I Fired My Therapist

The red flags I dismissed and the permission I never gave myself until it was too late

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I should have seen the red flags.

But I was conditioned to dismiss them. I never gave myself permission to leave until it was far too late.

“So, you’re not an angry person.”

I stared at the screen, blinking—frozen to my seat from the words. The shock felt like tectonic plates shifting from my heart, the tremor erupting throughout my whole body.

And through those cracks, anger boiled up, threatening to break the surface—to ripple across my collected expression. The therapist went on, her poised smile and white teeth flashing, “In fact, it says here that anger doesn’t come naturally to you at all. That’s just not part of your personality.”

We had been working with each other for a year at that point—an hour each week, like clock-work. That’s around fifty sessions and a whole lot more dollars. Why did I feel like my mail lady knew me better?—and we only chatted for a minute or two every month or so.

The therapist’s face behind the screen was calm, a chatty smile drawn across her expression, patiently awaiting my answer. She was a bit older than my mother—in her sixties or so with bleached blonde hair and dull grey eyes.

Maybe that’s why I thought I might like her. But unbeknownst to me at that very moment, our sessions would only take a deep dive south from that singular question and they would end in a way I would least expect.

I’ve been in weekly therapy for nearly twenty years, with multiple therapists, so I value sharing this experience to other survivors of trauma that are currently in therapy or would like to look for a therapist and aren’t sure where to start.

In this essay, I’ll share the full story—how things went entirely wrong, the red flags I overlooked until it was too late, and how you can avoid doing the same. Toward the end, we’ll walk through what to do if you recognize these patterns in your own therapy, using a framework called rupture and repair—a simple, client-empowering process that, unfortunately, isn’t often taught to clients (or even all therapists) but should be.

Finally, we’ll close the story with the session where I fired my therapist and how this went down in a turn of events I could never have predicted.

Lastly, I’ve added a brief guide on Pete Walker’s advice on how to find a good therapist that I truly wish I knew beforehand.

Photo by Julien L on Unsplash

I Fired My Therapist—the red flags I dismissed and the permission I never gave myself until it was too late

My personhood wasn’t taken into account

I remember walking into her office for the first time, smelling the strange odor of years of dust and dog urine. She had been ten minutes late to that intake session, her two small Shih Tzus jumping on my lap as she apologized in a detached way for her tardiness, explaining that her dogs needed to be taken out.

I love dogs, but I was in no state to be jumped on and licked—their tongues left stickiness and a sickening smell all over my arms and hands. I swallowed hard at the odor, pushing down my reservations and intuition at the same time.

The office felt wrong. Her presence towards me felt wrong. But I ignored it.

She was the only therapist in town who claimed a Christian perspective, and at that time, I was looking for this and terribly desperate.

Red Flags: