"building work making me feel unsafe"

I attended for my therapy session today and there's ongoing building work happening. Because of this we're now all made to wait downstairs in an open area. It's causing me a lot of anxiety. It's harrowing meeting people I know who are coming in for other types of appointment. We used to wait in the quiet rooms which were private but today there were people for different types of appointment and they could hear what we were being called in for. It broke our privacy. People were asking what I was in for and it was embarrassing.

In my session there were workmen right outside the door. It made me feel very anxious. It was hard to talk and I needed to talk really quietly because I didn't want them to hear what I was saying. I felt violated, unsafe, and really worried about being overheard. It's taken me years to be able to open up about the trauma I'm discussing with my therapist. It was terrible to have to talk about this traumatic event with men right outside the door.

My therapist is really amazing but the situation was out of her control. She'd asked the workmen to move but she hadn't been able to get them to go, and she was apologising profusely to me. She gave me the option to cancel my session but it would have been more damaging to do that, so we carried on.

It's important to understand that the room we usually use has become a safe place where I feel I can talk. Now I feel really anxious and there's an uncertainty about what will happen in the next few weeks - whether we'll need to keep moving rooms, and which room we'll be in. It feels re-traumatising. I think it's wrong to have the work being carried out at the same time as potentially quite vulnerable people are attending for their sessions.