Article: Psychotherapy as a Cult

Sometimes I feel guilty I have not reported her. Especially since she works with freshmen who have left home for the first time. I think about it a lot. I don't think I could deal with it yet, but I'm getting closer. Where I live, there is also the possiblity of having my current therapist break confidentiality to report unethical behavior by a peer without my permission. She has offered to speak to her supervisor for me (which TBH I think would help a lot), but she left it up to me, and I'm not ready yet to deal with the fear of running into her/guilt.

I have had other people I trust tell me I should report her, but I think it's hard for them to understand how much I loved her and how hard it is. I wish I could just turn that love off like she did, but I'm not built like that.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if I have a moral obligation here or not. It ties me up in knots a lot. But I'm struggling so hard just to stay safe, maybe my obligation is to that for now. So hard to know.

Oh yes, take care of yourself. It sounds like it will all progress as it should, in its own time. But yes, you come first. Best wishes to you.

Note that I said "easy to file a complaint" - not that they would necessarily be punished accordingly.

You also ignore the fact that those violations are now part of their permanent record and public knowledge should the public care to avail itself of it, plus that further violations probably mean revocation of licenses.

No pressure from me. You did well just to survive that woman, in my opinion.

I can see how that could happen. Conversely, when bad therapy induces emotional dependence in the client, the power differential can increase over time. I actually felt the differential was not so large early on with my main T last year, then after 4-5 months it was huge.

You know, I remembered that just as I was posting. I can see how the power differential could increase over time, definitely. The longer you stay in an abusive relationship, the harder it is to leave it.

Another take on power dynamics in therapy:

"Once in the realm of ‘love’ and the deep well of dependency, the price paid for being made to feel special is to give away one’s voice, one’s personal judgement, and one’s confidence in one’s integrity. Because the patient is an adult, s/he believes that s/he has gone to sessions out of free will. It is little recognised that an adult cannot decide about continuing such ‘treatment’ because emotions have been severely manipulated and unconscious deals done."
http://www.therapyabuse.org/t2-story-is-different.htm

If you have the right wounds, and the T approximates some idealized quasi-parental figure, all bets are off. Seem this is the place from which all addictions originate. For me it was very much addictive, and as a result I coughed up my dignity, autonomy, rationality with little or no conscious awareness. If you have been starving for a long time, you eat first and ask questions later.

If a client files a complaint involving any romantic involvement or sex, it is more likely than not that the therapist/psychiatrist will lose their license. I worked at a hospital where a psychiatrist had a brief affair with a client after termination. Once thier affair ended, she filed a complaint and threatened a lawsuit. He handed over his license to practice medicine and now can only do research. He is no longer allowed any patient contact. Their professional relationship wasn't even a long term one, this client actually saw him for consultation and possibly one more meeting after that.

I have also met a person who had a sexual relationship with her former psychiatrist when she was a teen. After a complaint was filed he had his license revoked and even served time in prison.

These cases are more recent and probably not representative of what may have happened in similar cases 10 or 20 years ago. I am aware it's not always this clear cut and it can be a stressful process to confront an unethical T. Still, I think it's important to stress that clients are not powerless and filing a complaint, if warrented, is never a waste of time. The end result is not necessarily going to be losing a license, but I don't think that's the point. Disciplinary action is still significant and no therapist wants it on their record. Having a complaint on your permanent record is terrible PR for a T and greatly affects their ability to attract clients or find jobs. The relationship may make some clients feel powerless, but the reality is they are not.

I understand that a major, provable violation, a sexual or other dual relationship, is most likely to be disciplined. As we've seen on this board, therapists can inflict extensive damage that isn't so definable or provable.

My grievance became a decision around "failure to refer," the only category for a beserk, bullying jerk. He lied; I lost. I understand only an infinitesimal percentage of complaints even are heard, and a tiny fraction results in sanction. In my case a distorted version of my confidential treatment was heard by a committee and became state public record because of how the therapist practiced. It was his behavior, but the therapist flipped it to make me and my very sanity the one under scrutiny.

My friend's insurance fraud case against her therapist was relatively recent. Likewise the light sanction for the therapist who traveled with his client. I'm working on anectdote here. But I have I difficult time believing the system protects consumers except in extreme cases.

Exactly. Let's all say it together -- the system only protects clients in extreme cases.

Cases of sexual misconduct, blatant abuse, client abandonment speak for themselves. But just below this threshold is a whole range of potentially harmful and insane behavior that can do lasting damage. In a way this is even worse, because nobody wants to hear it, nobody gets it. It's easy for the biz to segregate the egregious stuff and say it's a few bad apples. But not so easy to speak about well-intentioned therapists who traumatize clients, or those who are merely incompetent or emotionally unstable.

One of the many T's I saw this year practically attacked me when I claimed therapy had harmed me. He wanted to know what were the "gross transgressions" and when I could not produce any that he accepted, he began to angrily set me straight. This sort of thing is not evidence that "therapy is a cult" but it does show there can be similar patterns of manipulation.

One of the oft cited tactics of cults is the use of "love bombing" to capture new recruits.

There are many threads on PC and elsewhere about clients feeling love from or for their T with such intensity that it borders on euphoria. Or feeling like the chosen one. Was all true for me.

Is a therapist's "permanent record" open to potential clients in the US?

Yes. The way it works as I understand it is that all offenses for which a therapist was disciplined and the penalty imposed are recorded in a database online by each state's licensing board. This is accessible to the public via the internet.

States vary in the amount of detail available online (some only note the therapist was disciplined, others have the whole complaint and board decision online), but in many states, for a nominal fee and filling out a form, you can get full details, learn whether there are any pending complaints, and also whether there were any complaints that did not result in discipline but in a "letter of concern" sent to the therapist by the licensing board. The last two don't come with details beyond maybe the cause of the complaint.

I understand complaints only are accessible if the therapist is sanctioned. Some legal jurisdictions provide court records online. That only would apply if the client took civil action.

[QUOTE=missbella;4846394]I understand complaints only are accessible if the therapist is sanctioned. Some legal jurisdictions provide court records online. That only would apply if the client took civil action.[/QUOTE

I believe you are correct when you say information is available only if sanctioned. And, some states wipe the records clean after a certain number of years.

Many licensing boards are so overwhelmed, and underfunded that nothing happens to these bad practioners. Agencies that have had numerous complaints about a practioners will just quietly ask them to resign to protect there reputation and the headaches an investigation would cause. There ar numerous delay tactics available that many therapist have nine lives or more to continue their wayward behaviors. I suspect that a fair number do change for a be good.

From a site on cults:
"Legitimate groups have nothing to fear from their members reading critical information about them."

So folks, what exactly do we have here on PC? Given that many members clicked "thanks" in support of the above post, I for one am rather creeped out. A member has defined for the rest of us what is the truth, has declared that one type of experience takes precedence over another (because it's "negative"), and has labeled the posting of an external article to be "scaremongering". And it aint the first time someone has spoken for the group.

What are you implying, Budfox?

I'm confused. Are you implying that there is a form of cultish behavior that exists here?

I don't think any information is scaremongering. Just info for people to make an informed decision.

Lets not kid ourselves that we're not touchy. People who've been hurt by bad therapy experiences make what can seem like inflammatory negative generalizations about therapy. It ruffles feathers. Hell, it ruffles my feathers. I can see how someone would consider that touchiness "culty."

I disagree that it is--I think it's just that: touchiness. But that doesn't mean I don't see (haven't come to see, that is) how it can look weird from a certain perspective.

Okay, I think you get a lot of undeserved blowback on here and I think you have valid points about the dangers of therapy. And that you stay admirably calm in the face of lots of criticism. But posting something like this won't help your cause.

I also do not see why the post you choose to highlight is so creepy. EM is empathizing with people who have suffered therapy; she does make an assertion on the number of cases in which this happens, which is hard to determine; and then she makes a blanket generic statement that is obviously her opinion. When people click thanks, it means anything from "this made me laugh" to "I agree" to "I always thank this person because I like them." To imply that an entire internet forum, many of whose members never post or thank and only read, is a cult because people thanked a post you don't agree with is illogical.

Originally posted by echos : 'Yes, anybody who has experienced any type of abuse in therapy including gas lighting, emotional, sexual abuse or whatever else deserves a voice and empathy, however not at the expense of the truth, which is that this is a minority of caes'[/QUOTE]

I'm not aware of any reaearch that has been done that has been able to answer the question - what proportion of people are harmed by therapy? We don't know whether it is a minoirity of cases. I imagine that research studies that look at the effectiveness of therapy use decent therapists, but there may be a significant number who are not good at their job and who damage people. I think it is perhaps near impossible to ascertain how many people slink away from a therapy experience feeling lousy about it.A therapist said to me that in her experience most people quit instead of seeing it through (I think she was meaning not just therapy with herself but with other T's that she knew). I think that a huge number of people start therapy and give up, I think that there is no way of knowing whether these people found their experience a little bit damaging.

Until I had validation here, and from someone I love and respect a lot, and especially from my new T, I thought what happened was my fault. I felt so ashamed I couldn't tell her for months and had to write it down and give it to her. I felt damaged but I thought it was because of my own issues (as my ex-T told me it was).

""""""" I'm not aware of any reaearch that has been done that has been able to answer the question - what proportion of people are harmed by therapy? We don't know whether it is a minoirity of cases. I imagine that research studies that look at the effectiveness of therapy use decent therapists, but there may be a significant number who are not good at their job and who damage people. I think it is perhaps near impossible to ascertain how many people slink away from a therapy experience feeling lousy about it.A therapist said to me that in her experience most people quit instead of seeing it through (I think she was meaning not just therapy with herself but with other T's that she knew). I think that a huge number of people start therapy and give up, I think that there is no way of knowing whether these people found their experience a little bit damaging.[/QUOTE]"""""""

MY WORDS:
I've never seen any research that would support that idea either. I suspect many more people are harmed by therapy than we know about, but because of the nature of therapy they might be too ashamed to come forward. I could be wrong.

Yea was probably worded a bit too strongly. I am just making another comparison. That's not the same as calling PC or the whole biz a cult. If someone finds the comparison bogus, that's fine. But the thing about legit groups not being afraid of criticism (or questioning), and EM's suggestion that the article I linked to is not "approved" content… speaks for itself.

And if you are not troubled by a member attempting to define reality for the rest of us, then you lost me. None of knows whether therapy harms more often or helps more often, and it matters a lot. And suggesting that there are "negative" posts and "positive" posts and the latter are more worthy, yea creepy.