s a way for you to get good at being in a relationship in which you speak honestly and openly about how you’ve experienced the other person. It may be the first time in your life that you’ve ever dared to do this, but hopefully it won’t be the last. Your therapist will try to respond genuinely and non-defensively to work out with you where the missteps happened, and whether this can be processed and moved on from. Realising that you can have a potentially difficult conversation and survive it, that your therapist won’t undermine you, and that you might even get to a better, stronger place – that’s a challenge worth taking if you’ve felt you’ve been hurt by your therapist.