Therapists do more harm than good

I believe it should be "no harm" policy as with medical doctors. Sure you sometimes have pain or side effects when you are being treated by a physician but that supposed to be temporary as a goal is to get better not get worse. I do understand that some patients might never get better but certainly treatments don't suppose to make you worse!

If you go to a dentist you expect some discomfort and its normal but you sure know they won't drill extra holes in your teeth!!!!

Unfortunately same rules do not apply to therapists. So many create more problems than there was before!

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Although I agree, I don't believe your T set out to hurt you it sounds like she is still blaming you for her mistake- She took it away because (you) didn't need it anymore..

As far as not believing any therapist sets out to harm a client...I personally know of two- three who did. Some therapists and psychiatrists are sociopaths. Perhaps not many, but they exist.

Thank God I have found two others who care about their craft and their patients.

I believe it should be "no harm" policy as with medical doctors. Sure you sometimes have pain or side effects when you are being treated by a physician but that supposed to be temporary as a goal is to get better not get worse. I do understand that some patients might never get better but certainly treatments don't suppose to make you worse!

If you go to a dentist you expect some discomfort and its normal but you sure know they won't drill extra holes in your teeth!!!!

Unfortunately same rules do not apply to therapists. So many create more problems than there was before!

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That is true for people who are in therapy for reasons such as having neutral person to talk to or work on some issues etc but there are many people who are in therapy due to serious mental illness and they can't be expected to make sound decision. Some just can't. Some might not even understand they are being harmed

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This is kind of silly. Many people who go to therapy have great difficulty with the types of things you're suggesting they do. They are in therapy for that reason hoping the therapist would help them. They are unable to break away because of their issues. Therapy is supposed to help with that. The therapist should either help them or help them find someone else. Really it's ridiculous to suggest the client is to blame here.

Also be careful of making victims of victims.

I'm getting more personal here, but since my rupture with my T in March, I have more than doubled my smoking, when I was down to half a pack a day, and my self medicating has gone around the clock. No, I have not told her. I simply can't. But that sure tells me that I'm in a worse place now than before that rupture....even still. I wish I could talk to her about it, but I'm afraid it would come across as manipulative if I did. I'm not trying to "get her back." I'm trying to feel better in any way I can.

Thanks for the furious scold and shaming at those who stayed with poor therapists too long. I proudly stand up as one of the "fools." I find this an ironic spew accompanying the gloat how marvelously current therapy is going.

There are myriad reasons we have believed in quacks, charismatic figures and faith healers throughout human history. There are many reasons why people stay in abusive relationships and cults. Many of us have spent too much time with "frenemies." There are plenty of books on these topics, so I won't waste energy exploring here.

PS. I also got amebic dysentery from a restaurant but never figured out which one. Too bad life isn't simpler.

How are you so certain? Might there be those of us for whom therapy simply is a harmful modality, period? A reason I disrespect so much psych writing is the omniscient, absolutist speculation I read.

I don't see any contradiction or conflict in how responsibility is being placed in all encounters where harm is done to people, and I don't understand why people believe that the concept of responsibility is an "either or" issue meaning that it's either the victim who is responsible for staying too long in the abusive situation or the abuser for abusing the victim. For the life of me I don't understand why it is not both and why responsibility is equated with blame and shame.

I take full responsibility for choosing to stay in all harmful situations I've been in throughout my adult life. And I do NOT consider myself a fool. Yes, there are many reasons people stay in abusive situations and I had my reasons too and those were very understandable reasons. Does it mean that my choices were no longer mine just because I made them for understandable reasons? No. Those are still my choices. I own them. AND, only when I owned them I felt empowered and more prepared to make better choices in the future. I don't blame myself for making bad choices in the past. I have compassion for myself and for my inability to see the reality as it was because my pain compelled me to indulge in unrealistic fantasies. I have compassion for my pain that made me unable to exercise a sound judgment. And this compassion allows me to take full responsibility for my choices, which I am happy to do because, as I said, doing so empowers me. It frees me from the mental state of victimhood. That is not to say that I no longer feel that I've been wronged. I know I've been wronged and there is a part of me that will feel victimized and traumatized for the rest of my life, which is perfectly OK. I respect this part and, as I said, I have compassion for it, but I don't let it rule my life.

My choice to take full responsibility for my life's choices and for my behavior in NO way means that I reduce the responsibility of those who harmed me. It is not an "either or" issue, as I said before, but many people see it that way. They feel that if they take responsibility for their own choice then it somehow reduces the responsibility of abusers. It doesn't. My choice to stay in harmful situation has nothing to do with the behavior of those who abused me. Their behavior belongs to them no matter what I did or didn't do and they are fully responsible for what they did.

I am 100% responsible for my choices to stay in harmful situations. Those who chose to abuse me are 100% responsible for abusing me. What is mine belongs to me. What is theirs belongs to them. Simple as that.

Most people, even the ones who think they have a good therapist, are so enmeshed in therapy they can't see how harmful it really might be.

it's pretty obvious to those on the outside. It's pretty obvious to me looking back on my bad therapy that he didn't really know what he was doing. Easy to look back and say that though. I didn't realize it at the time and I think that happens to a lot of people.

I think that a lot of people are deluded into thinking they are being helped and so they don't see the reality of the harm they are in. They choose to stay because it doesn't seem damaging.

So it isn't really about being in an "abusive" relationship most of the time. It's about believing you are being helped by a professional whose job it is to help you when in fact they have no clue what they're doing even if they mean well or whatever.

This makes sense. I do wonder though if someone might think they are being helped and not harmed because they are in therapy. They think the person knows what they are doing and they trust them to not damage them. I think it's different from being in an abusive romantic relationship or a bad job or some other situation because one goes to a therapist to get help. I really had no clue I could end up worse off and even until the end I thought we would get through the rough places and come out okay in the end. People say on here all the time that it gets worse before it gets better. How does one really know when therapy is bad? I surely don't know. I pretty much think it is all mostly harmful with maybe a little potential for good. I don't know though.

Harmful psychotherapy, at worse, can be a rigged game because the therapist often is ascribed the power and authority. A client goes to a therapist seeking relief from distress, then follows the therapist down the hatch into a murky abstracted world of jargon and ritual that often is never explained. The client bares her soul while the therapist remains inscrutable. Sometimes the client is encouraged to surrender her judgment. And as we said, she's told she has to feel worse before she feels better.

I'm a functioning professional who provoked an extremely destructive dynamic when I questioned my therapists. I learned the hard way how frail and vain they were. If I was a fool my therapists were far larger ones, and they were the ones with the training.

The profession has a rich tradition of client blaming. Freud and early analysts had laundry lists of nasty things to say about the unfortunate patients with " "negative therapeutic reaction." The fault was everything from client narcissism to their unconscious desire to sabotage their therapists. I didn't find practitioner error even considered in that early arrogant analysis.

I learned many lessons from harmful therapy. However, I respect and don't think "fools" those faced with the task of sorting it out. My therapists were utterly oblivious, defensive and accusatory about the harm they created. They told me, in their most professional postures, that I couldn't discern reality. I half believed them because these "authorities" told me so. It wasn't until much later that I realized they merely were covering their own rears.

When I search for consumer information about harmful therapy, I find it only a sliver of their literature. I find almost nothing on the aftermath and most written by consumers.

I wish well to others who struggled or still struggle with extracting themselves from harmful therapy. Sometimes it's straightforward; sometimes its unprecedented entanglement.

I suppose it's easy to be unsure of how the therapy's going if one doesn't have concrete goals? I use my goals, along with educating myself on the treatment research, as a barometer of progress, while understanding, like another poster mentioned, that working on them won't necessarily be easy or painless. I found having community helpful too, during the most intense parts of the trauma work and as other issues arose, it was good to have feedback from others dealing with similar challenges and who were familiar with therapy.

If I was too mentally ill to have goals, I would definitely need some more trusted support to stay on track during treatment.

Sure. I thought I was being helped because my therapists were able to convince me of that and they were successful in doing so for a long time because I believed they were experts who knew better. But as I stayed in that process, my mind was noticing things that didn't make sense to me and that contradicted the therapists' assertion that I was being helped. I chose to dismiss my own logic and my own common sense because, again, I believed that the "experts" knew better. But there came the moment when I decided not accept their "expertise" any more, when I decided that my common sense and my instincts were more important to me than someone's presumed expertise. That decision is a CHOICE. Each one of us makes that choice whether we aware of that or not.

Yep. I already addressed it in the above paragraph.

It is somewhat different but not fundamentally different. It is different in the sense that it's much more difficult in therapy and in any relationship where psychological power is unequal to exercise a good judgment when the other person is in a more influential position. But even in those situations no one can take away our critical thinking ability and our ability to make choices for ourselves. As long as no one keeps me in the relationship by force, by the means of threats of all kind, I am ultimately responsible for staying in there or leaving. Sure, many times therapists use crazy making tactics to make you feel ****** about yourself if you choose to leave them. But, again, it is up to you to give in to those tactics or to follow your own senses. It was up to me to believe all kinds of crazy stuff my Ts told me or not to believe it. I chose to believe it for a long time and all that time I stayed with them. Once I chose to believe my own common sense I left. We also choose what we want to believe and we are responsible for that choice too.

Me too. I thought the same thing because that's what my Ts made me believe. As I said, I have compassion for myself for being so vulnerable to their influence. That still doesn't change the fact that believing what they told me to believe was my choice. In any case, my thoughts, my feelings, my believes - all that, all my inner process belong to me, and since they belong to me I have to own them.

Sometimes it does. That too I know from experience. What I also know, again from experience, is that it shouldn't get worse to the point when one becomes completely non-functional, when they start obsessing about their T 24/7, when therapy becomes mostly about the "relationship" with T and all other issues concerning different aspects of client's life are no longer discussed or client no longer pays attention to them because they suffer from unrequited love for T and don't care about anything else. Healing never has to get THAT worse before it gets better.

They don't. And, yes, it is a HUGE problem that the public is utterly uninformed. I am trying to remedy that by putting as much info on my blog about therapy as I can. One does, however, have a critical thinking ability and the ability to choose to follow one's common sense or someone else's persuasion. One may not be able to make the right choice right away, but eventually they will have an opportunity to do so. Will they use that opportunity or not is again their choice.

I agree. They way it is done now it is mostly harmful IMO. But I believe the changes will come only when consumers start rejecting harmful service, but in order to do that they have to start taking responsibility for their choices. That's the only way to take your health into your own hands and to take control of your life.

I do see now I have choices, but during my bad therapy it wasn't really about choices. I knew I could leave at any time, but I believed I was going to get better. I believed he was helping me and I believed there would be a good ending one day. I did choose to stay, but I was hopeful that it would end well. I think a lot of people think they are being helped and things will work out well for them.

I am MUCH MUCH more aware now and much more skeptical and basically have no trust in therapy and I think it is good. I will not get into a bad situation again. I do hope the system changes. I am glad there is information out there about bad therapy. It is a shame many more people will end up hurt because of the flawed system.

Good point. A lack of concrete goals is one of the factors that keeps professionals unaccountable, which contributes into harm. When we don't know what we are working on, we can do anything and I, as a therapist, can promote any non-sense I want and push you in any direction I want because you don't know what you want.

And it's also true that when someone is in truly mentally ill and isn't able to set concrete goals, all they need is a lot of support and guidance. But why do we need a professional to fulfill this function? Why can't we offer some communal services that would provide that kind of support? Emotional support is not something you learn in a graduate school or in a professional training. It's an organic part of our humanity. If we are at the point that emotional support is supposed to be provided by professionals only, at regular times and in measured dosages, then God save us all.. In that case, we are done as a civilization..

I do think a LOT of people would be far better off getting involved in community and perhaps going to support groups, taking the focus off oneself so much. I think self help books have been good for me and internet forums and just getting involved in life itself. It is sad that people have to pay sometimes to get support and guidance. Really really sad. Something is really wrong in our world.

Yep, I wasn't referring to the therapist as providing that support- therapists fill a specialized function in mental health treatment, along with psychiatrists and others, I meant more a relative, community member, social services helper, etc. to help protect/advocate for the client if they're too ill to be self-responsible at some point or long term to the extent that serious harm will come to them.

Really? So once you step over the threshold of a therapist's office, you become completely unable to manage yourself? To take responsibility for who is in your life, and who you allow in it?

Listen, I said that there are ****** therapists. But who on earth is going to protect you if you can't / won't / don't protect yourself? I mean, in simple terms of practicality nobody can.

A bad therapist is a terrible thing, but if clients keep paying them, then bad therapists stay in business. So what do you seriously, practically suggest can be done, if the client is not responsible?

Being overly attached to a bad therapist is about the closest real life thing I can imagine to the proverbial cage with an open door that a prisoner simply refuses to walk out of.

The problem is, how do you help someone who won't take the available exit?

I hear you. I feel exactly the same way. I cry when I recall how vulnerable I was to the influence of those who were in a position to help me but who harmed me instead. I do hold them responsible for what they did, but I hold the whole system more responsible in harming me than those individual therapists. After all, even when a therapist has best intentions, the system trains them in such a way that they will do harm inadvertently anyway. But then every system is made of individuals and so each person is responsible for how they deal with the system. Will they conform and stay willfully ignorant? Will they fight it from the inside? Will they leave it and raise public awareness about how it operates? I chose the latter. I left it and started raising public awareness of the ways in which it operates.

You and others who were harmed and who can see the reality the way it is have my full support. I know what it takes to stay true to yourself under the storm of attacks from all fronts - from professionals who refuse to take responsibility, individual and collective, from other victims who don't see themselves beyond their victim identity as well as from those victims who don't even recognize themselves as victims, who religiously believe in whatever their therapists tell them and who blame you for the abuse you took at the hands of your therapists..Stay strong and stay true to yourself. Don't give in to the need to identify yourself with any group. It's not worth it.

Extracting oneself from bad therapy is clouded further if the client is encouraged to surrender her judgment, to "trust" etc. And I've seen PC members here chastised, or chastise themselves for the "pattern" of "running away" which they're then commanded to use therapy to correct.
All that theory and all that metaphor can distort what actually occurs: a relationship between two equals. Rudeness is rudeness, control is control, fostering idolization or destructive dependence is just that.

And so what if the client has some pattern she hopes to break. That doesn't mean the therapist isn't harmful. The two are independently working parts.

By the way, one of my co-therapists SHRIEKED at me: "you're packing up your toys and going home, and that's JUST what you do in relationships!" At the time I was going to suspend therapy because I'd lost my job. Please. Unfortunately I got another job and spent several more months with those vainglorious tyrants.

So saying that stopping seeing a bad therapist and having a better one has improved matters for me is gloating? Okay. Sure. Let's go with that.

Should I have remained silent? Should I just say hmmm, yes, this made things better for me, but I better not say it because people might not like it?

It's just the simple truth that getting a better therapist will get you better therapy. It's also a simple truth that it is the client who selects the therapist.

Absolutely. Building supportive communities is one of the solutions I advocated for a long time. Expressing compassion and support is not and should not be a professional skill. It's a human "skill". I think professional help should be 1) scientifically based 2) more narrow with specific goals where the procedures can be controlled and outcome can be predictable like in neurofeedback

I also think it's ok to give people guidance and it's ok to call it counseling. But that should have nothing to do with any medical practice whatsoever.

Anything beyond that is the task to be resolved by a larger society. We have a huge deficit of compassion and basic humanity in our culture and this is something that can't be resolved in therapy. A collective problem of the society can't be resolved for each individual separately through the mental health system. Collective problems should have collective solutions. Let's form compassionate humane communities and we will have less need for professional mental health services.

LOL. I never said anything like that at all, but thanks for the attempt at understanding.

I didn't think I had a bad therapist. Most people don't until it is over. It IS on the therapist to be halfway decent and if they don't feel they can help the client then they need to tell them to move on and find someone else. You keep saying BAD therapist over and over. What is a bad therapist anyway?

The closest therapist of any kind to me is an hour away. I am not wasting time and money going any further than that for useless psychobabble. It's ALL bad. LOL.