Eight years ago Helga sought help at a therapy-center where she lived. She was between 27 and 32 years old, just divorced and left with a one-year old daughter. She had got problems with sleeping-pills due to problems with her sleeping, and wanted to get help with this and with sorting things out.
Although the waiting-time (waiting-list) was two years she got an initial talk with the director for the center immediately. This together with the director’s allusions to her pronounced attractive external appearance flattered her, but also gave her a certain lack of confidence. But she pushed this away because of her desperate needs to get help as soon as possible.
During the first time in therapy she cried a lot. This phase lasted several weeks. The therapist didn’t say much about this, but it made her good that someone listened to all she had to say. In the beginning of the therapy they agreed about that she could call whenever she wished, if the agony became too much. She used this possibility a couple of times.
But at one of the occasions when she called the therapist wasn’t at home, but his wife answered. To Helga’s’ astonishment the wife started to tell her husband's patient about her own problems without being asked. She told her that her husband used young female patient’s dependency on him for sexual plays and neglected and hurt her, who yet was his wife.
Helga quickly ended the talk, because she didn’t want to listen to this “slander” against her savior. Later she even admitted that she wasn’t even shocked by these disclosures. At that time her confidence in her therapist was still unbroken and she interpreted the wife’s words as an expression for jealousy and envy against younger women.
She told her therapist about her talk with his wife, but he pushed everything away (implying that it was something wrong with his wife), and Helga was satisfied with this, and didn’t even reflect over her talk with the wife at the moment when she entered into a sexual relation with her therapist. This relation made her believe in everything the therapist said, and she felt loved and chosen by him. This strengthened her self-confidence to that degree that she walked like in an ecstasy of luck for some weeks. Until she got to know that there were other patients this man had entered a sexual relation with. And then for the first time she started to think in patterns of exploitation and betrayal.
She entrusted herself to a co-patient, Barbara, who immediately told the therapist, the therapist in turn showed Barbara Helga’s intimate letters to him, and spoke about psychotic disturbances and declared perfectly untouched that what Helga had said was lies, fantasies and expressions of Helga’s feelings of being violated. On the contrary, it was Helga who had tried to seduce him and now she wanted revenge because he had rejected her.
To Helga the therapist also showed the image of an absolute honest, upright man who neither had nor had had anything to blame himself for.
Helga had no experiences of such perfect defensive position and rather doubted herself, her own senses and her own memory than the therapist's character.
Helga’s therapist was even prepared to accompany her through this psychotic “episode” and treat her for “paranoiac visions”. With this he tried to obliterate or reinterpret every memory she had of sexual experiences with him. For a while Helga was attracted to his care. But when she was threatened with an admission note to hospital and prosecution for slander her suspicions were awoken that her case wasn’t the first of this sort for him.
Helga remembered her call with the therapist’s wife and understood that she had tried to warn her. This man was apparently a specialist in threatening people to silence. This insight came undoubtedly late, but not too late. If Helga hadn’t got to know this (through her talk with the wife) she would have found herself in the brainwash a longer time.
Now she broke the contact with the therapist. But it took a long time before she could liberate herself from her confusion and the severe bodily symptoms she had got.
She got help from Brigit, a social-worker and therapist, with a long experience of incest families, who helped her processing the damages the therapist had caused her.
Today Helga thinks that the reason this man succeeds in keeping his patients in a state of fear is that he only accepts people in therapy that are easy to frighten and make insecure.
Helga thinks that her experience has protected her from looking down on other person’s credulousness or even joke about it. On the other hand she wanted to profit from this experience for better understanding of how it could come that she for such a long time wasn’t capable of estimating her situation.
I will write more about this later...
Yes, it is 36 years since I read English, and haven't used until 3 years ago... Only read English (French and German) texts on note-books and such things during the meantime... And during my whole school-time I moved several times, so I wonder how the education was too? So if my English is what it is...
I went the nature-science program at the gymnasium... But chose music in the end... But didn't read English till I quited the gymnasium...
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