This Isn’t Therapy—It’s Theft. A Rage-Fueled Reflection on the Gaslighting of Women in Pain

There are certain betrayals that don’t make headlines but shape a woman’s entire sense of reality. For me, it wasn’t just the years spent being emotionally erased by people who were supposed to love me—it was the paid professional who sat across from me, week after week, and didn’t see it. Didn’t name it. Didn’t intervene. Didn’t protect. She called herself a therapist; I call her complicit.

While my now-ex-husband spun in loops of nonsensical word salad, asking the same questions over and over like he had amnesia. At the same time, I twisted myself into knots trying to hold the emotional architecture of the relationship together, but this therapist just nodded. Reflected. Parroted my pain back to me in passive phrases like, “So it sounds like you’re having a hard time being heard.”

No shit, Sherlock. I’m drowning. And instead of throwing me a life raft, she handed me a fucking invoice.

Thousands of dollars, and I mean thousands, were funneled into the bottomless pit of “just keep working on communication,” while I gaslit myself trying to figure out why nothing ever changed. At the same time, I doubted my own sanity. While I carried the emotional labor of two adults and a therapist who clearly believed neutrality was ethical.

Let me say this now for every woman who’s ever left a therapy session more confused than she walked in: “Just keep talking about it” is not a trauma-informed intervention. It’s a stall tactic.

It’s lazy and it’s dangerous.

I watched my trauma play out on TV last night. It took a trashy Netflix reality show for me to finally see what I lived through. A woman on Love is Blind, the new Colorado season, was trying to talk to her drunk fiancé. He was saying the same things over and over, asking the same questions like his brain had short-circuited, and she was checking in with him, trying to ground him, trying to connect. And I watched her spiral while he looped.

That was me. For years. With my ex. With my mother. Walking on emotional landmines, trying to communicate with people whose responses made no sense. People who would forget entire conversations. People who acted like I was the problem when I begged for coherence.

You don’t realize how deep the trauma runs until you see it outside yourself

And when I did, I didn’t cry. I raged. Because the systems that should have named this—attachment trauma, emotional abuse, psychological regression, the very real cost of being trapped in dysregulated relationships—did nothing. They pathologized me. They billed me. They called it “progress” when I didn’t completely fall apart in session.

This is why women walk out of therapy and into the arms of coaches, witches, IFS circles, and somatic healers.

Not because they’re woo-woo. Because they’re done being gaslit by licensed professionals who see neutrality as virtue and emotional labor as “communication work.” I don’t want neutrality. I want truth.

I want someone to say:

“Michelle, you’re not crazy.”

“Michelle, that’s abuse.”

“Michelle, your nervous system is shutting down because you’re in an unsafe dynamic.”

“Michelle, it’s okay to leave.”

“Michelle, you don’t need to explain it any further. I see it.”

I wrote a poem called Rage Against the Therapist, and I haven’t shared it publicly—not yet—because it’s mine. It’s raw. It’s holy. It’s the culmination of 40 years of being misread, misdiagnosed, and misled by people who should’ve known better. It’s my roar. But this blog post? This is the smoke rising from that fire. And I’m not sorry for the blaze.

To the women who feel lost, flattened, and confused in therapy:

It might not be you.

It might be the fact that the only tool you’re being given is your voice, while the room is wired to reward silence and compliance.

Sometimes, the most healing thing you can do is rage.

And sometimes, the most therapeutic thing you can do is leave.

And if you are looking for a witchy, wild, priestess healer who won't gaslight you...hit the contact button.