Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
In the article the professionals have decided what constitutes abandonment and what is best for the client, pretty much unequivocally. Abandonment is defined as a clinical concept. That's insane. If the client feels abandoned, they were abandoned. I would NEVER let a T decide anything for me. They can decide with me.
Therapists in my experience believe they can define reality for others. It is the essential therapist arrogance and delusion of omniscience. My ex T and others tried this. They said I was not abandoned in crisis. Oh no, it was an "ethical" termination. They defined ethical for me.
As Psychologist Dorothy Rowe said: "The most dangerous people in the world are those who believe that they know what is best for others. Whenever our own truth is denied, ignored, or invalidated we experience the greatest fear we can ever know: the threat of the annihilation of the self".
That was my experience. Feel traumatized by it still.
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I'm sorry you had that experience. And I would agree that the sentiment, very nicely expressed by Rowe, is true in the vast majority of cases. I wasn't talking about the example in the article so much as I was wondering aloud if others felt there was
ever a legitimate exception to the sentiment.
In my personal experience, there
has been. I have
felt things that weren't true, because feelings do not create reality. Hell, I have heard, seen, tasted, and smelled things that weren't true, either. I was 100% convinced that self check-out machine had a consciousness and had intentionally and maliciously singled me out for ill-treatment. This was confirmed by what I knew, what I felt, what I saw and what I heard
with my ears. It was true in every way that it was possible for something to be true
.
Except that it wasn't.
Sometimes having your reality denied, ignored, invalidated is the
opposite of gaslighting. Just something to keep in mind when we're talking about what therapists do.