Thread: Another session
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Old Aug 26, 2018, 03:11 PM
RaineD RaineD is offline
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Member Since: Aug 2017
Location: United States
Posts: 950
I'm not a mental health professional so I could just be talking out of my behind. It seems to me that the proper thing for your therapist to do is to entertain that possibility but keep it to herself until more evidence surfaces. You would think that at this point in time therapists would understand the power of suggestion and particularly their power over their clients.

I was a psych major in college, and I remember my clinical psych professor spending half a lecture talking about the disaster in the late 80s/early 90s of therapists planting false memories of childhood sexual abuse in their clients. And this was not limited to hypnotherapy and not limited to children. Regular therapists were planting false memories in their adult clients. She said those therapists were reckless and engaged in unethical behavior (by hitting clients over the head repeatedly with the therapist's own erroneous belief that the clients had been abused). Basically the therapists insisted that the clients were abused until the clients gave in and adopted the therapists' reality as their own.

She cautioned us, if we were to enter the profession, to never do that. She said, because of confirmation bias, if we start out looking for something, we will probably find it, even if it's not really there.
Thanks for this!
susannahsays