Several years ago I posted a comment on a blog about retraumatization in therapy. It's close enough to this thread that I hope it's not out of line for me to post it here, too.
Quote:
I got some decent therapy finally – I hope – for dissociation and trauma issues that underlay a near lifetime of depression. But I’m also coming to understand how much hurt, shame, dysregulation, and confusion came from taking well-meaning advice from therapists who didn’t know better.
It’s horrifying to read the term “retraumatization” but it happens. One is vulnerable to it in one’s most vulnerable psychological state. It is not reasonable to expect that people who are fragmented and who don’t understand others very well will be able to distinguish when the therapist is being helpful and when he or she is being harmful. Now that I’m a little better, I CAN tell – but I think I may be extremely lucky, and it comes very late in my life.
It reminds me of the story of puerperal, or “childbed” fever that was unknowingly spread by attending physicians in the obstetrical clinic at the hospital in Vienna in the 1840’s before the “germ theory of disease” was known or accepted.
A concerned doctor, Ignatz Semmelweis, gathered some statistics. There was big difference in the patients’ death rates in the midwives ward and the physicians ward – a much higher rate in the physicians’ ward. Eventually an unhappy accident – a physician who died after being cut while performing an autopsy – led to the conclusion that patients were being infected by “cadaverous particles”. The doctors were told to wash their hands thoroughly before they examined patients after they had been doing autopsies. As horrifying as it sounds today, they did autopsies as well as the patient exams with their bare hands, back before anybody knew for sure about “germs”.
Based on my experience, the equilvalent of “germs” include therapists’ shaming, invalidating, belittling behaviors, many of which are probably reactions when the therapist is (possibly unconsciously) feeling defensive. I think it’s unrealistic to expect even the best-trained therapists to be able to screen themselves well all of the time.
I agree that the problem is systemic. It is not reasonable to put the problem on the clients’ back, though. I’m not sure what the solution is – I could suggest some things but the real issue is that the mental health profession needs to address the re-traumatization issue. I’m confident there are psychologists out there who are well-trained and could conduct a thorough study, if there were sufficient public outcry (not likely) or if there are people within the field who are concerned, like Semmelweis was.
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My opinion is that what is missing in therapy is a thorough, or good enough, theory of the development of identity or the sense of self. But that's just my idea, from my experience. And I'm still working with the same T, better, I guess, hoping to be finished soon.