I think it's fair to say that my last therapist didn't intentionally keep me in an unhealthy relationship, but the tangle of her (unresolved ) trauma and learned responses and mine apparently could not be resolved, she felt, and she terminated the therapy. I was willing to go forward to try to "fight it out", but she was not willing/able to do that. So that termination felt like a personal rejection as well as professional incompetence, to me. Perhaps that was a matter of the "bad fit"? But how on earth could I have had any inkling of that going in, when clients are so 100% encouraged to "talk to your therapist about your feelings". Again, from my perspective, it is a scam that I could not have found out about except by going down that road and being conned.

OK, maybe, that repeats things from my family of origin, where I, along with the rest of the family, and in order to "belong" in some sense with all the rest, kept up the con that we were all, or mostly, "good".

Maybe it took me being conned by therapy, for 55 years off and on, in order to fully "get" that? And to see/feel how punitive in my family it was not to go along with that program, that if/when I spoke my truth I was, and would be, rejected? A life/death situation -- really, I can consciously feel/deal with it now, but could not for so long. And, of course, it's not really life or death now but as as child, to be rejected, . . .or, for me to shut up and put on blinders for the sake of survival. . .a good, if difficult to reverse, choice at the time. Some may criticize that or have made another choice. But for a 5 year old, on her own, to try to survive, that was the one I made.

So then. . .as entrenched as my pattern was, would/could I ever have seen the con in therapy if I hadn't read comments here on PC from people who did not have the attitude that therapy was all good, all the time, which the therapy profession, and general society, still seem to promote? And that I could have a chance to survive if I didn't choose to see my family, or therapy, as "all good". I am still working hard at that dilemma. I can survive physically without being accepted by my family or anyone else, for that matter, but it's a horribly miserable existence that I still have little knowledge or confidence about how to do differently. And nobody in the mental health profession that I can find even seeing or acknowledging that part as an issue.