Therapist’s Campaign for Sex Left Deep Scars, Former Client Says

Only weeks after getting married, Sally realized that the relationshipwas on the rocks. When her husband asked her to join him in marital counseling, she agreed, believing it was the only way to save the floundering marriage.

In the first few sessions with Charles Hansen in July, 1983, they focused on the marriage. It soon became clear to Sally, who asked that her real name not be printed, that there was no saving the relationship. Several months after she and her husband broke up, Sally decided to resume therapy with Hansen.

She was upset about the abrupt split-up of her marriage. At 28, she also realized that she had to face her own troubled adolescence and the sexual abuse she had suffered from a male relative for seven years beginning when she was 13.

She had returned to live at her family’s home, even though it presented such painful memories.

“I was desperate,” she remembered. “During therapy, (Hansen) focused on my sexual history, the abuse. He started talking about the need to get back in touch with my sexuality because I had been celibate for a long time.”

As part of therapy, Hansen encouraged Sally to write erotic stories using him as a sexual partner, she said. He volunteered to set her up with a sexual surrogate, and asked if she would be interested in being a sexual surrogate for troubled male patients. She declined both offers.

“I was extremely embarrassed and humiliated by those discussions; that stuff was pretty foreign to me,” she recalled.

As the months went by, Hansen stepped up his campaign, she said.

“He would say sex with therapists is OK in a lot of situations,” Sally said.

Unusual things were beginning to happen, she said. One day, when she arrived for a counseling session, Hansen stepped into the bathroom, saying he would be right out. When he emerged 45 minutes later, his eyes were red and he was “acting really hyper,” Sally said. At the time, Sally didn’t realize that Hansen had a drug problem, which Hansen concedes but now says he has mastered.

In some sessions, she said, he talked of his personal life: troubles with his mother, his sexual activities with women, including other patients. Another time, he suggested they have the session in the car as he drove to his house because he needed to pick up something he had forgotten there, she said. When they arrived at his house, Hansen invited Sally inside--an offer she declined, choosing to wait in the car instead, she said.

More and more, he told her about therapists having sex with their patients, Sally said.

“He tried to tell me it was normal for a therapist to have relationships with patients,” Sally said. “I was abused and my self-esteem was really low. I accepted what he said.”

And the tint of their conversations began to change. Gradually, Hansen was letting her know that he was attracted to her, she said.

The crowning blow, however, came when Hansen told her that she no longer needed therapy.

“I was so depressed, so impaired. I had no social life, there was major family turmoil. . . . I literally had nobody,” Sally said. “I had thoughts of suicide. I would have been happy to die. And yet he led me to believe I was OK.”

On her last session, Hansen told Sally that he wanted her to say “Goodby, doctor.”

“He knelt in front of me, he kissed me passionately on the lips,” she recalled.

So Hansen became the only person in Sally’s bleak world. He suggested they could see each other if she called him, which she did after several weeks of feeling she was crawling alone through the mire of her depression.

“Charles Hansen set a date to come to my home. It was mutually agreed that it was for the purpose of a sexual encounter,” Sally said. “He had worked on me in therapy and outside therapy to set me up for this.”

But, after she had sex with Hansen, he cut her off, she said. He wouldn’t return phone calls. And her isolation and depression set in.

“Looking back, he so pressured me, set me up and pushed this on me. After that, he dropped me like a hot potato,” Sally said. “I felt betrayed, abandoned, embarrassed and humiliated. I had been abandoned, beaten down by every male in my family, and here was another major rejection.”

Sally spent the next six years scarcely functioning. She would go to work and go home. She had no friends, no hobbies. She no longer even spoke to her own family. After her mother died, she resumed therapy with a new psychologist. During one session, she described her affair with Hansen, she said.

Gradually, she began to understand that her relationship with Hansen was destructive and that she had done nothing wrong. Eventually, she filed suit, outlining those allegations.

Today, Sally has re-entered the world. She has a boyfriend, and she feels she is hitting her stride at work. But she is very angry.

“I am still realizing the impact and the depth of what he caused me. I think he took away six years of my life. . . . There were so many times when I could have just committed suicide. I suffered extreme depression, low self-esteem,” Sally said, her eyes filling with tears.

“I am getting better. I have come a long way in the last year, but it’s going to take more time,” Sally said. “I really want to see (Hansen) burn.”