4 ms·
> In therapy, you are unconditionally accepted with positive regard Oh, how I wish that were true. When I was 12, my brother was heavily into drugs, my sister
by amp108 6y ago
> In therapy, you are unconditionally accepted with positive regard
Oh, how I wish that were true. When I was 12, my brother was heavily into drugs, my sister was violent, and my parents were ending their loveless marriage. I wasn't handling it well.
My mother decided to put me in therapy. My therapist bullied me, literally shouting at me that I wasn't normal, suggesting I should skip out on school, and offering to "teach me how to masturbate". I hated going there, and told my mother (who had been granted custody), but she just said I hated it because he told me "hard truths" and "told it like it was".
It's been decades, and for all I know he's dead. I heard that he'd been fined for insurance fraud, but never lost his license.
I'm sure a competent therapist would have helped me. I did have problems adjusting, and I suspect (only suspect) that I'm "on the spectrum", as the kids say. But I was put in exactly the wrong place to deal with that.
Moral of the story: you have to vet therapists thoroughly before you entrust your psychological well-being to them.
- thom 6y agoI'm sorry you went through that, both the relationship with the therapist and your family's lack of support. I hope you, your siblings and your parents are doing better now, but either way this seems an important warning to note.
- GuiA 6y agoIt’s hard to bring up that point without being misunderstood. While therapy can obviously be incredibly positive, like any discipline it suffers from a large proportion of mediocre practitioners, and a smaller but more dangerous proportion of harmful practitioners. My personal experiences with mental health professionals (over several decades, in multiple countries) were unhelpful at best, and at worst they included things like recklessly prescribing medication (within 10 minutes of the first meeting), relying on outdated junk science, pushing for more appointments/making it very hard to end the patient relationship, etc. Considering that many people who are likely to go to a therapist are likely to be in a vulnerable place to begin with (doubly so for children/teenagers), the recent wave of blind faith in therapy and the belief that “go see a mental healthy professional it can only make things better” is reckless.
- mnm1 6y agoFor sure. The first talk therapist I went to was right after it father died. The receptionist warned me he was very old, which I did not find to be a problem in and of itself. I don't know if that is the reason he told me basically that I would get over it and not to worry too much. After two sessions, I stopped going. I went to psychiatrists for drugs still for many years, getting slightly better then much worse as most people in drugs do. It took almost fifteen years before I went back to a therapist (last year) and started taking her seriously. Talking to my drug dealing psychiatrists I did not take too seriously, except for one. She did both therapy and prescriptions. She got mad at me when I asked for a slight increase in my dose. That was the last time I took drug dealing psychiatrists seriously. I left her soon after and a year or two later tapered myself off the drugs and started recovering on my own. In retrospect, I truly wish I had not gone to any therapist and definitely not to any psychiatrist. My normal drug dealer was much more helpful and much less harmful than any of them prior to the therapy I started last year. Psychiatry, especially, is a fucked up profession and when the two are combined and done by the same person, the conflict of interest prevents it from working. I will likely never see a psychiatrist again. Regular drug dealers have more scruples.