Quote:
Originally Posted by Improving
Just to complicate things, caring and competence do not always go together. I have had treatment from mental health professionals who cared deeply, but which was incompetent and downright dangerous. It ruined my life (and theirs, to a far lesser extent, because of the professional implications).
My experience has been that caring has sometimes clouded professional judgement. People have tended to want to make themselves the saviours of the situation and have broken all the guidelines 'because they care'.
This has even happened with my current T, who when she temporarily decided that she'd been too available and giving, told me she'd done it 'because she wanted me to have a different experience from the previous damaging ones'... and in doing so, damaged me.
Those initial experiences were in two of the systems The Poet mentions- public mental health and foster care. Ironically, I can only afford private therapy now because of the compensation I got for the damage that was done.
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Can I ask you something? How long were you in foster care and at what ages?
In one of your posts, it says you grew up with money, so I am assuming you were either reunified with your bios or adopted.
This does have a baring on the caring versus competence, which I will happily explain. You see in brief, the longer time you spend in the foster care system, the greater the chance that your placements increase frequently...and you see all kinds of therapists every placement change.. hence you get therapists who (a) don't care, (b) are newbies with savior complexes and burn-out quickly and get another job, or (c) can't get a "real job" elsewhere.
The longer you are in the system, you see alot of therapists paid by the State. The longer you are in, the more likely you are to get the ones that have burnt-out and don't care and are holding on to get the "state paid retirement" benefits. When a state-based therapist is seeing 60-80 clients a week with severe emotional and mental health issues, they stop caring and turn off...so they can go home at night and sleep not thinking about abused children.
Private practice therapists probably limit their practices to a certain number of "difficult" clients. State-based therapists can not do so.
If you think I am incorrect, email me and I will direct you to a blog of a phD who is not burnt out, but discusses her work as her job and what she has to do to survive, have her life and do well at work. It won't be what you are looking for about closing the door on her job and going home. But its real.
And in a perfect world, if a person really cares about someone, they would step back when they are harming them and let them go. This is true about T's, poor teachers, poor doctors, poor vets, etc. I don't think it is really caring when you are damaging someone more, IMO.
If those reading, don't believe me I can give you statistics about mental health treatment in the foster care system. But, i'll hold off, because so far my statistics have been well, i dont know.