Hi all - OP here.

I thought I might weigh back in here. I certainly didn't expect this thread to take this course.

Relationships between T and patients can be exceedingly complex; this complexity makes blame about any specific outcome - good or bad - potentially less relevant. While the ethics of sexual relationships are crystal clear, I will say that I took a lot of responsibility (right or wrong) for what happened. Mine was a therapeutic relationship bound by poorly managed maternal transference and the child part's terror of losing his 'mother'. Therapy ended, I think, because of romantic attraction from the T to me; the post-T relationships that were 'offered' to me included none or sexual. With where I was at the time so deep in maternal transference, I had to take the sexual one. I couldn't tolerate being abandoned again. That was, in fact, what the therapy was about.

I have spent endless hours trying to sort out how it got there, what I did or didn't do right, how my therapist was so horrible vs the most amazing person I've ever known. The worst of it all is that it ended so suddenly (my choice) and we never even said goodbye. We never tried to figure out how to resolve things in a way that could minimize the damage - to both of us. Because while she may have violated an ethical boundary, she was undoubtedly ripped apart by this. Who's fault is that? Does it matter? The pain is the same. The damage is done.

I thought suing her could help me move on, and when that didn't work, it left me even worse. The horrible things her attorney said - I never knew if my ex-T said or believed them, or even knew about them - hurt beyond words. They violated every core belief I / Child part held on to about her care and love, held on to the certainty that she loved me no matter what. That Child part has now been victimized again, abandoned again. Worse for suffering through what was experientially for me an incestuous, abusive sexual relationship of child with mother.

You all can accept this or not. You can tell me I'm full of **** about the power of mishandled maternal transference. You can disregard my feelings of a child being sexually abused (and my heart goes out to those of you who have been victims.) But please try not to boil this down to an academic argument of who's fault it was and how I, or any other victim of therapist abuse, should have 'known better'. Because like it or not, all of us take responsibility in the aftermath. We have no choice because we're the ones left to try and put our lives back together. We're the ones who hate ourselves for what happened. We're the ones who see in it the validation of our own failures, weakness, and vulgarity.