I saw my therapist weekly for two years. Then he let slip he’d been watching me. Had he crossed a line?

He said it lightly, but I was unsettled. The trust had curdled

Just under a decade ago, I began seeing a therapist who, for reasons that will become clear, I will refer to only as James. I was in my late 20s, living in London and more stably employed than many of my friends, but also sleeping on my sister’s sofa and eating rice noodles on her floor following a dismantling breakup. Work became my life while the rest of it quietly fell apart. Whenever something major like this happens to me, which is not often, I usually do one of two things: leave the country or return to therapy.

I have been in and out of one kind of treatment or another since I was eight: school counselling, grief counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy, various forms of Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy – roughly in that order. I would almost consider myself a veteran. Not that it always works, of course. Of my six therapists – a coterie of old men, young women, and one who had seemed ageless until he died of old age – most were forgettable, their words, pauses and therapy rooms blurred and confined to memory. But I believe in psychotherapy as both a healing tool and an absolute social imperative. When I run out of money, it is one of the last things to go – somewhere between milk and the hairdresser.