2018.

You expect the person sitting across the room from you to be a genuine, ethically conscientious, professional.

You trust them with your most vulnerable thoughts and feelings.

You don’t expect to be taken advantage of. This person is going to “save” me after all.

I was first introduced to Ana by a friend.

Ana was a qualified Psycologist who specialised in Career Coaching and the Myers-Briggs personality tests.

Now this is what I was super interested in at the time. I wanted to understand my personality better as I was trying to find my purpose in life.

I had booked a session with Ana and was keen to get the test done. (A little too keen, as the instructions stated that you need to do this in a quiet space with no interruptions. I did the exact opposite, I completed this in the middle of a workday, in an open plan office. I think it’s safe to say that the test was invalid.)

I use the name Ana, as we shared the same first name. We also shared the same birth Month, and we shared the same personality type too. Or, so she told me, I’ll never know if that was true or not. Reflecting back, this was accompanied by a few other compliments which I’m pretty sure is called Love Bombing in today’s world.

She then somehow got me to continue therapy – as I had told her about some struggles in my, then, marriage.

She was the first person to diagnose me with severe depressive disorder.

She asked me a few questions from a questionnaire, and the diagnosis was instant. Now, I haven’t done my research on this, so I don’t know the extent of an evaluation, but thinking back on this. The number of psycologists I saw after her, all told me they don’t see severe depressive traits in me. I do have A LOT of unresolved trauma and I know there have been other lifestyle contributing factors, so there is work to be done.

Back to Ana, she convinced me that I needed several sessions and that she would apply to my private medical aid for funding.

I never reconciled the billing that she submitted to my medical aid with the actual sessions had. But looking back, she always submitted it months later and in batches so I wouldn’t have noticed any discrepancies.

Our sessions were mostly casual, she even commented one night that she could just sit and talk with me for hours over a glass of whiskey.

She eventually encouraged me to leave my ex-husband (which would’ve happened anyway) only to see if she could set me up with one of her other patients a few months later. That didn’t work and she reached out to me AGAIN one year later, trying to play match maker. When I told her that I’m happily remarried, she ghosted me.

All the red flags were there.

Like the times I had to wait outside of her residence/home office complex in the car, at night, for hours at times, because she was running late, and I was just too grateful that she would see me.

She overstepped so many ethical breaches.

I felt used. I felt taken advantage of.

This has been stuck with me for nearly 8 years and it feels good to finally have a platform where I can allow myself to let it go….

AW