Rose McGowan has been saying for 20 years that Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted her.  It was her words bravely spoken publicly that ultimately resulted in him being outed for the predator that he was.  Eighty some women have now come forward with their own experiences of being assaulted.  Rose spawned a #metoo movement that has given voice to millions upon millions worldwide to find their voice as well.  This is a perfect example of how the power of voice to name gives space for others to be in their truth.  My hat is off to Rose McGowan. It is only perpetrators and enablers that want victims to be silenced.
 
My predatory therapist was not and will never come to the level of notoriety as Weinstein.  That said it is not without a great deal of consideration that I speak her name in a community that knows her well. Some, including ex-clients, think of her as generous, honest, and politically in sync with feminist thought around violence against women. Others long ago recognized the harm she was inflicting and the poor boundaries she exercised around her work with survivors of trauma.  It is into that climate that I, after several decades, finally am able to speak my truths. Some will hate that I am doing this and others will appreciate the validation for what they suspected (or knew) all along.

While there was no contemporaneous criminal case that named my predatory therapist, in March of 2018, the Crime Victims Assistance Program of BC, after reviewing documents and evidence concluded that "there is sufficient evidence to determine that Ms. Fox is a victim of sexual assault by the accused [Pamela Sleeth]."
 
I name Pamela because it is the truth.  In my memoir, "Coming To Voice: Surviving a Predatory Therapist" (see below), I worked to be scrupulously honest and as fair as I could be to Pamela.  Spoken testimony is evidence in a court of law.  My words come also backed up with evidence.  The book itself provides much documentation to support my disclosures.
​

 
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​Coming To Voice: Surviving A Predatory Therapist by Bernadine Fox available on Amazon and Kobo

​#metoo #timesup #RoseMcGowan #weinstein #boundaries #therapy #abuseofpower #mentalhealthconsumer

#mental

​​To receive your free booklet "Examining Ethical Boundaries in Therapy: Checklist" please sign up for our newsletter.  You can cancel at any time and keep the booklet for your reference. If after sending your information you have any difficulty receiving the booklet contact us at bernadine@abuse-of-power.ca.

#mentalhealthconsumer  #survivorculture #boundaries #therapy #cptsd #sexualabuse #letstalk

Dr Colin Ross, in the Foreword, writes, “Bernadine Fox is doing other survivors of sexual misconduct by professionals a great service by telling her story. Such misconduct is not rare, whether the professional be a therapist, priest, doctor, camp counselor, gymnastics coach or a football coach. Telling such a story takes a lot of courage. Pamela Sleeth was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Her obituary lauds her for her many contributions to helping women survivors of sexual trauma. Now the full story is being told.”

P. Susan Penfold in the Introduction offers, “In this memoir we can see how the therapist, Pamela, repeatedly abandoned her fiduciary duty to Emma, seeking to meet her own needs, and manipulating, coercing and humiliating Emma. … Although profoundly damaged by the abuse and its after effects, Emma’s intelligence, determination, resilience, and insight allow the memoir to end on a hopeful note as Emma fully realizes the enormity of [Pam’s] betrayal and exploitation and can begin healing.”

Nine out of ten victims of exploitation by their therapists do NOT report.

​Bernadine is working to change that.  

It is hard sometimes to know where #MeToo starts and stops.  I have a simple formula:  Is there an abuse of power?  If yes, then we are dealing with #MeToo.  

There are many situations where some people have power and authority over others.  Therapist/Client is one.  The Movie Industry revealed how it operates within an arena where the power that some have is far-reaching: A Director who could make or break the career of someone who would not sleep with him.  There is Employer/Employee.  That is almost simple and straightforward.  And then there is this example where a woman is sexually harassed, assaulted, and bullied not by just her employer - but by what must feel like the entire RCMP Force across Canada.  How does one simply remove themselves? 

This woman, former RCMP Officer Krista Carle, like many who are victims within the #MeToo Movement and who have been victimized by others with enormous power and authority over their lives, did not survive.  Suicide is an all-too-common consequence.  Suicide Prevention Crisis Centres and Lines need to be educated on how abuse-of-power differs from other forms of assault and how to help those who call them.

​http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/krista-carle-dead-1.4740130

#MeToo brought into focus those who held power in society and misused it to sexually harass and emotionally coerce others into sexual contact. As much as this issue has stormed through industries, only men have been shocked by the frequency with which it occurs.  Women knew this.  We have been warned by our mothers and grandmothers about this nearly everyday of our young lives. Every dress was assessed for its risk factor.  Every job was considered with an eye to who and where and were there other women there.  Every career choice was looked at as to whether or not there was the potential that women would be forced into compromising situations.  While some were demanding that prostitutes be stopped, they turned a blind eye to what was right in front of them everyday: people with power forcing others to participate in sexual acts against their will.  

What is most shocking is the extent to which that power was exerted on victims and how our social constructs were created to maintain that status quo and the ability to silence those who were hurt and/or banish those who refused to be quiet.  It is laying bare the social apparatuses that have protected offenders, endowed with power over the lives of their victims, from the exalted heights of the Movie Industry to the highest offices within Ivory Towers right down to those who position themselves to help victims of trauma and the Grassroots Organizations that fight for the sexual assault victim but instead, out of fear, anxiety  disbelief or whatever, end up harboring an offender. 

Power is power.  It can be used to empower others or it can be used to enslave.  Therapists who engage their clients in sexual contact are abusing their power and authority.  Every professional organization in Canada is clear that no therapist, psychiatrist, or psychologist can engage in a sexual relationship with a client without it being a sexual assault.  There is no grey area.  Here we begin to recognize again what those dealing with sexual assualts have always known.  Not all rape occurs with physical force or GHB.  The imbalance of power removes ideas of mutually consenting adults replacing it with conversations about emotional coercion where the client may not realize, as it is happening,  the extent to which they are being harmed.  

#ExploitationInTherapy #MentalHealthConsumer #sexual assault #MeToo #TimesUp #CriminalCode

Question: I am concerned about talking to my therapist about a certain thing that happened to me.  I need to talk about it.  But I am afraid that when I do I probably won't cry.  I might tear up.  But I was taught not to cry.  I am afraid she won't believe me or think I am lying or embellishing because I don't cry.

Advice from the Trenches:  It is not unusual for those who have experienced childhood abuse to exhibit this lack of affect.  The fact that you don't cry or can't cry when discussing terrible things that happened to you will demonstrate to a good therapist the degree to which these experiences have traumatized you. The one coping skill children have during trauma is to dissociate.  The bigger the trauma the more the need to dissociate.  Not crying is a symptom of that dissociation.  A good therapist will not isolate one reaction to define the whole of who you are.  They will take all the information she/he is receiving from you to create a whole picture about what you have coped with and how you did that.  Their job then is to help walk you through that trauma in a manner that provides resolution.

Question: There are times when I have this weird experience where I feel kinda numb and like I am no longer in my life but watching my life happen.  Is this weird?

Advice from the Trenches:  It is important to not underestimate the importance of our coping skills regardless of how they manifest.  This is especially true around dissociation or de-personalization.  Dissociation is not an aberration but a coping skill that we used as child to keep us away from that which was overwhelming.  In the here and now, during times of crisis, it functions much like your autoimmune system automatically kicking in when you catch a cold, only this time the risk is to the body and mind.  What can reduce how this impacts on you or your life is examining the painful, childhood experiences that initially dictated it.  Most often that occurs in a therapeutic process.  

It is always a good idea, when this happens, to check in with your life and your surroundings.  Is something happening that puts you at risk or is something/someone around that triggers a time that you felt at risk?  

Secondly, engaging in an act of mindfulness can sometimes help to reground you to the here and now and dispel some of that dissociation. 

Let me know if that helped.

​Bernadine

The Therapy Exploitation Link Line (TELL) describes the danger signs of a therapeutic process that is broken down and has moved towards exploitation of the client.  They offer a look at what a healthy therapeutic process looks like and some of the sign of when the boundaries have slipped.  But they also provide a complete list of what that relationship looks like when it has become seriously damaged: [1]

1. The therapist talks about his/her personal problems, including sexual relations with others.
2. The therapist makes sexual or suggestive jokes.
3. The therapist asks questions about your sex life when you are talking about an unrelated issue4.     The therapist suggests seeing you outside the office or professional setting (e.g., dinner, movies, home visit)
4. The therapist offers to cut fees, see you for extended session with or without fee, and wants to reschedule you to be the last patient of the day.
5. The therapist tells you not to talk about your therapy with anyone else, that therapy is a secret.
6. The therapist talks to you about his/her other patients.
7. The therapist tells you, explicitly or implicitly, to stay away from friends or family.
8. The therapist touches, fondles, hugs, or otherwise makes overt physical contact with you.
9. The therapist offers food, alcohol, or drugs.
10. The therapist gives you gifts or accepts them from you without discussion about their meaning.
11. The therapist suggests that you trust him/her absolutely.
12. The therapist asks you to work for him/her or solicits your advice on business, investing, or other area of your expertise.
13. The therapist requests detailed information on your finances
14. The therapist uses fines or other types of punishment for infraction of his/her imposed rules 
15. The therapist seeks to borrow money, your car, or other of your belongings.
16. The therapist shows up at your house or suggests that your house would be an appropriate place to meet.
17. The therapist tries to get you together socially or romantically with his/her other patients. 
18. The therapist threatens you in any way, such as the threat to tell others – including your family members – about you, to say that you’re crazy or to reveal confidences you have shared in the therapeutic context.  
19. The therapist promises to be your caretaker and/or to protect you from others. 
20. The therapist justifies any of the above behaviors by telling you that you are special, that he/she has never felt this way about a patient before, and that the boundary violations occurring are okay because of the special and different nature of your relationship.
21. When you express discomfort with any of the above, or any aspect of therapy, the therapist becomes angry and/or tells you this is your problem and/or part of your illness, rather than discussing your discomfort openly.

[1] List is taken verbatim from. “Psychotherapy: The Good, The Bad, and The Dangerous,” Ilana W. Rosen, MSW (need complete list of authors) TELL: Therapy Exploitation Link Line. http://www.therapyabuse.org/t2-unsafe-psychotherapy.htm

Looking for first-hand accounts of folks who have experienced exploitation by therapists and/or ‪#‎femaleperpetrators‬. Working with a group of folks here in Vancouver, BC who are going to AND can make change happen - make your voice count.

Please send to me via PM at bernadinefox AT outlook DOT com and feel free to share this post with folks you think might be interested in what we are doing.

Your information will be held in confidence and used only in the manner you are comfortable with.

Any questions - leave them below or contact me directly via email.  Please do not leave personal information or contact information in the comment section.

It is time to change the status quo.

written by Bernadine Fox

Not even as a baby suckling at her momma’s teat had Emma known what it felt to be safe. So when her therapist suggested that therapy required her trust, she first had to ask what that was and what it looked like.

Two years later, when her therapist slipped into discussing her own personal feelings Emma let it go. When her therapist hugged her a bit longer than she should have, when she rested her hand on her leg a little higher than she ought to, when she gave out her home number and they talked for hours every night … Emma again let it go. Who was she to say what therapy looked like? When her therapist encouraged her work and said she was beautiful and brilliant she simply felt good: wasn‘t this a part of therapy, too? After their first kiss, they discussed sexual transference and yet, her therapist still became her lover. They went over the power imbalance in their secret relationship and believed it could be navigated. In fact, over the years, Emma had come to implicitly trust that her therapist, this person who had heard all her terrible secrets, did indeed care for her and would certainly never hurt her. Emma finally felt safe.

She did not realize that her therapist/friend/lover/partner had fostered an unhealthy emotional dependence. So, when Emma ended the relationship, and her therapist/friend/lover/partner dived into a viciousness she had not witnessed before, it was too late to alter what became a free fall. A horrible depression settled into her bones. Feelings began to burst through the thin veneer of her existence. She was jolted out of deep sleeps as her world went out of control and she dropped a quarter of her weight within a few short weeks. Vodka softly spoke her name and slipped the ragged edges of her world out of focus while the anger, that had incessantly become self-recrimination, melted with the ice cubes in her glass.



Brutally alone and frightened, Emma reached back into her childhood to find something to rely on. All she found was sex and performing it became unemotional, uncomplicated and easy - like comfort food for the obese and self-mutilation for those who cut. She didn’t care how many she slept with or who. Fear had been scattering the bits she had broken into. And now the hands of these lovers rooted her body back into a reality (any reality) one stroke at a time.
Emma knew about sexual violence in childhood and abuse of power. She knew this cycle of booze and sex was dangerous and self-destructive. But survival screamed its necessity. When booze and sex no longer worked, she added Valium to interrupt the anxiety that crawled through her veins, then Baclofen to prevent the muscle spasms that rippled through her body, and then Rizatriptan to calm the pounding in her head. She should have been afraid of what she was using to cope. But her agony was all-encompassing and locating some small refuge from the horrendous trembling that sputtered out of her psyche was a daily imperative. And all of this - all of it - was simply the beginning.

Her therapist/friend/lover/partner’s scorn escalated into cruel bullying fueled with all her secrets from therapy. Emma crashed. Every trusted thought or pool of knowledge that she had once depended on disappeared. That trust in herself, her intuition and judgment that she had cultivated in therapy evaporated. The ground vanished and vacant air took up the spaces beneath her feet. Panic rose from a depth in her soul she did not recognize. Terror consumed every minuscule ounce of space around her enforcing a vacuum that she could neither breathe in nor move around. Her world tipped and those scales of balance that she had ruthlessly maintained toppled. She was certain that the state she was in required the assistance of a therapist. And, she was just as certain that that would never happen again. The very thought of allowing another person emotionally close caused air to be sucked out of her with such a force it pulled with it strange sounds from the bottom of her small soul. She was lost in her own life: a life that had suddenly lost any identifiable meaning. Had she been able to, she might have then become frightened of her condition.



Emma could recognize her rage over what her therapist had done. She could locate it and analyze it. But then it percolated inside until she was reduced to an anxious puddle. She wanted to speak up and speak out, but the only words that came forward fell, letter by letter, at her feet. Inside and out, everything spun about. All that stood out was the sound of her own brain ticking away into a silent oblivion and the realization that compared to that which had happened in her childhood - this trauma that had occurred when all her walls were down - was worse than them all. This betrayal had broken her in ways that she believed could never be fixed. And although, ultimately, she found her way past the fear, the booze and sex, as she tried to move about friendships and love, this same panic would rise up and air would be sucked out carrying small sounds of pain as terror compelled her to push those she loved, away.
So know this: regardless of who your therapist is, regardless of who you are, and regardless of what you hope: a therapist who becomes a friend is standing on dubious ground. A therapist who violates their role and becomes a lover or becomes a partner has surely transgressed from healer to one’s worst predator. The relationship does not evolve because one is healthier or special but because power is seductive to them. It will not offer healing and may just destroy what is left to trust.

And so with this tale, I caution you.

Bernadine Fox