Not The Other Woman pt. 1
A year ago, my husband discovered that I had become emotionally entangled with my Christian counsellor. At first, my husband suggested that I had been taken advantage of but I didn’t know what to think and after conversations with my pastor and google searches, we both came to think that I had had a long-distance, emotional and sexualized affair with my counsellor.
I had begun working with this counsellor online the year before (to work through issues that were keeping me from reconciling with my then estranged husband) and ten months later, after a series of what seemed like unimportant incidents at the time, he called me up to tell me that he loved me. He had told me many times before that he “loved me like a sister” but this time he meant romantic love.
I will admit that I thought he was amazing. He had listened to me, validated my feelings, encouraged me and prayed for me. I felt grateful from early on and the attachment towards him grew over the weeks and months so that when he made that call and said those three words to me, “I love you” it had a profound impact on me.
Firstly, I couldn’t believe it was happening. In the coming months as he slowly initiated sexting and phone sex, I felt like I was living someone else’s life and this couldn’t be real. I knew something was wrong and yet I either dismissed or did not recognize red flags in his behaviour. Instead, his attention towards me felt validating.
Was it an affair?
It wasn’t until months out from completing an affair recovery type program that I began working with a therapeutic counsellor who assigned the word “abuse” to what I had experienced. The counsellor and I had started out in what I thought was a professional, supportive relationship where my he focussed on helping me work through some marital issues.
However, it turned into a nightmare when instead of pointing me to my husband and towards reconciliation, this counsellor abused his position of power by gradually inserting himself into places in my life outside of our sessions where he didn’t belong. He also invited me into his life in areas where I did not belong. This is called abuse.
Affair recovery programs
As a result, my husband and I spent months in an affair recovery-type program, that by the way, I would recommend to anyone looking to recover from an affair but not someone who was abused by her counsellor.
As someone who felt betrayed, my husband benefitted from the program as it taught me, the “unfaithful wife” to create a safe place for him to learn to trust me again. We also learned a lot of great tools to help navigate any marital issue, set up healthy boundaries, protect our marriage and love each other as an action - not a feeling. Some of it was good but not in the context of what I had gone through.
Not all programs are created equal.
The problem with affair recovery programs for a woman like me who was a victim of therapy abuse, is that they insisted that I take all the blame, forgetting that I sought out a professional for help and was damaged as a result. I was a victim.
However, I was treated like a woman who’d had loose boundaries and engaged with a male friend or co-worker. My counsellor misused me and caused harm to my husband and yet there was no one in that program that alerted us to this.
Here’s the problem:
Historically, when a woman winds up in an “inappropriate” relationship with a counsellor, or pastor who is counselling her or anyone with spiritual authority over her, many people will incorrectly label that relationship as a ‘romantic affair’. However, there is no such thing as an affair with a client or someone with whom you have a fiduciary duty to protect.
We need to play this on repeat:
There is no such thing as an affair with a client or someone with whom you have a fiduciary duty to protect.
By nature, every client/congregant is vulnerable the moment they agree to receive help from a counsellor or their pastor and it is impossible for that relationship to become “inappropriate“ without the the leader/professional either steering it in that direction or allowing it to be steered in that direction. Therefore it is the professional’s sole responsibility to ensure that he always acts in the best interest of his client/congregant.
My biggest regret of the past two years is that this happened.
My second biggest regret, is that the people involved in the recovery of our marriage did not once recognize the element of abuse in my story. Had they, they might have explained issues of power imbalances in relationships and they would have explained to my husband that I was vulnerable to my counsellor’s words and actions by the very nature of his position and my need for counselling.
We would have approached healing in a different way. There would have been a space for me to grieve my betrayal and not just focus on my husband’s healing. But there was no one and there was nothing. Consequently, for months I suppressed that rising feeling that was telling me, “This isn’t right…something bad happened to you too.”
I do want to mention that my husband, with the understanding that he had (that his wife had had an online sexualized emotional affair with her counsellor) did choose to show me compassion and chose to stay and work on the marriage. He has since come to understand the nature of the abuse but he continues to struggles to reframe his thinking at times. The feelings of betrayal are real for him regardless of whether it was an affair or abuse.
He has worked hard this year in his own recovery battling triggers, memories and hatred towards my ex-counsellor/abuser). He has supported me in the best way that he knows how during each stage of his own healing and we, as a couple are doing well.
However, I still long for him to be able to comfort me and acknowledge my pain in a way that I need to feel that he truly understands my experience. My current counsellor tells me to give him time. I am.
If you take one thing away from this blog, I hope you leave reflecting on the difference between an affair and a relationship created through manipulation as a result of a professional’s abuse of power. The word “affair”, while devastating to those who experience it, minimizes the role of the counsellor/pastor’s behaviour, reducing it to a moral failure rather than a crime.