One woman's dilemma regarding her husband's therapy practice has sparked outrage online. Described in Reddit's notorious "Am I the A**hole?" forum, the post has received a whopping 18,000 votes since it was posted yesterday, along with 3,700 comments.
The husband's behavior, as described by his wife, appeared to raise some serious red flags in the eyes of readers—especially when compared to the advice and opinions of mental health experts.
According to Redditor u/SantaCloseTheDoor, self-described as a 34-year-old woman, her husband recently took up therapy—a choice which she fully supported.
While he didn't have any specific trigger that prompted him to start therapy, she said "he feels too overwhelmed with work" and "wanted to let off some steam...I 100% encouraged him and said 'go for it.'"
She added that her husband "works a demanding job" but chose not to specify further, as she doesn't "want him to be judged for it."
However, once he actually began therapy, things quickly became more complicated. "These therapy sessions have been happening for a period of [three] months," she said, noting that he will often "have [two] sessions in just one day," multiple times per week and that they take place virtually, from their bedroom.
"He'd stay in the bedroom for hours on end preventing me from coming in," she wrote. "I'm talking [three] to [four] hrs a day."
On the two occasions when u/SantaCloseTheDoor entered their bedroom during his therapy sessions, "the laptop [got] slammed shut."
"He told me if I walk in one more time he will take matters into his own hands," she added.
The conflict came to a head when, the day prior to posting, the Redditor encountered an emergency situation that required her to retrieve something from their bedroom—while her husband was in the middle of a session. "I kept knocking but he didn't answer so I [walked] in quietly," she wrote. However, upon doing so, "he immediately [shut] his laptop" and looked "enraged."
"He gets off his chair and starts lashing out," she wrote. "I get out and he locks the door...Out of respect I waited til his session was over and started arguing with him about how utterly bad it was of him to lock me out of the room."
"He said he had to lock me out because of my barging/snooping and continuous disrespect of his privacy. I...said he needed to start having his therapy sessions somewhere else since it's not okay for him to keep the bedroom busy for 4hrs."
She reportedly told him that he could do therapy from any other room in their two-bedroom apartment, or from a location outside the home. "He shamed me and said this is his apartment too," she wrote.
Finally, the Redditor wondered: "Am I wrong for asking him that?"
In the comments section, readers rushed to the woman's defense. And, notably, many who claimed to be mental health professionals insisted that the sheer amount of alleged "therapy" described by the woman is cause for alarm. Wrote one commenter: "Hi therapist here. It is absolutely not normal to have 3-4 hours of session a day. No therapist would allow that."
"Unless someone is in an active crisis, I basically never see any of my clients more than once a week," echoed another therapist. A third added that "often insurance won't allow you to bill for multiple therapy sessions in the same day."
These claims appear to be backed by experts. As licensed marriage and family therapist Saniyyah Mayo explained to Huffpost back in 2020: "A person can have a 4-hour session but they are not going to reflect and digest everything that was discussed during the session."
"The client may think it was a good session, but too much information would be covered for them to completely digest it and benefit from it," she added. "Giving people increments of information and allowing them to process it in sections is good for the best possible outcome for treatment."
Moreover, noted fellow therapist Becky Stuempfig in the same piece, "it could feel traumatic to a client to sit with their pain for an extended period of time."
With that in mind, many commenters have suspected that the husband is not actually attending therapy during these multi-hour stints in their bedroom—a theory evidenced by his suspicious behavior, like slamming his laptop shut when his wife entered the room.
Many, for example, theorized that he's been cheating on his wife and is possibly spending that time on Only Fans or "tipping cam girls for hours on end."
"Or he's in a cult or something," wrote another commenter. "Gambling or porn addiction, online gaming. Could be anything you can do on a phone, really."
Others advised the Redditor to check his bank and credit card statements, along with his computer history.
"There's literally zero chance that he's doing 4 hours of therapy a day. He's lying to you and until he comes clean, you don't have a marriage," wrote one commenter.
Newsweek reached out to u/SantaCloseTheDoor for comment.
