I used to love my therapist. Then she sent me a deranged email about my daughter.

This is part of Breakup Week. We just can’t do this anymore.

I first saw my therapist, we’ll call her Dora, in 2005 when I was having some pre-wedding struggles—namely, having an impossible time doing what my family wanted while also staying true to myself. The challenge manifested in wedding planning decisions but ran much deeper. I grew up avoiding conflict, and I was marrying someone who was very good at making his position on just about anything known. In the gap between avoidance and expression, I was paralyzed. I needed help.

My soon-to-be husband rightly insisted I see a therapist. I asked for a recommendation from a friend. She suggested I reach out to Dora, who was her friend’s therapist. Dora had a small office in Manhattan, mere blocks from where I worked. A bin of magazines—the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker—sat outside her door, where the noise machine whirred. Her bookshelves were lined with Freud and other titans of psychotherapy. Dora was tiny and impossibly glamorous; she was always direct but seemed somehow impish, too. I don’t know where she was from because I followed the rules of psychoanalysis and refrained from asking direct questions about her life.

Of course, she knew all about me. And over my on-and-off-again relationship with Dora that spanned 10 years, I talked to her about my first marriage, my pregnancy, my divorce, my daughter, my various work challenges, my parents, the man I was dating. When I needed a break from therapy, I took one. When I wanted to come back, Dora made time for me. I learned how to be a better communicator, how to set boundaries and hold my own lines, how to be less reactive. How to sit with things, and make smarter decisions. I learned how not to run, how to be happier, how to ask for help. I did not just mine the past to understand the present. I changed, for the better. And it had a lot to do with my work with Dora.

I had a tendency, as I do, to ice-break. (Ask anyone at Slate and they’ll tell you I love to yap about personal stuff before we get to business.) I reveled in sharing about my daughter as she grew, and I showed Dora pictures of her latest doings. Dora knew a lot about her, but she didn’t know her. She never met my daughter in person, and I never saw Dora outside the office except for once or twice, when I accidentally ran into her at the cafe down the street.

One afternoon, I started our session by asking Dora about her vacation. (This was as close as I got to a “personal” question.) We’d missed a week because she’d been away. She told me about a couple she’d met who had a toddler, and how she adored him. Then she mentioned that, in the future, he’d be “perfect for your daughter.” I thought this was weird, but I brushed it off. Sometimes people say stuff, and she meant it in a nice way. I changed the subject.

Then COVID happened. I was newly separated and working on getting divorced, and therapy was an integral tool in navigating this transition. We moved to Zoom, as we did in all things. It was not at all the same—doing therapy on a screen flattened the experience. And Dora wasn’t in the academic, smart-shrink setting that provided context for her. Now she was just another head on my screen, asking me how I was doing. That was … everyone.

But I kept going. I needed to.

Then one weekend in May of 2020, I received an email from Dora with an odd subject line: “Non-analytic matchmaking with a patient’s child …” My daughter and I were about to drive back to the city from a few nights upstate in an Airbnb when I noticed it in my inbox. I opened it and started reading.

“So I think I told you that I met a mesmerizing little boy when we were staying at this boutique hotel,” it began. “I maintained absolute privacy but we may have to break the boundaries if this truly looks like a match up ahead.”

I closed the email immediately. This needed to wait until I got home. I didn’t want to think about this while driving. There was an attachment.

Once we got to Brooklyn, I dared to look at the whole thing. It was an email, with pictures of the child she’d met on her trip months before, for me to see. Along with them was a note she’d written to this little boy, describing my daughter—the one she had never met—and extolling the virtues of an “older woman” (my daughter was in early elementary school at the time). She wrote many nice things about my daughter, but I could not appreciate them, because the entire thing was not only creepy, but a violation of my privacy, and my daughter’s, and this poor little boy’s. Why do I possess photos of this small child? I thought frantically. Why had she referred to him as “total dreamboat” and a “hunk of smiling love”?

I wondered what the boy’s parents—who got her note since he was a toddler, could not read, and surely did not have email—made of this. I also wondered what had happened to Dora: The person I learned boundaries from had broken some very important ones of my own, and seemed to have no idea that she did, or that unprovoked matchmaking between two small children was deranged.

I thought about reporting her to a governing body for her profession, but I didn’t. Another therapist said I would never know the outcome of an investigation, and I truly hoped that this trespass was one of a kind. (I don’t know if this was the right call or not.) But I did use all the skills I’d cultivated over the years, and I ended our relationship. I told her I would not be making my regular weekly therapy appointment because I needed to think about whether I could continue working with her, given this violation of my trust. I also told her I would not be paying for the missed session.

A Beloved Actor’s Face Is Now Unrecognizable. But It’s Us Who Should Be Looking in the Mirror.

I Broke Up With My Therapist. It All Started With an Absolutely Deranged Email.

She emailed me a terse response in which she sounded genuinely confused about what she’d done wrong. Then she left some pleading voicemails that left me even more unnerved. There was something in her voice that sounded vaguely romantic or mournful, which made the whole thing even more bewildering. I felt betrayal and anger. I needed a therapist, and I had a very good one. And then I couldn’t work with her anymore.

Eventually she stopped trying to contact me. COVID went on. Things happened in my life she would have been happy about, things she helped make possible. My loving, important, close relationship with my ex-husband. My easygoing, warm, and stable second marriage. My imperfect if secure parenting. My more honest relationship with my parents.

I’m never going to know what happened to Dora—if there was some kind of COVID-related mental break or if this was just a breach of therapist code that allowed an aspect of her authentic personality to break through. But I do know that I’m grateful to her for my having the skills to move past it.

I miss her, but I don’t need her anymore.

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