Red Flag for a Bad Counselor

A series on Purity, Patriarchy, and Reclaiming Goodness

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

Before I went to graduate school to study therapy, I had only been to one counseling session with a Christian therapist. Her office was in northern Louisiana in a small space tucked in the back of a Southern Baptist church. It was as if the office had been put there on purpose, a place for folks to sneak into in order to hide their shame around their struggles with mental health.

My mentor at the time, a college football star turned campus minister, recommended I go to a counseling session after depression from sexual assault sent me spiraling into a state so low that even prayer couldn’t fix it. I had tried everything he suggested- reading scripture, devotion, even forgiving the man who hurt me– a process that involved writing verses about loving your enemy written on colorful flashcards and memorizing them, and weekly prayer meetings where I practiced the language, “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.” However, the words felt empty as I spoke them. Day after day, I would practice, but none of it worked. Instead, these attempts made me feel bad, like I wasn’t doing something right to move on from the past.

As I made my way to the therapist's office, I parked my jeep in the empty parking lot and looked at the beige door camouflaged with peach paint. Grabbing my backpack and heading towards my session, I looked around to ensure no one could see me. It was like this session was some undercover covert operation, but it was for my soul.

The office was covered in light pink wallpaper and smelled like caramel Yankee candles. The smell and the small space made me nauseous and a bit claustrophobic, but just as I felt light-headed, a woman appeared only moments after she heard me open the office door. She was middle-aged with a short blonde bob, her body wide and accentuated with a cotton-striped shirt that clung to her large breasts.

“Welcome! You must be Megan. I’m Sally,” she said, smiling in a way that was shy, hiding her teeth the moment they began to shine. “I’ll need you to fill out this intake form before we start.”

I took the forms and their pages and sat at a nearby table. The only one, and it had the damn Yankee candle, and the smell overwhelmed me as I pulled out a pen and began going through the questions one by one. The intake form was broken up into categories of Yes or No questions to measure what was going on with the person’s mind, body, and, primarily, the soul. I didn’t know any better that this was not a typical counselor, a typical office, or a typical intake form. So I fell for it as the real deal even though, nearly decades later, I can only imagine where this woman studied, some pseudo-Christian online certification created by God knows who—zero accreditation.

The first category was Spiritual Upbringing:
Do you go to church? Why yes, every Sunday, thank you very much.
Have you been baptized? At least ten times that I can remember.
Do you pray? Yes, indeed, I prayed right before I got here.
Have you received Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? More times than I can count. Do you read the Bible daily? Every. Single. Morning.

I circled yes for each one with little hearts, feeling like I was passing the test a teacher was grading—a gold star for a good girl.

The next category was Spiritual Oppression:
Have you ever practiced yoga? Yes, but I prayed while I was doing it. Does that count?

Have you ever used an Ouija board? I did when I was about twelve when my friends and I were just messing around. It was no big deal.

Have you ever had your horoscope read? Sure, at the fairgrounds, but I don’t think she was even for real.

Have you ever attended a Unitarian Church? Gulp. I went to a Unitarian Church until I was eleven. Is that bad?

Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons? Um... I mean... Who hasn’t? Wait... I think I am failing at this thing, aren’t I?

Whatever I aced in the first category was now completely nullified by this one. She looked at me, eyes squinty, my face flushed.

The third category was Mental and Physical Health.
These questions were to be answered by rating yourself 1-10 based on what best applied, with one being the least likely and ten being the most likely.

How often do you feel sad?

I thought of my bedroom at the corner of the house and how I sometimes slept for days. My pen filled in the circles up to 8.

Do you ever feel anxious and struggle with panic attacks?

I thought of the nights I woke up out of breath, sweating from hot flashes, and the room spinning out of nowhere. My pen filled in circles up to 9.

Do you have thoughts of ending your life?

I thought about how sometimes I imagined that it would be nice to die, nothing violent, just a sleepy euthanization on a soft bed drifting out to sea. My pen filled in circles up to 10.

I finished filling out the entire form and walked up to her desk, placing it face down. Was I suddenly back in school all over again, submitting a test I hadn't studied for and utterly failed?

“Give me just a moment to review your form, and then we can begin our session.” Sally turned the papers over, holding her glasses close to the form as she scanned each question. I watched her expression to see how it shifted as she read. Her eyes scrolled, her line of a smile turned down slightly into a frown, her posture slouchy, tired, bored.

“Okay, let’s begin.”

I sat across from her on a comfy couch that caused my body to sink into it—made me sleepy. She held the form in her hands and asked the questions one by one, but this time out loud for me to answer. How honest was I supposed to be here? I tried both the superficial response and the deeper ones. The superficial answers felt easy, light, and tasteless on my tongue, but she smiled and jotted notes as I spoke them. Things like my spiritual involvement, how many times I’d been baptized (I knew that number would come in handy one day), and Bible verses written in black sharpie on my hand as a reminder.

The subversive answers were weighty and felt like being underwater, the outside world an echo, but my body awake with the truth. Things like my preoccupation with death, the intrusive memories that infiltrated my waking thoughts, and the nightmares that haunted my sleeping like ghosts I’d forgotten. Her eyes changed at these deeper stories. I swear I saw fear in them as I shared about the darkness. With each word, my honesty sent me plunging into the truth water, and she was with me, flailing, reaching for the surface air.

At the end of the session, she made me a list of things to do to feel better. It was pretty much a reiteration of what my mentor had prompted in me. The first on the list were several Bible verses I was to memorize and repeat daily to help alleviate the feelings of sadness. The next was to go to church every Sunday and Wednesday, if possible, to surround myself with a community. The last was to read a prayer from a book about spiritual oppression every night before I went to bed to get rid of any dark thoughts. Easy enough, I thought as I packed up my bag to leave.

“Do you need a ride back to your dorm?” Sally asked. My roommate had dropped me off at this session and was slow to return, so why not? I had already shared the shallow and the deep end of my life with this stranger.

“Sure, thank you!” I replied as I climbed into the passenger seat of her blue minivan. It was dirty, with baby toys in the back and fast food trash tucked into the side doors.

“Want a Frosty from Wendys?” She asked with a smile. “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” I replied quickly.

“It’s no problem, and you really opened up today. You deserve it!” She nodded at me with a wink.

We pulled into the drive-through, me and my counselor. We ordered Frostys and french fries. Sally prompted me to try dipping the fries into the ice cream. “Like this,” she said as she lowered the greasy fry in chocolate and swirled, then placed the entire piece in her mouth in a single bite. I did what she said, even though the texture of the two together made me want to hurl. After that, she dropped me off at my house, stepped out of the car, and hugged me. My tiny body wrapped up in her cozy bosom.

“Don’t forget to study your verses and practice your prayers.” She yelled out of the car window and honked as she drove away. I smiled wide, teeth sore from too much sugar and cold from the Frosty. I went inside, down the hall to my bedroom, locked the door, and returned to sleep.

Her God prescription only exacerbated the hole I felt on the inside that wasn’t able to be filled with answers that would explain away the pain. And so I ditched the Bible verses written on index cards and began to pray differently– through writing fractured memories in poetry form, painting the pain with colors layered thick on canvas, and singing songs to try and overcome the trigger of music that was wrought from the experience of sexual violence by a Christian band member I trusted. Bit by bit, as I began to write, create, and sing about the assault, there was a little more confidence in my experience.

It was through ignoring her God advice that I took my own, and you know what? I found the most holy thing of all– questions without answers. These questions like–where was God? Why did this happen? Was it my fault?– all felt sacred because each one felt like a hand holding the broken pieces of this trauma without an agenda to put everything back in the box, wrapped up with a tidy bow.

I liken this time of healing to walking on holy ground. There is a scene in the scriptures where Moses heard God speaking to him from a burning bush and was terrified at its obscurity, confrontation, and beauty. I have seen God in the burning places, and I haven’t seen God. The truth is, I am afraid of both: I am afraid of a God present in atrocities and of a God whose absence can’t be explained.

Later on, as I began processing more of my assault story, I saw the violation with the vividness of a recording, and I saw God holding my feet through it all, which only added more questions– why was he there in the first place? The questions I feared became my burning bush in the dark night of the soul, illuminating my need for God in the middle of uncertainty. What I thought would swallow me up in the not-knowing liberated me because I could finally let go of the answers I didn’t have the strength to hold on to anymore. In this space, I felt a newfound freedom, an anchoring in something sacred that said it’s okay not to know, to feel all that you need to, and to heal at a pace with no timetable.

So, I guess I want to thank the counselor who taught me to unconsciously turn to myself for a new kind of liberation through a reckless session and boundaryless drive-thru at Wendy’s. You opened a God door for me, one you would probably mistake now for heresy, but the truth? This new opening brought me home in a way I never could have imagined, and I am forever grateful for that.

Thank you so much for reading. I appreciate your open heart. Love, Megan

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