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Originally Posted by missbella
IG, my wish is that you can put away self-recrimination around what happened and see the blame where it belongs--with the therapist. It was solely her responsibility to keep treatment on track and to take stock, get her own consultation and take care of business if the relationship went awry. You're doing the job she can't handle by severing this.
You even said there wasn't a 100 percent consensus about your diagnosis, so I wish you could put aside that label. I do know that you're gracious here and acknowledge our feedback, etc. I appreciate that.
I've meet a few of the women from TELL and a couple of others in person recovering from harmful therapy. Despite extremely intelligent, competent women,they found harmful therapy extremely disorienting and confusing. Likewise are reports of Deborah Lott's In Session, Yvonne Bates' Shouldn't I be Feeling Better by Now, Dorothy Tennov's Psychotherapy, the Hazardous Cure.
You seem to have far more clarity and composure than I did when I first fled. Bad therapy has all the earmarks of cult brainwashing. Untangling it isn't easy for the strongest person.
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Thank you. No, I would like to be clear that I don't for a minute feel that people who get caught up in bad therapy are weak or not strong. It's like any other form of abuse. Countless intelligent, astute and otherwise self-possessed women still find themselves in abusive domestic relationships. It is nothing to do with weakness on their part, and everything to do with an abuser being an abuser.
The only thing is - I am not sure enough of my own position when it comes to whether it was all bad therapy or not. Or course chunks of it were, for sure. But I am uneasy at throwing the baby out with the bathwater, uneasy at writing off a human being for failing to keep their human flaws under control all the time.
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Originally Posted by NowhereUSA
Regardless of diagnosis, the therapist remains the authority. If she is incapable to dealing with someone of a certain diagnosis or with particular traits, then it is her responsibility to recognize and refer out if needed. Furthermore, it is her responsibility to define boundaries and to enforce them in a way that is both effective and skillful.
Your responsibility is to focus on whatever your goal is with regards to therapy. The boundaries you learn to respect are the ones that are clearly defined and yet, she should be skillful to redirect you when you encroach on them.
As for the confusing bit, it's one thing to walk away, it's another to walk away with a fireball behind you because you just blew something up. In this case, I think the most effective thing to do is to walk away without the fireball. Don't leave the door open, don't be passive aggressive, don't find a way to ruin her. Just walk away.
Then, from there, find another T and process what happened. Perhaps a complaint needs to be filed. Maybe not. Having someone with whom to check the facts will be helpful.
A diagnosis is useful in some ways and in other ways, it's utterly useless. Don't define yourself by what "BPD people do." Define yourself by what you do and who *you* are and look for a T who is going to treat you as an individual and not a diagnosis.
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I don't actually define myself by what BPD people do. However, it is a useful tool for understanding some of my own thought processes driven by intense and unbearable emotions.
This T did not treat me like a diagnosis. She was reluctant to pathologize any of my behaviours. It is the new psychologist who has diagnosed me, all the while taking great pains to stress that she is not a fan of labels but they are needed in public healthcare to gain access to appropriate treatment. Fine by me. I don't care. The way I look at labels is they are simply useful tags which that act as a form of shorthand to allude to a commonality in some way, whether that is labelling myself as a horse lover, or as borderline, or as a queer woman. Personally, I never feel that labels are any more than that - I never feel they are the sum total of a person.
For me, the diagnosis does not mean some sort of damaged goods - it simply means my emotions spike and drop at dizzying breakneck speed and means I have an emotional obstacle course to navigate, which then leads to chaos and problems, and some misguided attempts at solving the problems which leads to more chaos. As I have said before, I am pretty optimistic it's a transient thing, that it will go into remission.
Sorry! That was a bit of a rant about bpd and labels! #getsoffsoapbox