Dear Therapist: My Daughter Tried to Confront My Ex-husband’s New Wife
Now he has cut her off and expects an apology.
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Dear Therapist,
I was married to my husband for 35 years when he left me for his therapist. My eldest daughter was so shocked and hurt by this that she called the woman at her work to ask her how she could do this to a family. The woman wasn’t there; my daughter spoke with her boss. The woman was asked to resign.
My ex was very close with this daughter in that their personalities were so similar. But since this happened, he has more or less cut our daughter off. He texts her short greetings on her birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas and sends gifts at appropriate times, but it all feels very empty to my daughter. He went to visit her once in the six years since our divorce and said his reason for the visit was to receive an “apology for what you’ve done to my wife.”
She feels she has done nothing wrong and refuses to apologize. She told him that his wife owed her an apology for destroying her family. She has a 2-year-old daughter herself, but he has little interest in his grandchild.
He treats our other daughter with love and cares about her children. He pays for her to come visit him and stays in close contact with weekly phone calls. It breaks my heart that he can be so cruel to one daughter and so kind to the other. In the beginning of this mess, I tried to get him to put himself in her shoes and understand she called the woman out of love for him and not for the purpose of getting her fired, but it has made no difference.
Should I try to do something again or just leave it alone? My daughter is in pain.
Dear Reader,
This is such a tragic situation with a legacy of ripple effects—not only for your daughter but for your entire family. To be clear, therapists who have romantic relationships with their patients have breached the profession’s code of ethics, and the typical consequence for those who do this is that they lose not just their job but also their license to practice. I mention this first because whether the information came from your daughter or elsewhere (presumably the facts would surface at some point), the result would have been the same. Your daughter didn’t harm this therapist—this therapist harmed herself with her poor judgment and unequivocally unethical actions.
Many people—including you and your daughter—might wonder how a father could become so blinded to this objective reality that, even six years later, he continues to view the situation backwards, insisting that your daughter is at fault and owes his wife an apology. His distorted thinking shows how an emotionally unstable therapist can allow normal emotional processes to run amok in the therapeutic work, and then abuse her position of authority to convince your husband that she has done nothing wrong—and has, in fact, been wronged.
Here’s how this works: In therapy, two dynamics typically emerge—transference and countertransference. Transference occurs when a patient directs feelings related to a person in their lives (for instance, a parent or sibling) onto the therapist. These can be positive or negative feelings, ranging from anger to adoration. Transference generally occurs outside one’s awareness. If, for example, you have a problematic relationship with a family member or another important person in your life who you feel is controlling, you might transfer those feelings of being controlled onto your therapist whenever she suggests an intervention for you to try. Romantic or erotic transference can also occur, which means that a patient believes he’s in love with his therapist. This can happen when a therapist reminds a patient of a past romantic partner or love object, or when an earlier need is being fulfilled by the therapist—unconditional acceptance, a safe environment, emotional intimacy, feeling seen or valued or protected. With this kind of transference, the therapist is often idealized and perceived to be the perfect partner. Transference can be very useful if the therapist helps the patient identify this process as a way to gain insight into underlying feelings and to understand where these feelings are actually coming from.
Meanwhile, therapists are trained to monitor their own feelings of transference toward the patient—what’s known as countertransference. A therapist whose patient reminds her of her impossible-to-please mother might start to feel helpless and begin to resent this patient. Or a therapist might overidentify with a patient who struggles with a similar issue to one that the clinician dealt with in the past (divorce, an alcoholic parent), and become unable to disentangle the patient’s feelings and experiences from her own. As with transference, countertransference needs to be brought to light and processed. But unlike with transference, therapists process their countertransference away from their patients. They go to supervision to get professional feedback from other clinicians (or they go to their own therapy) to monitor their own countertransference and avoid muddying the clinical work they’re doing to help their patients. If the countertransference can’t be managed through supervision or their own therapy, therapists are ethically required to refer the patient to another clinician.
Your ex-husband’s therapist, however, neither helped him understand what his romantic transference was really about nor managed her own countertransference. What’s worse, once she married your ex-husband, instead of using her training and knowledge to help him navigate the fallout by saying, “Here’s the effect our being together is going to have on your family, so let’s take responsibility for the pain we’ve caused and try to heal this,” she put her former patient in an impossible bind. Choose between two people you love: me or your daughter. What a terrible dilemma, in which the only way for him to please his wife is to alienate his daughter.
This outcome doesn’t seem like collateral damage; it feels like willful manipulation, a continuation of the behavior she exhibited as your ex’s therapist. She must know, for example, the deeply damaging effect a father’s rejection will have on his daughter and also his granddaughter, and how that wound will pass through the generations (what’s known as intergenerational trauma). I’m sure she has a sense of how parental abandonment affects a formerly loved child who experienced years of a strong father-daughter attachment, especially when that daughter feels not just abandoned by her father but also utterly betrayed and gaslighted by him. This former therapist must also know about the lasting impact of sibling favoritism and the profound consequences it can lead to, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem—and the tension that this imbalance can create between the siblings themselves, another factor that affects emotional well-being. (A good sibling relationship is correlated with greater lifelong happiness.) In other words, given her training, she must be well aware that her choices to become romantically involved with her patient and then alienate this person from his daughter have widespread consequences for innocent people: a damaged father-daughter relationship; the potential sibling conflict, including resentment from the abandoned sibling and a sense of guilt from the one who remains in favor; a granddaughter who won’t know her grandfather; a wife betrayed in a traumatic way and left to helplessly witness her daughter’s ongoing pain.
You don’t say what your ex-husband was struggling with before he became involved with his therapist—perhaps he was depressed or anxious or had issues in your marriage—but going to a therapist is an inherently vulnerable act, and in this state of vulnerability, he seems to have fallen prey to her influence. Yes, he’s responsible for his actions, but in a different dynamic, one that didn’t involve his therapist, he might have seen more clearly the pain his daughter is in—and been motivated to help alleviate it. But given his wife’s influence, I don’t think he’ll be able to hear anything you might say if you attempt to speak with him.
Instead, here’s what you can do: Reassure your daughter that she’s done absolutely nothing wrong. Explain to her that her father’s behavior reflects everything about his own struggles and nothing about her. Remind her often that she is a person worthy of deep parental love, and that she has yours always and forever. Suggest that if she wants to attempt to reach her father, she might write him an email letting him know that his absence in her and her daughter’s life feels like a tragedy for all of them, including him, and that she hopes they can find a way to heal while there’s still time. (Your daughter might not trust therapists much, but if her father is willing to go to therapy with her—and she gets to choose the clinician—there might be an opportunity for something new to happen between them and for him to get some perspective free from the pull of his wife’s gravitational force.)
Your job as her mom is to hold two truths at the same time: You can’t help her father see something he isn’t willing to look at, or prevent his actions from hurting her. But you can offer your daughter the most precious gift a parent can give—your loving presence—and know that although it won’t erase her pain, it will still be more than enough.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.