Lys Says: The Sadness Is Real and it is Devestating
This piece was written in July 2025, in the weeks after a suicide attempt and after the end of my five-year therapeutic relationship at The Guidance Center. I begged for closure. I was denied it. I refused their referrals — not out of stubbornness, but because I had already learned what their care costs. I am posting this exactly as it was written, because the rawness is the truth, and the truth is the point.
I didn’t want it to end this way.
I wanted repair. I wanted accountability. I wanted a chance to heal with honesty — both from The Guidance Center and from my therapist. I didn’t want to burn it all down. I wanted to be heard.
I trusted my therapist deeply. It took years to build that trust. My history of betrayal and trauma made that process long and hard. She knew that. She once promised me she would never betray me.
But after my first Title 36 hold, something in the room changed. She felt cold, dismissive — defensive, sometimes even mean. I showed up anyway, crying like someone flayed raw, terrified but trying. I spoke through tears. I begged to be heard. I reached out with everything I had.
And I learned: to be heard, I had to validate her first. I had to soothe her defensiveness.
Slowly, I thought she started to hear me again. I kept showing up, emotionally bleeding out in that office. That period overlapped with severe and recurring flashbacks. I told her that. I emailed her. I told her again. Nightmares, memories, trauma crashing into trauma — the flashbacks and nightmares covered multiple periods of my life, overlapping and following each other.
She knew how fragile trust is for people like me — people with deep wounds. But every time I named what The Guidance Center did wrong, every time I spoke of how it harmed me, I was met with distance. Neutrality. Silence — or strong and emphatic defensiveness.
I wrote email after email describing the flashbacks. The nightmares. The pain. Some of it detailing childhood molestation and medical trauma. It poured out of me in rivers of psychic blood.
But those stories, that pain, never made it into her notes. Not once.
And then — in the middle of The Guidance Center’s latest attempts to silence me — I asked to see my files.
That’s when everything shattered.
The tone of her notes changed the second I started saying The Guidance Center had violated laws and ethics. Suddenly, a new diagnosis appeared: Personality Disorder, NOS. She began labeling my distress as “narcissistic injury.” She spent months subtly weaving a narrative about narcissism.
But not one single note mentioned my flashbacks. Not one note mentioned the nightmares I cried through. Not one note referenced the pain I emailed about in detail. There was no discussion of the new diagnosis with me. No treatment plan. No informed consent.
Just a backdated label, appearing right after I started demanding accountability.
It felt like a coordinated effort to discredit me.
And it worked.
Overwhelmingly, I feel violated — just violated to my absolute core — by how both my therapist and The Guidance Center treated me.
At night, I fight the urge to die. That’s the truth.
I read how she wrote about me — while I was bleeding out emotionally, reaching for connection — and I feel utterly worthless. I don’t even recognize myself in her words. She made me sound like someone I don’t know. Someone I wouldn’t trust either.
This is when the temptation to die becomes strong. Most days I manage. I survive daylight.
But I do wonder if The Guidance Center — and maybe even my therapist — would prefer I didn’t. My existence and insistence on truth seem deeply inconvenient to them.
The relationship couldn’t survive this.
I don’t believe anything she says now. I want to — god, I wanted to — but I can’t. I trusted again. I risked again. And now I’m left with another layer of grief and devastation. I know it will take years to try again. If I ever do.
I grieve deeply. For myself. For the trust that was crushed. For the experience of violation that colors my nights. For my therapist — and I know that may sound strange — but I grieve that she had to survive a system that treats people as disposable. She stayed in it long enough to become part of it. And that is a tragedy too.
This was an extreme betrayal. A gross ethical violation. A system with no real accountability — more concerned with optics than honesty. A system where “trauma-informed care” is branding, not practice.
And what happened to me isn’t unique. That’s the worst part. So many of you write to say: “It happened to me too. It took years to recover. I never trusted again.”
I hear you.
Truly trauma-informed care cannot exist inside toxic systems. The two are mutually exclusive. And The Guidance Center is a toxic system.
It starts at the top — with The Guidance Center’s direct leadership — and rolls downhill from there. It starts with NARBHA, an organization that is supposed to make sure The Guidance Center behaves ethically, but which has every reason to cover things up instead.
It always starts at the top.
I grieve when people who could be good, who could be real, get infected by a system like this. The grief compounds. And so I grieve as much for my therapist as I do for myself.
