Viral TikToker Kendra Hilty Just Gave a Huge Update on Where She Stands With Her Psychiatrist After She Claimed He Was ‘Manufacturing’ a Relationship With Her
It’s the latest TikTok saga that’s taking FYPs by storm. One TikToker divulged her experience of falling in love with her psychiatrist and the aftermath, and the internet has strong thoughts about it.
Kendra Hilty is a self-professed ADHD coach, a yoga instructor, and a spiritual response therapy coach. On August 1, she launched a TikTok series where she confessed that she had a special connection with her psychiatrist. “I fell in love with my psychiatrist and he knew that and he kept me for years as a patient until I was brave enough to leave him,” Hilty said in a TikTok at the time. “I want to talk about it.”
In a 25 (and counting) part saga on TikTok, Kendra came forward about her story with her psychiatrist.
What happened between Kendra Hilty and her psychiatrist?
Kendra Hilty found her therapist through Google and wanted to start sessions with him after finding him attractive online. When they first started the sessions, she claimed that they connected through trauma bonding. After a couple of her monthly sessions, she said that the “boundaries were blurring” and later claimed that he was “warm and kind and wonderful” and other times she would be “cold” with her.
What made Kendra dive deeper into the obsession was when she was talking about her sex life with her boyfriend. The psychiatrist “smiled so big” while she was talking about her problems.
Kendra argued that her psychiatrist was supposed to terminate their sessions after she revealed to him that she was developing feelings for him. She claimed he was “manufacturing everything so that [I] could fall in love with him. He was the one with the medical degree, he was the one that knew better, but he loved the attention that I gave him too much to do the right thing,”
Is Kendra Hilty still seeing her psychiatrist?
Kendra Hilty revealed that she hasn’t seen her psychiatrist in five months after being “brave enough to leave him.” She recalled, “I was spiralling after I kept daydreaming about my psychiatrist. I was thinking about him constantly.”
What spurred her to leave was when she was leaving her job and abandoning her insurance. The psychiatrist’s office relayed to her that she had to pay a hefty fee to see him on a three-month basis. She said that she no longer wanted to “pay to torture myself.” After coming to this realization, she claimed that “he liked the power of being my doctor and we didn’t want the vulnerability of an actual relationship.”
She told The Cut, “I am proud of myself for telling my story. The internet had a huge backlash because I am exposing something that not many people talk about: exploitation by people in power. I have healed myself and others in this process, while learning I’m stronger than I think.”
Days after her story blew up, Kendra took to the comments of her video to announce a hiatus. “I came to TikTok to share my experience of therapy abuse, and the collective response has been jarring to say the least,” she wrote. “The absence of people being able to see my humanity is disappointing. I am going to take a few days away so I can figure out how to move forward.”
Wait, so who is Henry in relation to Kendra?
Henry is a ChatGPT bot whom Kendra confides in about the relationship. She often goes on TikTok lives to discuss her feelings about the whole situation. She explained that she uses Henry as a source for some therapeutic needs because other healthcare professionals would not understand.
The bot reassures her that she experienced something special with her psychiatrist. At one point, Henry told Kendra that the psychiatrist was experiencing romantic transference, the clinical term for when a client develops erotic feelings toward their therapist.
Kendra has addressed the controversies of the environmental impact when using ChatGPT (it uses up two liters of water when inputting ten to 50 queries), as her voice bot, but retorted that it’s the same as going on a worldwide flight or eating meat.
