I failed therapy or therapy failed me. Whose “fault” it is/was – to the extent that my faults were to blame, I was in therapy to try to identify and correct or accept my faults. To the extent that therapy was to blame – nobody much is looking much to identify the faults and correct them or accept them and inform potential clients.
There are some exceptions. The quote
Quote:
Interviewer [Male Voice]: In your recent book Prevention of Treatment Failure you talked about the fact that some patients do get worse in the course of psychotherapy. How common is the problem, what are the causes?
Michael Lambert: In adults who enter treatment, the rate is about 5–10 percent. In children and adolescents who seek treatment, the rate is about 15–25 percent. So it's relatively rare in adults but all too common in children. And the major causes are external events that set people back like a divorce or a death or loss of a job, so it's environmental. And then within the therapy itself, it's usually related to some kind of rejection that the person experiences while they are working with their therapist. It's usually not related to specific therapy techniques but to relationship factors where the patient feels misunderstood, uncared for, or neglected in some way.
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From the article
Interview With Michael J. Lambert About "Prevention of Treatment Failure"
has a explanation for therapy failure that seems relevant in my case, I think.
I did feel rejected by my last T, and some others before her. And to the extent, as I have learned since the therapy ended, that I had unprocessed experiences of feeling rejected from early in my life, that made me vulnerable to feeling rejected, again, in therapy probably.
At the risk of sounding boastful, this seems to me like a potentially useful insight, from me to therapists – if any of them were interested. When my last T got haughty and shamed and rejected me – she later “knew” what she had “done”, I think, and was then caught up in her own shame and defensiveness about that so there was no way that my rejection experience could enter the room and be talked about.
If this were a recognized “thing” that can happen in therapy, then perhaps some strategies to help identify and deal with it, within an existing therapy relationship could be developed. So, OK, it was my last T’s issues and countertransference, which she “hadn’t done her own work” about, but perhaps she wasn’t entirely aware of it, either. Her fault, not mine, but I paid the price.
Not “right”.
Nevertheless, moving on. . .