Dear (new therapist),

I do not need to know if you have experienced your own history of childhood abuse, but I will need to know that you are able to ride alongside me to the depths of my own pain without pulling back through fear. I also hope to discover that you have sufficiently worked through your own life-issues so as to avoid confusing your issues with mine.

It is very important to me that you do not see yourself in any different category as a person because of the fact that you are or are not a survivor. In other words, I need to know that you do not at any level of consciousness stigmatise survivors or perceive us as inherently different to others through having experienced childhood trauma.

I would like you to help me continue to honour the wisdom of my inner process, for this has been invaluable in helping me learn to trust myself. I also need you to recognise that I may often require the safety of being in complete control of what I do in therapy. I have a good sense of what work is still needed and how I need to process things at different times.

I want you to understand that dissociation has been a life-affirming adaptation for me and I have never experienced it as a "disorder" in need of treatment. In fact, even for those who experience the extremes of dissociation, I believe the true "disorder" is society's pathological denial of the reality and extent of child abuse. Dissociation makes a lot of creative sense for any child in an abusive family, and can become a life-long adaptation within the context of a society which still prefers to blame the victims, defend the perpetrators and invalidate adult survivors.

I hope that you will be able to do what I cannot yet fully do for myself, - to be able to similtaneously see all of me as I am, including both my adult strengths and my childhood vulnerabilities. I need you to recognise the quality and extent of my adult strengths, and at the same time not lose sight of the legacy still to be healed. While celebrating with me how far I have managed to come since childhood, I will also need you to understand the childhood realities that still exist on the other side of my dissociative barriers.

My adult self was formed to encapsulate the very opposite to the treatment I received as a child, and over the last few years I have managed to develop a very low tolerance for abusive "therapy". I have learned (the hard way) to immediately leave any therapy situation in which my adult self-respect is being severely undermined.

I do not need you to be perfect or to make no mistakes with me. I have experienced therapists who have attempted to portray themselves as infallible while paying lip-service to their fallibility. What I do need is for you to be very self-aware, particularly when counter-transference could make it challenging to respond with empathy rather than react defensively. It is precisely when things are most difficult between us that my therapy will be made or broken. I hope you will get outside supervision if needed, rather than relying solely on peer supervision.

I need you to dare to trust me as much as you hope that I will in time be able to trust you. I need you to trust that at all times I try to use my adult strengths to the best of my ability to ensure that my therapy progresses as smoothly and successfully as possible.

I will need you to take as much care and responsibilty as I myself will take in ensuring that our therapeutic relationship remains strong, supportive, and non-abusive until I am ready to finish therapy. Finally I need your acknowledgement that despite some previous therapy experiences to the contrary, I have maintained hope that all these things are possible.