Missing In Action
After feeling that the therapist had shafted me in favor of The Identity Thief, I bowed out of counseling for three months. I halted my own treatment in favor of peace. Perhaps I really did not want to share the therapist with The Identity Thief, but I was more bothered by the suffocation I felt with this narcissistic frenemy invading certain aspects of my life.
The Identity Thief was a copycat. She mimicked my every move. If it was not copying my goals for graduate school, posting my desires on her social media posts as daily life quotes for others, or her living her life vicariously through me, then The Identity Thief obviously was not enjoying the life that she had apart from me.
I was annoyed and exasperated by The Identity Thief’s need to copy me at almost everything. I could never catch my breath. If she was not attempting to one-up me on everything I talked to her about, the she was attempting to manipulate her way into even the most personal aspects of my life that I did not want to share with her.
She was supposed to be my friend [so I thought]. Yet, I was thinking less and less that she really was my friend and viewing her more as my enemy. I found myself liking her as a person less and less the more I came to realize that consciously she seemed to hate even my smallest successes. For this reason, I never wanted to share anything else with her, and while this situation with the therapist was happening, I found more of a reason to distance myself from her and go silent altogether.
Getting Back Into The Swing Of Therapy
Anyway … for few weeks the receptionist left me voicemails about rescheduling my appointment with the therapist. I refused to return any of her calls. I recognized that I was angry with the therapist. In fact, I was actually more angry with her than I was with The Identity Thief. I had become so accustomed to The Identity Thief’s cunning and manipulative behaviors that I reasoned within myself that she truly had a personality disorder, but I simply could not get passed the level of trust that I had in the therapist to do what I believed to be the right thing.
Specifically, I was more than convinced with the facts that The Identity Thief had narcissistic personality disorder because I was taking a graduate class on mental health disorders that confirmed my suspicions. For the most part, I did not really even need the class to know the truth. I had been studying this narcissist and narcissistic personality disorder for a long time, and I knew the criteria for the disorder fit The Identity Thief perfectly. She was/is a narcissist, and not even the therapist could change my mind on that one.
Nevertheless, I avoided therapy and The Identity Thief for three months. At some point during my hiatus from therapy, the therapist reached out to me via phone herself. She left a voicemail and even texted me. She acknowledged to me her concerns and hoped that I was doing well. She really believed that I needed to continue with therapy, and she wanted to talk to me about some other things. I was just too angry to respond because I was still reflecting upon the immense betrayal that I felt that this therapist seemingly treated with indifference. Basically, I was nursing my hurts and resolving them through continuous journaling.
The Return
After three months, I decided to reschedule my visits to therapy. I wanted to talk through some issues. I also still wanted to talk through my issues with The Identity Thief. I reasoned back and forth in my journals that maybe I was not being reasonable concerning the therapist. I had red flags though, and I still felt the residual effects of what I believed was the therapist’s betrayal against me. I also still wanted to talk about this. For me it was not over. So I called the receptionist and scheduled an appointment.
I had also resumed communication back with The Identity Thief. Whenever things between us would die down, and I initiated time apart, I would text The Identity Thief “Hey”, and interestingly we would resume back to where things left off even if slowly. Of course, The Identity Thief could not let things go that easily despite the fact that she initiated discards with me all the time … and for just as long stretches of time as well. However, when the shoe was on the other foot, I would say nothing. I would bring up nothing. Yet, when it was me, she would feel the need to rehash things for her benefit.
Needless to say, things were going back to what might have been considered normal even though this narcissist frequently instigated drama into my life and made me tired and just apprehensive altogether. However, I did not always see the drama encircling my life as a problem that involved narcissists. I thought it was me even though my number one goal was always rest and peace. I was a busy person with a busy life. I just thought the drama came with the atmosphere of what was going on in my life at the time.
Anyway … I returned to therapy. Although I was unable to reclaim my regular time slot [since the beginning of my therapeutic experience], I had a time slot that I was at peace with for that time frame. [Eventually, things did go back to normal.] I was just glad to be back into therapy. The therapist seemed happy to see me too. She had apparently been doing some thinking. Ethically speaking, she realized her error and concluded that I had stayed away from therapy because she had really hurt me and was careless in the way she handled the entire encounter between The Identity Thief and me.
Not Certain I Learned A Lesson In All This
Back then, I was longsuffering and always forgiving of others even when I was hurt. I was relieved to hear the therapist recognize that she was wrong because for whatever reason, I simply could not get past all that happened and needed to make sense of things. I was not too trusting of her, though, and I admitted this fact to her. I might have been too nice for my own good and even too forgiving, but once my trust is broken I am always going to be on the lookout for a mess-up.
The therapist was not getting off that easy, but in many ways she had gotten off easy. She remained my therapist. In retrospect, her mess-up was big enough that I should have considered cutting her off from being my therapist. Fortunately for me then, however, the therapist informed me that The Identity Thief and her husband and stopped attending therapy sessions a few weeks after I had stopped attending.
Although the therapist never told me anything that was discussed between them [and I never asked as I knew it was confidential information], I was given the impression that the sessions were eye-opening to her. I gathered that maybe she had encountered more than she had bargained for, but that was just my hope. [Interestingly, I had information about from The Identity Thief’s point of view that things. From her perspective, things were not all she thought that they would be in therapy, but more on that in another blog post.]
Perhaps the therapist was not fooled by The Identity Thief. Maybe the therapist saw The Identity Thief in a new light considering that they were friendly outside of the therapeutic environment. I do not know, but after a while, my sessions went back to a different type of normal from that point onward. I actually spaced my time out with the therapist from two weeks to three weeks. I did not realize it at the time, but there were other cracks this therapy situation, and the situation with The Identity Thief was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately, it would be a while before I realized that this therapist was not for me.
My Voice Unchained 