I am lying in my bed, face into my pillow. I still think that I love her, and I feel how broken my heart is. I cannot concentrate on my job, and I feel like a fool because that strong attachment to my psychoanalyst is a childhood relic of how badly I wanted to be accepted by my mother, not the real feelings to this woman sitting in a chair in front of me — in the present. I sought acceptance of my inner world, but instead found myself betrayed and humiliated — pain so excruciating that it eventually led me to file an ethics complaint.

Ms M, as I will call my former psychoanalyst hereafter, gave an impression of a brainy and petite woman from our very first session. There was something indiscernible in her deep dark eyes, as if they could contain several worlds: hers and her patients’. I remember how I trembled in our first session: a refugee trying to make Vienna his new home, with three pieces of luggage: his computer, his clothes, his past wounds. It was scary to get psychologically “naked” in front of an unknown person, yet I summoned enough courage: I wanted to be seen, so I was willing to risk. I wonder when I should have noticed to which extent she could not understand my helpless sense of vulnerability … she often told me “Let down your guard…”, her look eyeing me — alike a surgeon hurried to start the operation without a consideration for anaesthesia. Was her empathy genuine or just a “tool” to advance my therapy? Her later verdict of our work as “pseudo-analysis” gave me the answer.

I can and cannot point out a specific moment when my therapy became the walk in the cycle of pain. It felt like bells ringing in the distance, each session bringing their sinister sounds closer and closer till I could not surmount them. The first alarm rang after our third session: I shared the details of my childhood trauma and the difficulty of telling it made me paranoid during the session. I left Ms M’s office in ecstasy: my psyche felt relieved to have got the troubling events shared with the person whom I thought I could trust. My elation was then calmed by the cold Viennese wind and the thought “What would she think about me?”. Her thought was “some form of psychosis”. These very words broke something inside of me, yet Ms M was careless enough not to elaborate, in spite of my increasingly insistent requests in the following months when the crisis subsided.

If I was psychotic, how could I sustain a full-time software engineering job? Maintain relationships with my colleagues and a few, but deep friendships in Kyiv? Orient myself quickly in the EU upon leaving Ukraine? My analytical mind was critical enough not to take such an unnerving phrase at face value. I needed the second opinion like a breath of fresh air, and I was right: the doctor confidently denied any claims that I may be psychotic and prescribed anti-depressants. The reaction of Ms M? “She [the psychiatrist] told you what you wanted to hear”. It takes a considerable amount of self-importance, belief into one’s impunity and being a piece of shit to speak like that. How can one be a mental health professional when they have no regard for basic human morality and tact? How can one abuse trust and dependency so callously?

Ms M once interpreted my comment as asking her the question “How real can I be in analysis?”. She was quite open to describing my childhood as being “at the mercy of such parents”. What she failed to comprehend is how at mercy I felt with her reckless authority. I could not be natural in all the rawness of my anxiety either. I remember once coming to my session 10 minutes earlier and staying in the waiting room. Its dim lighting and comfortable chairs would have relaxed me had I not been surprised by the footsteps of her colleague. The next session, she asked me to come on my time sharp so as not to scare people with … me being scared? “You are not accepted here either” — what an ultimate message, yet I took it with stoicism.

Relationship with a mental health professional is transactional at its core: a patient pays for the corrective emotional experience with their psychoanalyst. This posed an important question for me: does my analyst see me as a unique individual or have I been reduced to psychoanalytic framework? It was effortless for Ms M to “know” what was with me and what she needed to do — way simpler than embracing the messiness of my personality. When I discussed with her having our sessions more often, she initially agreed with my proposal, but when the time of the change came, she told me her “intuition” told her it would be best to remain as-is. She “knows” how often we should meet, she “knows” what I need and she does not care to explain — did Ms M see me in this process?

Could she feel there was a human soul at stake in her small hands? Driven by the depth of my emotions during our four-week break, I wrote her a poem — not as a patient, but as a lost soul. Its beginning masterfully shows the tension between an intellectual engineer and a sensitive man:

I am starting my verse
With a desire to sound smart
I want to shrug these signifiers off
My inner world is torn apart

How bittersweet — the soul seeking humanity finds itself dissected into intra-psychic conflicts.

Unable to resist her reductionism and authoritarianism, I drowned in the avalanche of emotions. My longing for her — her betrayal. My look into her eyes — her blank face. My urge for acceptance — her sterile analytic scalpel. Our last month of therapy was my downfall. In our penultimate session, I asked her:

A: Do you care at all?
Ms M: The goal is not to answer whether I care or not, but to show you why you feel I don’t care.

Isn’t that obvious why I think so? My final understanding of how unwelcome I was in her office came from Ms M’s comment in our last session: “You are difficult to work with”. My excruciating pain, hidden under the facade of indifference, yet also a revelation — my feelings were right and I do not need anyone’s validation to feel and make conclusions. I was being reduced into Ms M’s existing picture of the world, while I am different from Freud, Lacan, Klein and others. This is the cause of her therapeutic failure. Her final comment is a reminder of how I need to trust myself and see a human first in front of me and not a function. That is why I have decided to start a blog.

One month after our analysis ended, I filed an ethics complaint. I do not have an answer to whether I was right, but I do know that I have a say. Wiener Landesverband für Psychotherapie responded:

Es tut uns sehr leid, dass es in Ihrem therapeutischen Prozess immer wieder zu unaufgelösten Kränkungen und atmosphärischen Unstimmigkeiten kam.

In English: “We are very sorry that unresolved insults and atmospheric disagreements repeatedly occurred in your therapeutic process.”

Even if they had not — I have myself. That is something no theory can take away from me.