Two years ago, I was abandoned by my then-therapist after I didn’t reciprocate her sexual feelings

To fix it, I made myself desire her, and we had an (e-)affair. It helped, but ended when she got scared I would out her. I remain broken, but am giving myself an ending by telling the story.

Dear reader, thank you for being here, and I ask for your kindness. This story gets messy in places, and I did things that are controversial (like repeatedly writing to her demanding answers when all she wanted was to avoid me). At the time, I felt like it was all I could do to stop myself from killing myself.

I write this now because I had been holding on to the hope that after the 2 year clock expired, my “ex therapist” (whom I will call M) might be willing to talk to me like a full human. But now I have to confront that that is unlikely. So I’m going ahead and writing this because I can’t continue like this forever. This is my attempt to give things an ending.

I’m writing this non-anonymously to give it credibility, and to do my part to destigmatize these topics. At the time of the events two years ago I was a productive academic at Stanford University (here is my Google Scholar profile). It is fair to say that what happened took a wrecking ball to my career. That wasn’t a bad thing because, as I hope you will see, it allowed something new to rise from the debris.

Preface

You might think these kinds of things can only happen with unskilled therapists, but M was not unskilled. I found her through a referral service that itself came highly recommended, and her rate was at the highest end of what this referral service offered. Also, up until things unravelled, she checked all the boxes of professionalism: never self-disclosed unless it was therapeutically relevant, was never late, no red flags whatsoever.

Because I had never read about how psychotherapy works, I didn’t understand that authenticity was paramount. This belief allowed me to always mentally keep M at a distance, because I thought: you never know what she is actually thinking; she could be saying something she doesn’t believe just because it’s meant to help you.

At the same time, I intensely admired her. I assumed that to get where she was, she had to be highly skilled at what she did in the same way that I was highly skilled at what I did. Essentially, I believed that I was among the safest hands possible.

[picture me stalling; it is hard to remember that feeling of safety; I haven’t felt it since]

Did I ever make a complaint? No, because complaints mark a therapist forever, and I happen to know what that feels like: the reason I was in therapy was that in 2017 I was the target of a false accusation (made in retaliation for reporting deceitful behavior involving a startup). Although the truth ultimately prevailed, I was treated as guilty for a year. I do not want to put M through that; it would take a perfectly skilled therapist, someone who could help other clients, off the market.

Also, I know that clients can and have experienced a self-esteem boost from learning their therapist had an erotic counter-transference, and that it can and has been handled well. I have no inherent objection to a therapist revealing an erotic counter-transference. I just want to say: please have a backup plan in case the client does not respond the way you expect.

A previous post

Two years ago, while I was still in denial and trying to blame the collapse on anyone but M, I made a post about the events on reddit. That post was intentionally written to give my former therapist the best defense possible: I repeatedly debased myself and left out the worst parts. I did this because I wanted to see if some people wouldn’t take her side even if I gave her the best defense possible. Plus, I didn’t want to relive the hardest parts.

Indeed, there were several careful readers who compassionately pointed out that, no matter how you spun it, M had pushed too far, and I had been put through client abandonment. To those readers: I can’t thank you enough.

To the more lazy readers who actually came away saying that there was no evidence of a sexual counter-transference (I wrote that post before the affair): please educate yourself on the difference between evidence and proof before you gaslight more vulnerable people.

With all that context out of the way, let’s being the story.

The beginning of the end

It is fair to say that my worldview in March 2022 was in need of an overhaul.

The root cause was heartbreak: the person who had made the false accusation against me in 2017 was someone I had loved and trusted, and after five years of failing to move on, I had surrendered to the idea that I would never be able to love again. Believing (as I later realized, illogically*) that suicide was an escape from pain, I got on the sanctioned suicide forums and started planning to kill myself in the next 5 years if things did not improve (“enough time for one last hoorah”, I said). I calmly revealed this to the people in my life, leading my parents to make a sudden trip from India to visit me in California. M, whom I had been seeing for 1.5 years, knew all of this, and perhaps she believed that if I could experience love with her, it would give me hope to live again.

[*why I say illogical: I have since realized that while neuroscience has shown that the brain can create signals in our conscious experience, it does not show that the brain is the only thing that can create signals in our conscious experience, for the same reason that knowing a VR headset can create signals in our conscious experience does not preclude experiences from happening once the VR headset is removed. Add to this the near-death experiences that show that we can experience an accurate conscious reality even during cardiac arrest (specifically, patients who have out-of-body experiences are able to describe their resuscitations substantially more accurately than those who don’t have out-of-body experiences). During cardiac arrest, the oxygen supply to the brain is compromised, and oxygen powers the brain; believing that the brain could generate these experiences without oxygen is like believing a virtual reality headset can generate a detailed and accurate representation of the external world even when its power supply is cut.]

I have tried to explain M’s error as follows: “I had love for her, yes, but it was a different love than sexual love; I saw her as a kind, almost sacred maternal figure who could do no wrong and whom I was lucky to receive help from. Perhaps she mistook my admiration for romantic love; if you’ve ever had a mentee who admired you, you know the look. If you put that look in the eyes of someone you believe is your equal (M was not much older than me; she just felt older because she seemed so put-together), it could be mistaken for love”. It sounds plausible enough.

Did I do anything to lead M on? Not consciously; I didn’t even think it was possible for a qualified therapist to fall for a client. I knew she was good looking, but there was no real attraction because…well…to me she was never humanized; she shared so little of herself that I didn’t feel like I actually knew her.

There was a time when I suspected she thought I was attracted to her: she pressed me to talk about how I felt about her, and I said I wasn’t letting myself develop a stronger attachment because “I don’t want to fall into the stereotype of a client who is overly attached to their therapist”. She said “…the stereotype is that you fall in love with your therapist”, I just shrugged, and she let it go with a bit of a smirk. I shrugged because, I mean, yes, I definitely didn’t want to fall into either stereotype. I didn’t try to protest the smirk because my ego wasn’t injured and I thought protesting would have made her smirk even more.

There was a time when I noticed her ring for the first time and wanted to ask if it had been there the whole time (I really don’t pay attention to how people look; I listen to what they say, but actually looking at people feels a bit overwhelming to me). Maybe this was the same session as the one before, or shortly after; that would make sense. I didn’t end up asking because I was afraid it had been there the whole time and asking the question would reveal what an oblivious idiot I could be, so I kept quiet. In the very next session, the ring disappeared.

I like to think M had sensed my discomfort surrounding the ring (I recall feeling disappointed because the ring “looked heterosexual” i.e. diamond and conventional; not a queer/alternative ring such as alexandrite; I’m a woman, in case you didn’t look closely enough at my photo), and she decided to stop wearing the ring immediately after. If so, this was an amazing feat of intuition, since it was all teletherapy. Whether she did this for other clients, I do not know; I never asked why she stopped wearing the ring. After therapy ended, I looked her up (trying to make sense of what had happened), and learned she had been married the entire time.

I can see why regularly taking off a ring to make a client comfortable would prime a therapist to believe something was in the air.

There was also a time when I was understanding of limitations of hers that had come up, and she thanked me for not being angry and told me many times that she had been “very vulnerable” with me then. In my mind, I was just treating her with respect. I can’t think of anything else that I did to give her the impression that I was in love with her.

Wrecking ball

How did M go about revealing her feelings for me?

The gist is that it started with her pushing me to talk about how I felt towards her, and when I didn’t give her the answers she was expecting, she pushed even harder, saying more and more obvious things, with me at some point becoming intentionally clueless because I wouldn’t dare presume that was what she had meant (to me, she was too good for that). Here are some examples of things she said. As I mentioned, because of the affair that happened later, there is no doubt that she had sexual feelings for me:

“I feel like you do know me…and everything that I’m thinking, and everything that I’m feeling”

• Said in response to me saying I didn’t really feel like I knew anything about her, after she pressed me to talk about how I felt about her
• this is not as bad as it sounds; there were a few moments in therapy where I was understanding of limitations of hers that came up, and she thanked me for not being angry with her; she mentioned multiple times that she had been “very vulnerable” with me. I genuinely didn’t think much of it because to me she was a superhero and I had shown her the due respect.

“The only line is…we can’t have sex”

• Said in response to me saying that I didn’t let myself feel closer to her because I didn’t want to “cross a line”.
• I had meant “cross a line” in the sense of becoming too clingy. I craved feeling whole and emotionally connected to someone and knew I had to be careful not to develop that kind of attachment to a therapist because they have their own life and other clients.
• We were doing teletherapy, and she was not the most precise with her words, so I don’t think she was trying to entice me into something that stopped just short of sex; I think she was trying to make me feel comfortable talking about how I felt towards her, because she was so convinced of a sexual transference.

“I feel like you’re trying to make this into a friendship because that’s what is familiar to you. But I’m not your friend, I’m your therapist…it’s a different kind of relationship”

• Said in response to me saying that she felt “generationally separated” from me even though she was only 6 years older
• I responded by saying I said that because she wasn’t on social media. I don’t think I was aware of the maternal transference. And clearly she didn’t consider it as a possibility, because you don’t want to be “friends” with a mother figure.

“You really think there’s nothing to discuss??”

• Said after going in circles with the previous example

“I guess the line between an intense sexual connection and a really strong friendship is…[so thin]”

• I don’t recall precisely how the sentence ended because my brain went into shock. I am certain she said “intense sexual connection” because I couldn’t denial how mutual the wording was.
• That was when I finally made sense of what she had meant by “you’re trying to make it into a friendship”. She had meant I was trying to desexualize the relationship. Fuck.

I want to reiterate how deeply unpleasant all of this was. I had once had a pure, protective shell that consisted of seeing her as someone who would never harm me, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she persistently began prying it apart. When I tried to pull it closed, she smashed a fucking axe into it, and I went mad with fear, exposed, naked, trying to cover myself with the split remains of the shell membranes and muttering “this is fine, everything is fine, I’m sure it’s happening for my own good, in fact I’m sure the shell is still there”. I started saying things like “are you the type of therapist who would try to charm a client if you thought it was in the best interests of the client?”, and told her I knew it was all an act and she could stop acting because it felt safer than the truth. I never imagined I would be reduced to believing a delusion because it felt safer than the truth.

I wish M had made space for me in session to process my discomfort, but this was not within her capacity. Even I could barely bring myself to admit it was real. I vividly remember a session, our very last, in which I got the closest I could to putting words to how upset I was: I told her “the muscles in my groin are extremely tense”. In response, M could not even make eye contact. She just looked down. If she had asked “is this because of our last session?”, maybe we could have worked through what happened. Instead, she looked like she wanted to cry.

Unravelling

It is really, really shitty to have your psyche’s foundation ripped apart.

I was a person of ideals. Of absolutes. Of “justified” rage because I thought rage was necessary to keep abuse in check.

What happens when one of those people whom you have designated as the source of goodness that validates that rage-powered worldview, the goodness that the rage believes it was created to protect, then (according to your rage’s logic) “ought to be” the target of that rage?

Your worldview has two choices: surrender or implode.

A part of me considered that I should just report M. This proposal felt like saying I should rip my own heart out and stomp on it.

So instead, I took a second leave from work (I had already taken leave the previous year due to a c-PTSD trigger/relapse), and I flooded my system with THC because it was the only thing that promised to shutter the rage long enough that I could glimpse a new worldview starting to form.

That worldview began by considering the possibility that M had “picked up on something” that I had shut out. A part of me already believed soulmates existed, because it was the only thing that could explain why I was so attached to the person who betrayed me in 2017 (the “trauma bond” explanation didn’t cut it). The other, dominant part of me didn’t think soulmates were real. But that same part of me didn’t think it was possible for M to feel the way she apparently felt about me — what else was it wrong about?

The following thought took hold:

Your rule out the idea of something more because you believe you are your body, and this is why you want to kill yourself: to be free of the pain that comes from having this body. But what if you merely cannot hear the rest of existence because the signals from your body are drowning them out? After all, you only know that you are a perceiver of signals from your body. You do not actually know that you are your body.

A basic observation. But it integrated all the evidence on near-death experiences and memories of other lives (discussed below) that I had explored as a teenager and then given up on for no other reason than people I idolized seemed to dismiss it. Perhaps those people I had idolized were just as wrong as I had been about M? As she had been about me? I began to question all the things I had never questioned because they had been said by people I worshipped the way I had blindly worshipped M.

My god, there were a lot.

My highly successful career as a resarcher in academia, which had been motivated by a drive to do something meaningful, now felt like I had turned by back on an enormous oasis while I searched the sand for water. Why? Because everyone else I looked up to was searching the sand for water, and I had refused to believe that those people could be so incredibly wrong. Exactly like I had assumed M was incapable of being so incredibly wrong.

It is extremely, extremely difficult to give up your heros, give up your whole value system, and rebuild from the ground up. Sometimes, no matter how “logical” you pride yourself on being, denial is just easier.

Fear also keeps us blind. So many academics I knew simply refused to consider the evidence I mentioned above because they have trauma from exposure to fear-based religion. To them, the belief that the brain is the only thing that can create signals in our conscious experience is the only thing that protects them from that unhinged religious trauma. They don’t dare to imagine that what could take its place is even better than what was there before. Just as M’s shame prevented her from learning that the love I had for her transcended being sexual, rather than being beneath it.

But I can write this now, with the benefit of two years of solidifying my new worldview, and sobriety on my side. At the time, it was not pretty.

Collapse

After my last session with M, the one in which it became clear that she was ashamed, I properly descended. I went from never texting her to blowing up her phone with wild speculation about consciousness and what humans were capable of. I wish she had seen that I was doing all of that to stop myself from imploding with rage. It wasn’t pathological behavior, it was a damn coping mechanism that was protecting her from the shockwaves of the worldview she had exploded.

The sacrifice I made was significant. Because I was now high all the time, I sent cringey emails to professional colleagues, reeling from my unraveling worldview and disillusioned by the seeming triviality of everything I had blindly worked towards my whole life. My breakdown took on an extra fervor due to the war in Ukraine; I could not understand how I could work so much under the pretext of making the world a better place, and a major world event like this could come along, affecting people I had been close, and I was supposed to accept the idea that there was nothing I could do to help prevent something like this from happening again…like it wasn’t a clear sign that all our systems deserved to be torn up so we could start again.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that M forced me to go to the ER to get a medical evaluation, but at the time I was deeply upset, and warned her that I would hate her if she did that to me. “Do not psychologically rape me”, I wrote. She still forced me to go.

The ER discharged me because, ultimately, I was just high; I was not a danger to myself. But not before they put my parents (who had flown in from India) through a grueling, hours-long interrogation in which my mother (a doctor herself) had to repeatedly tell them that my new beliefs made total sense in the context of my cultural background, and that she was adamantly oppposed to having me medicated because all said and done this was a huge step up from me wanting to kill myself in five years and they were completely against messing with whatever transition was occurring. In the end, my formal diagnosis was “mood change”:

Diagnosis: “mood change”

Catastrophe

At this point, I was very upset with M. She would have understood that I didn’t need the damn ER visit if she had just called me. But instead, she freaked out to my emergency contacts and put my loved ones through hell. All the while oblivious to the fact that I was going “crazy” because I was reorganizing my worldview to protect her from my anger.

On getting discharged, I found I was not looking forward to another therapy session with her; in our last session, when I had tried to ask her about her life (my way of piecing together why she had developed a sexual counter-transference), she had avoided giving me any answers, saying “we’re not here to talk about me, we’re here to talk about you”. But she also hadn’t wanted to talk about what I actually needed to talk about (my discomfort), so I figured the therapist-client frame just wasn’t working. I wrote to M to tell her “I don’t think therapist is the right role for you in this case”. I put a smiley face in the email because I was still using spiritual euphoria as a defense. “Lol, I don’t know what’s going on there, M sure has some stuff she needs to figure out, but I’m sure it’s all part of the journey” I remember thinking.

I thought she would at least afford me the dignity of a phone call, to make sense of what had happened. Instead, she let it end over text. She even tried to make it seem like a mutual breakup when I had clearly just fired her: “I can only see you today and ongoing if you are in the care of a psychiatrist who will co-ordinate care with me”, she wrote. I took this to be code for “in the care of a pyschiatrist who will agree with me that something is wrong with you”.

I should have backed down. Taken a moment. But I felt so dehumanized that my repressed anger finally got control. “This is important for her” it told me, “she will use the trauma of what we are about to say to make sure she never makes this mistake again”.

“Fuck you. We’re done” I replied, and called her a psychological rapist.

Plummet

I’ll be honest: I didn’t actually have a plan for losing her completely.

I thought we were going to have a series of conversations, human to human, to make sense of what had happened. In hindsight, I should have kept her as a therapist if I wanted these conversations, but she was very expensive ($250 per session, referral service probably took a cut) and I was very very angry.

I tried to find new therapists, but my ability to trust had been compromised. I actually started seeing two therapists at the same time, so that I would have a backup in case I lost one, and ended up losing both (one because I didn’t feel comfortable, and the other because she felt out of her depth).

Other events came to a head as well. My tendency to go into denial about the strength of an attachment had extended to more than just M, and one person in particular had felt led on by me and held a grudge against me ever since I began dating someone else. My guess is that person, on seeing me outwardly euphoric due to my “mood change”, got angry that I was so oblivious to her pain and used knowledge of my PTSD to trigger me in the worst way possible. I actually begged M to take me back when that happened — I was that desperate and willing to debase myself, find a psychiatrist who thought I was crazy, whatever — but I got no response.

Luckily, I was able to call out what that person was doing for what it was, and the experience helped me heal the original trauma from 2017 by training me to trust my truth…but that person had been a colleague, and the experience left me unwilling to return to where I had worked (even though I was invited to return) since there had been an undercurrent of racial bias in her complaint (e.g. sharing a bed is considered platonic in Indian culture and I had been extremely clear about this, but that person still tried to claim it was an example of something romantic that had happened…sigh). That person had been very socially influential at my predominantly white workplace (e.g. I noticed people who had been friendly with me stopped following me on social media after her complaint), so I felt she had rendered the environment too toxic for me to go back to. Thus, I voluntarily decided to not return and planned to just interact with my boss to wrap up projects to the best of my capacity.

Things got especially bad after I started running out of unpaid leave and couldn’t find a psychiatrist in a position to certify medical leave (I had a teletherapy psychiatrist; needed an in-person one). The lack of a therapist also put me in a catch-22 where I was not able to access certain treatment programs that might have helped extend my leave. Out of options, in no condition to work, and aware that my right to stay in the US dependend on my ability to contribute productively to its economy, I came extremely close to killing myself; I got my hands on sodium nitrite, and decided that after my father finished a two-week trip to the US that he needed my help on, I would take it.

Pivot

It’s very liberating to feel you have nothing to lose.

I loaded myself up with levels of THC that would overwhelm people twice my size. I had gotten quite good at staying functional on THC, and I reasoned that since THC made it easier to get in touch with my emotions, I “might as well give all parts of me a fair hearing”.

It unlocked the extraordinary experience of being able to talk to my subconscious. And I mean quite literally have a verbal chat with another aspect of my psyche. I have always had a tendency to say things out loud without realizing it, but with enough THC I entered a zone where I wouldn’t know what a thought was going to be until after I had said it out loud. If I then designated that vocalized thought as something that “my subconscious” had said, I could then simply think a thought in my mind to “reply”. My father, who overheard some of these conversations, told me that it was like listening to someone talk on the phone.

I wasn’t hallucinating, but I became aware of how the line between “mental thought” and “distant sound on the edge of hearing” is quite flexible. (Try it; try imagining a very faint sound in the distance and being confident you didn’t actually hear that sound…actually, people without internal mental imagery i.e. aphantasia may have no idea what I am talking about).

Externally, I made quite a scene. Because I was genuinely planning to kill myself, I decided that even though I wasn’t going to make a complaint, I wasn’t ok with M getting off completely scott-free. There had to be some consequences. As I mentioned before, from looking her up, I learned that she had been married the whole time she was my therapist even though she had stopped wearing her wedding ring midway through our sessions. This felt a hell of a lot like cheating, but as it turned out her husband appeared to a jerk (he was a lawyer for entities that are known for taking advantage of people, and he routinely mocked people’s appearances on social media), so I decided to throw a grenade into her personal life by calling out his shitty behavior online and saying this was why his wife had fallen in love with someone who treated her with basic kindness.

Yeah, I was cruel. If I had known I was going to live, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

I also realized the following: “attaching your ego to being a good person leads you to optimize for the appearance of being a good person, rather than actually being a good person”. People who are motivated to be good out of fear will never stand up for the most vulnerable in society that no one is giving out rewards for defending. Like, when was the last time you saw someone who was against child SA take it upon themselves to stand up for non-offending pedophiles? It’s so much easier to demonize all pedophiles because that’s what most people do, even though this literally makes the problem worse because it leads people who experience pedophilic attraction to think they are doomed to offend. (The reason I’m taking this example is that during this period I challenged myself to “be the change I wanted to see” and took it upon myself to start twitter ad campaigns against blanket shaming of pedophiles…hey, Musk had just taken over twitter, I figured the platform was doomed, time to push the limits).

It was a rough ride. I lost a close friend and received a few concerned messages from colleagues that suggested people were gossiping about me (though, as it turned out, not nearly as many as these messages seemed to think; lots of friends I reached out to afterwards had no idea what had happened). Ultimately, though, it was worth it: rather than kill myself, I decided to get on a flight back to India. Told friends I was doing it to renew my visa, but had the feeling that I would never come back. As it went, I left an apartment full of stuff and never returned.

By sheer luck, a friend of mine whom I had met through a group therapy program needed a place to stay immediately after I left; I remember texting her where to find the spare keys from the Bangalore airport. She said the time at my place (before I finally decided I was leaving the US for good) was a huge help. Funny how things work out.

Slow Healing

The loss of identity after I left the US was devastating.

All my life, I had been a star academic performer. Then (I thought) I had taken a fucking flamethrower and torched the whole thing down. Suddenly, I was an unemployed nobody with a history of clear mental breakdown, going on and on about the psyche and consciousness. On top of that, I had not lived in India for 13 years. I did not fit in.

But it is remarkable how much changing countries can completely change which beliefs are considered rational. In India, there is no resistance to the idea that the brain is not the only thing that can create signals in our conscious experience. Seriously, no resistance. In the US, the same idea can get you labeled crazy. So even though I was a social misfit, at least I no longer felt insane. That was really helpful. And I found an excellent Indian therapist who gave me full space to explore my newfound spiritual beliefs.

So I took the time to learn more, and eventually realized all the evidence on spiritual phenomena clearly points to a concrete mechanism of how consciousness interacts with the material world. For example, extensive evidence from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies on young children with verified, highly specific memories of other lives (think “reincarnation”) shows many cases of the child having unusual birthmarks and birth defects that lined up with the locations of wounds on the autopsy photographs of the deceased (happens in about 30% of cases). For an excellent overview, see this article in Scientific American, written by a skeptic.

What is the likely mechanism? It turns out that what is often assumed in physics to be “random” is very likely not actually random, but rather is influenced by conscious thought; see the review of the evidence in this article published in Biosystems, titled “Quantum Aspects of the Brain-Mind Relationship: A Hypothesis with Supporting Evidence”. In the case of birthmarks/defects, it is as though the child’s mental impression of how things “should” look is able to influence the unfolding of “random” developmental biology events that dictate how things actually look. Like the placebo effect, but in reverse; like a psychosomatic disorder.

Still, even if I managed to make a case for being open to the evidence, I struggled to convince anyone in my professional network to do something about it. Honestly, I can’t blame them; look what it took for me to finally take the evidence seriously. The barrier is not so much one of credibility as one of courage. Unless your old world is ripped away, you have little reason to go building a new one. (For comparison, think of how long it took for the fact that homosexuality is not a disease to go mainstream. The evidence from other species was always there, but the willingness to admit it was not.)

By good fortune, events conspired to give me a life again. Purpose landed in my lap: a family member I knew in Australia was separated from her husband and in need of childcare support. After a coincidental visit in March 2023, I realized I could help her and I ended up moving to Australia and getting a job there to support her. Despite my disastrous public unraveling, my key professional mentors had remained supportive throughout, so I was able to find a job in a new field without any difficulty. And by luck, it was in an area I’m now very keen on: neuroimaging data analysis.

Why neuroimaging? Turns out, we really don’t understand how the brain works. It is well known that regions of the brain display co-ordinated activity even when that co-ordination cannot be explained by the neuronal connectivity structure of the brain…to me, this very clearly indicates that the signal to coordinate is coming from outside the brain, particularly when you combine it with the evidence of synchronized brain activity between physically separated identical twins; see:

• Extrasensory electroencephalographic induction between identical twins (Duane & Behrendt, 1965, published in Science)
• Brain Functional Connectivity Correlates of Anomalous Interaction Between Sensorily Isolated Monozygotic Twins (Silberstein & Bigelow, 2024, BiorXiv)

Also, there are major signs that our conscious representation of reality is not even created within the brain; from Feldman, 2013: “different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole….There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene…the subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry”.

If “souls” are defined as the seat of our conscious perception, they may be the conduit for the synchrony and integration of different neural circuits, both between separate brains and within a single brain, and are a vital part of how the brain works.

All this to say that at least now I have professional purpose. A step up from planning to kill myself in 5 years. So maybe M’s revelation was for my good — just not in the way M had planned.

The Affair

The whole time this was happening, I coped by continuing to write to M, even though she asked me to stop contacting her. I reasoned that the feelings had to go somewhere: either I killed myself, I made a complaint against her, or I wrote to her.

One question in particular I kept coming back to: when had M’s attraction to me started? I had never noticed a change or shift in her style the whole time she was treating me. So…had she had a crush on me the whole time? Is that why she had often seemed nervous with me? This I struggled to ignore because I never imagined that someone as “put together” as M, someone who seemed to have life under control, could feel instant attraction to a “misfit” like me.

What could she have been attracted to? I knew I wasn’t ugly, but I could be quite dorky (clothes/hair out of place because I’m too busy thinking about something else to notice). But I do have a trait that I find attractive in others: I’m skilled at expressing my ideas, and speak well. I wasn’t normally aware of it, because part of how that trait works is that I have to lose awareness of myself and just let the words flow (same when I do improvised dancing). But yes, it was a potentially attractive trait I knew I had…and M had been exposed to it for 1.5 years.

I was so used to being the one with the smoldering, long-lasting, unreciprocated crush, it was huge to imagine that someone else, someone who I thought was way too good at life to be in my league, could actually have felt like that about me. Even though I hadn’t had a chance to know M enough to feel that way about her, I knew that experience of falling in love was beautiful, and I desperately wanted to vicariously live that love story through M. In fact, given that it involved me as the main character and she had shattered my world by revealing it, I felt entitled to hear it.

About a year after losing M, I had a communication breakthrough. I set up a way for M to send signals back to me that wouldn’t require her to write to me (think something like read alerts)…and it worked. Poetic emails opened in the dead of night, forbidden questions asked, “open if yes” messages used to respond. It became sexual (I sent her pictures, she signaled that she enjoyed them). I didn’t mind this time; I had been able to set up a new frame within which to relate to her, in which the sexual aspect could be integrated as something that enhanced the relationship. Plus, it helped to get proof that it wasn’t in my head.

What the data from the read alert signaling system looks like

But the affair quickly unravelled. I told M that the therapist I was seeing in India would reach out to her, so that M, as a fellow therapist, could at least provide her perspective on how things had ended. It sounds like a strange request, but I badly wanted to hear that perspective because I was still upset by how she had abandoned me and had not fully forgiven her. M, ah, left my therapist on read (meaning, my therapist got a read alert on whatsapp, but no reply). Then, at one point, M became afraid that I was still manic, freaked out and pulled away. After I assured her that (once again) I was not manic, I was just high, I revealed I was quite upset by her handling: “if you thought I was manic, shouldn’t you have reached out to my therapist??” I asked. It was painful to realize that her fear of being discovered was greater than her concern for my well-being.

In hindsight, that is my answer for why she abandoned me.

I told M I was pulling away from her because that made me feel “less ashamed”. This caused M to panic, send me a flurry of signals that I said I wasn’t going to sort through, and then to send a nonsensical message to my therapist claiming that she was not going to discuss my case because I was “harassing” her and she didn’t want to encourage me…I imagined her saying this to a case investigator and them asking “…if so, why did you finally respond to Av’s therapist right after Av said she was going to stop contacting you?”. It was not very strategic, which tells me she was too scared to think.

It hurts that M was willing to tell a lie that risked causing me to doubt my sanity, given that she knew how painful gaslighting had been for me in 2017. Even my own therapist only really started to believe me (“could the signaling system be buggy? M’s message to me reads very differently from someone who was responding to you this whole time” she asked) when I showed her that my “read alert” system indicated that M had opened up messages I had written to her about my therapist around the same time (4AM India time) that she had replied to my therapist. It was ironic that M’s attempt to portray the signaling system as buggy was what confirmed the reliability of the signaling system.

All I had wanted was for M to see past her fear long enough to see me. And when I expressed this, she just became even more afraid that I was going to make a complaint.

M’s final read alert was on an email of mine that showed her what the read alert logs looked like. I wanted her to appreciate how exhausting it had been for me to piece through them…and I wanted her to know how futile her attempts to cover her tracks had been. She still had her career because my choice to not report her was indeed a choice…it wasn’t like I didn’t have the evidence.

I never heard from her after that.

No ending

I don’t know how I am supposed to get over this. Normal dating just seems so…shallow after losing two epic loves. It is much more satisfying to retreat into a fantasy over what might have been, and dating someone else makes me deeply conflicted about still being hung up on the past (it’s not fair to my partner; they will never have all of me for as long as part of me is locked away).

I did end up using the read alert signaling system to reach out to the person who had given me hell in 2017, and it allowed for there to at least be a recognition of the abiding depth of our love for each other, and a confirmation that it hadn’t all been in my head. But her last read alert to me was on “(open if yes) you think this is a mistake, and would like me to forget you and move on” so…that’s that. Before that, her last read alert was on my attempt to explain to her why my love for her was not a trauma bond, why it was different from the love I had for M so…I guess I failed to convince her. At least I have more closure there than I did before, and the what happened with M gave me the courage to reach out by giving me the confidence to trust my memory of how she had felt, that it hadn’t all been in my head.

When I try to tell myself that I am never going to find fulfillment with either of these ghosts, I tend to become very depressed. If I’m not secretly running on the hope of eventual reconciliation, I feel like I can muster up about 30% of myself to show up for work/colleagues/friends. My long-term professional goal is the only thing keeping me alive.

But hey, maybe sharing this story is my ending. And maybe you the reader found it eye opening in places. I know writing it has helped me, so if you made it this far, I thank you for reading it. And M, if you’re read this: I am sorry for what I put you through, and maybe you understand things now that you did not before.