I met Avery when I was 13 years old. Before I ever met him, I was not okay. I had what I now know to be panic attacks for about as long as I can remember. They rendered me unable to sleep in my own bedroom. So I slept in my parents’ room far longer than a kid normally should. I only stopped when they started fighting.

My parents spent a few years breaking up, starting with, in my perspective, one blowup fight when I was in 4th grade. At 9 years old I developed what I now know to be depression. And my parents, with the best of intentions, did not have the capacity to meet the needs of my child self when they were going through so much themselves.

My depression was visible, if you were looking and knew what to look for. To some, it may have just come across that I was a weird kid. Which, to be fair, I probably was. And maybe it just looked like I wore pajamas to school because I was weird and not because I didn’t have the motivation or self-confidence enough to get dressed and didn’t care about myself enough to take care of me.

But my parents could see it. And the best they could do was tell me I need therapy; what they couldn’t do was find a way to voice that as something that didn’t sound like a punishment. And so when they would occasionally break under the pressure of not knowing how to take care of me and blurt out that I needed therapy, I resisted that. I didn’t deserve that kind of punishment.

I also masked a lot of my pain. I’ve spent a lot of my life walking this awkward fine line between obviously fucked up and excelling at objective, measurable things. I got good grades. I didn’t need to be told to get my work done. I was smart at the right things, so it didn’t take more effort than I had to give to be apparently successful at school.

The fact that I was already mentally ill made me vulnerable. I believe that Avery could tell. I believe that he targeted me because he knew I was an easy target.

The fact that I was already mentally ill is something that Avery’s lawyers have tried to use to say he didn’t damage me. I was already damaged. Not only was I an easy target, my mental illness was an insurance policy for him in the aftermath.

I needed therapy before I met Avery. I just didn’t get it. And if I had, maybe those therapist’s notes would have helped to prove there are certain things he caused by raping me, certain things he exacerbated by raping me. Maybe I could have chosen to expose all of my wounds to my rapist and a jury to make that point. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful.

Maybe if I had therapy before I met Avery, I would have been less vulnerable. Maybe he wouldn’t have tried, or if he had, maybe I wouldn’t have fell for it all. Maybe I would have had mental tools that would have helped me.

Or maybe I would’ve still fallen victim to a person who, when he sets his mind to it, knows how to create victims of abuse.

I can’t know what might have been. What did happen, though, was that he spent a few years grooming me before raping me repeatedly when I was 16 and a junior in high school. And it was all a secret. He had orchestrated my isolation and demanded my silence, and as an expert in hiding, I was his perfect victim. 

But by my senior year of high school, I could not hide the weight I was losing, so my mom became concerned. She started keeping track of the lack of menstrual products I was using and even once had me weigh myself in front of her. After another argument where I continued to deny I had an eating disorder, I finally did admit that I was suicidal and agreed not to go to therapy but to get on medication. My mom found a nurse practitioner who would prescribe them without doing therapy, and I got on an antidepressant and a sleep aid.

I had to do medication check-ins with the NP. As the antidepressant started to work, I started to become more open to the possibility of actually trying talk therapy. I knew that I was damaged from what happened with Avery, but I believed I was the problem. Because I couldn’t identify what he had done as abusive and nonconsensual, I believed there must be something wrong with me for it to mess me up so much. Still, I was left with a sense that I should probably talk about it. 

The antidepressant was making my nightmares worse, unbearably so. They became more vivid and more disturbing. Every time I voiced concerns about it to the NP, she shrugged it off and said it was just how my brain was processing life. As someone who had become accustomed to my feelings being belittled and disregarded, I lacked an ability to assert them with any confidence. So I endured the worsening symptoms and continued to see her without complaint.

I told her I wanted to try therapy, and this was met with a neutrality that in hindsight I wish I could have identified as important. But I didn’t know that there could be bad therapists because I had no experience with them and had only ever associated therapy as a negative thing anyway. I didn’t know that it could matter whether someone was the right fit for me. It was a gigantic milestone that I felt open to the idea after years of feeling like therapy was simply a punishment for being too much for my own parents to handle. And the person who I was ready to open up to was unfortunately very much the wrong person.

I had several “sessions” with her. She spent much of our increased time together talking about herself, using her phone, and not listening to me. She not only was uninterested in treating me, an actual child, but she seemed to actively dissuade me from engaging in therapy. I never actually talked to her about anything. I was working myself up to it, wanting to feel better, and it’s incredibly hard for me to not wonder what would have happened if someone else had been on the receiving end of that.

But I did not voice concerns to my mom or anyone because I was someone who had no faith in my own feelings. I had not ever truly experienced validation in my life, and beyond that, what I had experienced was ongoing genuine gaslighting. As a 17 year old struggling with all that life had handed me thus far, I did not have the capacity to question the adult who was supposedly helping me.

Until it became so obvious that she was not. For our final attempt at a therapy session, AKA her accepting a higher payment for a longer session, I was late. I want to say I was around 10 minutes late. It was not an insignificant amount of time, but it was not so much that we couldn’t get most of the session in. When I arrived at the office, she was sitting at her computer with her back to me. She told me to sit down and wait.

She then spent at least as much time as I had been late ignoring me, leaving me there to watch her just doing something on her computer. Even in the moment, I had the sense she was trying to send a passive aggressive message to me that I wasted her time so she was going to waste mine in kind.

Eventually she led me to the room where it happens, and the usual occurred. I would begin speaking, she would respond by talking about herself, I would never get to even the surface of the waters I wanted to dive into.

And then, over 10 minutes early for the time the appointment was always supposed to end, she said she had to leave, go do something else, obviously something more important. To be very clear, I wouldn’t have expected her to do a longer session to make up for the time I missed by being late, but either she actually had something scheduled and already planned to cut my session short that day, or she did it because she was mad at me, again a child, for being late and was punishing me for it. Either way, it’s bad.

She didn’t leave, though, before charging me the full amount for the hourlong session. And with that day’s experience, I finally had enough to admit to myself that she was not someone I was going to get any help from.

Unfortunately, in my teenage mind, what that meant was just confirmation that therapy is not helpful, and it was just a lapse in judgment that I had started to become open to the possibility that it wasn’t a bad thing.

Not long after giving up on therapy, I woke up from a nightmare that was so upsetting to me, I quit my antidepressants cold turkey. She had not warned me that was not a good idea in general and especially with the antidepressant she had prescribed me (which she provided me many free samples of from her actual closet full of it), which is well known to cause terrible withdrawals. She made no attempt, as far as I know, to see why I stopped showing up, to offer any advice to wean off the medication.

My cry for help ended with six months of brain zaps and another four years before I would attempt therapy again.

* * *

In 2016, now 21 years old, I was finally really working through some of the things that were wrong with me. I was still friends with Avery, who I misidentified as someone who could answer some of the questions that confused me, given that he was the only one besides me who was there and all. So the door was still open for him to continue gaslighting me, making it that much harder to accept the truth. 

But later that year, I finally did. It took over five years of confusion, self-blame, shutting down completely and then clawing my way back into some level of functioning, a shitton of work and research and support from others, and some undeniable revelations to be able to say he had raped me. And although my world came tumbling down, my understanding of reality going back to 2008 shattered, for the first time it actually started to make more sense instead of less sense. And it hurt so bad. And I knew there was a lot to think about, a lot to figure out, a lot to reprocess. I knew I needed help.

But I still don’t believe I would have been able to seek the help I really needed if it weren’t for a friend who had been going through a hard time at the same time sharing their experience of therapy with me. We had been leaning on each other and trying to help each other navigate the darkness, and they found a therapist. And I saw how it helped them. And it was a revelation to me when they once said they were really looking forward to their therapy session. It was the first time I had ever been exposed to therapy as a truly positive thing, a good thing, a place you might want to go to. This person’s innocuous comment changed my life, and I will be forever grateful. Because for the first time, I realized I deserved therapy.

Finding a therapist took more effort than I wish it would have, but I was determined. And I got really lucky this time, because my therapist was really a perfect match for me. She was an age that she could be my mom, and she had a nurturing, motherly energy with me, but she was cool and like-minded, had tattoos and was very into meditation and mindfulness. I know it can be really hard to find the right match and then for the right match to have availability and accept your insurance. I don’t believe in karma, but if I did, I would say that Deb was the counteranswer to the nurse practitioner I had encountered all those years ago.

Therapy helped me so much. My therapist helped me so much. Therapy was truly a safe space for me, one I really had never had anything like before. The work was painful and challenging and it wasn’t perfect, but it was so healing. There were times it felt actually magical. I learned so much, processed so much, beyond just what happened with Avery, because although what he put me through had the biggest impact on the course of my life and mental health, the abuse was not the only thing I ever struggled with, before or after him.

I learned to manage my panic in a big way, which had been highly exacerbated by the trauma and affected my life in a lot of ways. Learning how to cope with panic contained powerful lessons that extended into more general anxiety and other aspects of my life where I just wasn’t thriving. 

I spent a lot of time talking about the abuse. I wasn’t done dealing with it, and I’m still not. But I also talked about other things. Things that had happened in my life, relationships with my family, friends, people around me. In the four years I was working with Deb, we had covered a lot of my life, past, present, past that’s still affecting my present. I opened myself up fully. I wanted to heal, and the more it helped, the more open I was able to be.

So by the time my rapist was requesting my therapy file as part of my lawsuit against him, that file contained so much of me, so much that no one had any right to know if I didn’t want them to, and certainly the person who hurt me the most in the world had no right to get their hands on.

But by that point in the lawsuit, I had learned that there is no point in trying to fight for any semblance of my human rights. Avery would have his legal team fight no matter the cost, and I would lose every time.

But we tried, first, to provide them with a summary of what was relevant rather than the entire file itself. My therapist gave them this:

And their response made it clear they were going to fight for the entire file.

My lawyer told me we could try to fight it, but that would cost money and time, when the lawsuit had already been dragging on for four years by that point. So I did not try to fight what I truly believe was going to be a losing battle anyway. The courts had made it clear to me that I have no protections. We tried to request that the notes could be for attorneys’ eyes only, which is something that is done all the time in the law, and my rapist refused that request. He personally wanted to see it, wanted me to know he’d be seeing it.

So at the end of May or early June of 2021, Avery got his hands on my entire therapy file. 

I underestimated the impact this would have on me. I thought I had no sense of privacy at that point already from the discovery process of the lawsuit. I wasn’t happy about sharing the file, but the alternative wouldn’t work for me either.

I unraveled over the following months, and while I was still having therapy, I couldn’t deny that it didn’t feel the same, and not because of anything my therapist was doing. I could not convince myself that I could be fully open. I wanted to. I was struggling immensely, and I knew that therapy could be helping me more; I just could not let it.

I relapsed hard into my eating disorder that summer, and my lawyer, and then Avery’s lawyers, were some of the first to know about it. And I was trying to handle it better this time, admitting right away that I needed help and really trying to get it. So I was evaluated for a treatment center and put on a waitlist. But it never panned out, so I found a different place to go to for treatment, and I actually felt optimistic it could help me.

But Avery was delaying his deposition, a milestone that was extremely important to me. And if I went to treatment, it would mean that the depositions would be further delayed — depositions that I knew would give me more I would need to process and heal from. It made the most sense to wait. And Avery, knowing what was going on with me, knowing that I was needing treatment, continued to delay.

And by the time Avery was finally court ordered to do his deposition, I had lost the ability to attend therapy entirely. I just could not feel safe there anymore. Knowing that my rapist’s hands could get into anything I said was something I could not shake, and I really tried. I tried. I loved therapy. I loved my therapist. I needed therapy and I knew it. I deserved therapy and I wanted it. But the magic was gone. The safe space was gone. I lost therapy at a time I needed it most. And it’s something I grieve, a lot.

Technically, the lawsuit isn’t over, despite once again being tossed out for the statute of limitations. But the appeal process is long and quiet, and my lawyer, who I’ve now been working with for over seven years, knows that for my sanity, I only need to know what I need to know. And although it’s absolutely legally correct for me to win the appeal and have another shot at a day in court, I don’t assume the outcome will be what it ought to be. The lawsuit could be over. I could try to convince myself it is.

But the truth is, I don’t know if I will ever get to have therapy again. I really don’t know how to unlearn that it was never a safe space. I don’t think I can convince myself that my rapist could never infiltrate it again when he’s done it before. And of all the things I need to feel safe from in that environment, it’s him. The irony is, if I could have therapy, maybe I could heal that wound and feel safe there again. But I can’t. 

I hope I’m wrong. I hope someday I can feel safe enough to open myself up to receiving the care and support and magic that occurs in therapy. But I truly don’t know.

I want to share this to be able to share a part of my story that I want to be heard, but I also have another hope for this. I hope that someone reading this who has been skeptical of the good that therapy can do will excitedly seek it out, find their therapist match, and be better for it. I hope anyone who doesn’t understand that therapy is not a punishment but a gift will realize the truth and give themselves that gift. I hope anyone who can’t fathom that therapy could be something you look forward to can hear me when I say I miss it so much, and I wish for everyone that they can have it. Not because you’re fucked up, not because you’re too much for the people around you, but because it is magic and you deserve it.