Y'all raise good points about needing (psycho)therapy but having experienced therapy abuse in the past makes it harder to benefit from future therapy and/or feel safe in approaching therapy again.

Although there are alternatives to psychotherapy, alternatives are not the same as therapy. You read it all the time on social support sites or alternatives that their offerings are not to replace therapy. Such warnings are there for a few reasons, the most notable being that alternatives are not going to offer treatment to necessarily process and maintain your mental disabilities.

What I think we do need is for more therapists to be trained on how to work with individuals who have had prior negative experiences with therapy, including therapy abuse. I think that therapists should have an opened mind when it comes to other colleagues within their field actually emotionally abusing their clients, instead of victim-blaming and considering that the psychological field can do no wrong (at least not without proof). Like issues with the codification of laws concerning child maltreatment, emotional abuse is hard to detect, prove, and therefore substantiate. It doesn't mean that emotional abuse does not occur, but it does mean that the lack of evidence demonstrates a problem for clients who need healing from such often hidden, unsubstantiated, and nearly unprovable cases of abuse behind closed doors.

Until treatments are in place for that, abused clients are at a loss. The treatment for therapy abuse is seemingly tantamount to PTSD treatments regarding establishing safety, remembering and mourning, grieving any losses, and acclimating back to society (or in this case, back into a safer therapeutic setting) - if we are to follow Judith L. Herman's (1992) recommendations from her book, Trauma and Recovery. Such would need to take place first in order for any therapeutic alliance to form and for work on the original (pre-therapy-abuse) conditions to take place. This gets more complicated when the pre-therapy-abuse conditions comprise PTSD and/or some other trauma-related disorder, including continuous traumatic stress (e.g., microaggression stress, workplace bullying stress, school bullying stress, harassment, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, human trafficking victimization, immigration stress, medical trauma, continued polyvictmization, continued revictmization, continued repeat victimization, etc.).

Until therapy abuse is acknowledged, understood, and prevented, we survivors of therapy abuse will continue to seek treatment without its full effect and/or will continue to avoid clinical settings altogether. --At least that is what I'm hearing, observing, and feeling for my own self.

What do you all think?