Three Therapist Dumb-Asseries I Have Known

(a) When my parents got frustrated that I didn't smile or laugh enough for them, my dad asked around his workplace if anyone knew a good therapist. One coworker raved about the one his kid was seeing, so I'm packed off to him. Thanks for not telling dad this was a christian therapist, coworker. To all the arguments put forth for the existence of god, we can now add:

Argument From Therapist Smugness

1. Depressed atheist late-adolescent client is honest and confesses that not only does he not believe in any god, but is disgusted with the "thought-police" aspect of the creature described in the Buy-Bull, who reads and punishes thoughts and feelings as well as actions.

2. Therapist says, condescendingly, "You have a distorted image of Christ."

3. Client is given a christian-themed sentence-completion exercise; being cynical even at that age, he completes the stem "Prayer ____________" with "induces a state of psychocatharsis."

4. Therapist reads the response, then clucks his tongue and shakes his head smugly without saying a word.

5. Therefore, God exists.

(b) Then there was the supposedly secular one who told me, "Just follow the Ten Commandments and everything will be fine." O-kayyyyyy ... so my insurance carrier and I are paying you $200 per 45-minute hour for advice I could have got from a used bible I could buy for a buck at any thrift shop???

(c) The worst: I once told a therapist I was feeling some tension at home. Just those exact words. Nothing more. Whereupon she immediately asked, "Have you ever thought about leaving your wife?" Uh ... did I give you the slightest indication the issue was within a HUNDRED MILES of that serious???

(This one apparently also thought regular bathing was oppressive. Hard to concentrate on the work when your healer fell off a garbage truck, tumbled into a sweat lodge, then tripped and fell head first into a fully loaded manure spreader.)