Psychotherapy inherently flawed?

I think there are some differences amongst people here and why therapy was started, why it was continued and how important it was viewed. I went as a sort of last resort for something I found annoying. My life basically worked okay and I have no serious issues that sent me to a therapist. I did not go because my whole life was in disarray or jeopardy. I keep doing it more as a curiosity or hobby that fascinates and frustrates me. Which is a very different stance from someone who has used it or needed it as something much more serious.

Hi SD and gang. It's been a while, well a really long time! I also keep doing therapy partly as "curiosity." It is like a saga, a mini series that I follow and I am one of the major characters, though the people in my life that I'm struggling with also have parts and then there is the therapist, who plays a leading role, often as an antagonist.

What has CHANGED is that for the first time in many years, I have a therapist who I can trust. She doesn't add to the drama. She helps me problem solve about real-world problems. I have never had this positive, healthy, functional and PRODUCTIVE relationship with a T. I had concluded that therapy was inherently flawed and resigned myself to this being the case.

This time around, I have made lasting positive change in my inner world and outer life.

Prior to this, I thought of therapy as a tragic re-wounding at worst, and an expensive shell game at best. I've had "decent" therapists who provided a safe and confidential place to vent but not much more. I've raised my expectations WAY WAY up and now will not settle for anything less than measurable improvement in my functioning through working closely with the right therapist.

Life is just to short to settle. I probably fired ten of them before I found one who worked.

Thanks, I guess I am having hard a time knowing where you are coming from. I realize you are not trying to fix anyone, but some of what you said was a bit too close to the gaslighting thing ex T and others tried on me. It went something like this:

me: Therapy has harmed me.
therapist: No it hasn't, and here's why.

Not sure our experiences were so similar. My T sat with me too during a painful time, but she was also subtly feeding me many things (and I her) in a way that was not at all healthy, and not sustainable, and when the umbilical cord was abruptly cut, what I felt was the same lack of connection and attunement that I felt before, only more acutely, having become habituated to what she was feeding me. I just cant frame this as merely imperfect. It was quite destructive.

Glad yours is survivable.

Frankly, I don't have an agenda. I am not out to get you. I feel empathy for you, and if you think that is presumptuous, then so be it, I don't care, because I'm not feeling empathy just to spite you, or even for your sake, I just do.

I see the little party lines here. I recall a lot of the threads on this subject and how it has been playing out on this board. Well, let me be clear, none of that matters to me and I have no intention to play a part in it. I am not in any camp. I have no agenda other than my own desire to grow and share that growth.

You know, deep down, I still probably love my ex T. I try to rationalize it and change it and reframe it and whatever, but emotionally it doesn't change, even after she shut me out without any lasting recognition of two years' worth of enactments, I still love her, and she still has a deep place in my heart. Not that she would do this, but if she called me today and said she needed me, let's run away together, I would find it really hard to say no--no questions asked, even though it would be totally irrational and reckless. I felt more alive with her than with anyone ever. I don't think that's wrong, but I'm also realistic now about what it means for the fate of a therapy relationship when it is, to some extent, reciprocated.

But the truth is, I wanted more from her than therapy. I wanted that emotional enactment, I sought it, and also acted it out, whether deliberately, knowingly, or unconsciously. This was not a narrative that she did to me, I created it with her.

By going to a therapist, and paying for a therapist, but then also longing for more than a therapist in her, and actually treating her as more than just my therapist, I became more than a client. We developed a dual relationship in the confines of her office. The one relationship was all the things we said, and the other relationship was all the things we thought, and dreamed, and fantasized about, and ruminated on, but were too afraid to say. Those things leaked into our actions, but we did not acknowledge them for so long. Well, the purpose of therapy is to say those things, and by not saying them, I was seeking Not Exactly Therapy. If I don't believe I am really paying for therapy, I will not act as if I am really getting therapy, and in return, I will not get therapy, and that will be all my money was worth to me. There are plenty of Not Exactly Therapists who will gladly take my money in exchange for the Not Exactly Therapy I am willing and wanting to pay for, and they will enact my feelings with me, and not really do the best job of therapizing, but bottom line is that if that's what I expect from them, it's what I'll seek out.

If I wanted Real Therapy, I would accept that I have to be willing to say the things I'm not saying, and give up on the fantasies, and I would have said them much sooner, and the reactions of a Not Exactly Therapist would be not good enough for me, and I would move on and find a Real Therapist.

All of this was within my control. That's just my situation. But in any situation, there is this interpretation, where you create your circumstances, and life is uncertain, and risky, but with risk comes reward, and creativity, and the potential for growth. With certainty and guarantees, on the other hand, comes stagnation, and inertia, and loss, because certainty and guarantees do not exist, they are a fantasy.

In my situation, too, there is the interpretation that because my T was not acting in the full capacity of a Real Therapist, the blame lies with her.

But in reality, if she had been a Real Therapist, what would have happened? She wouldn't have escalated the boundary crossings, and I wouldn't have felt special and loved and wanted, and I would have not developed my feelings, and I would have thought, "therapy is boring, I already know all this stuff logically, I just don't think this is for me." And I would have moved on. Or otherwise, I would have kept going, not knowing why or what I wanted out of it, and she would have felt unable to help me make progress and referred me out, before there was any emotional involvement in the first place.

So there are two black and white interpretations, a) the therapist is entirely responsible, or b) the client is entirely responsible, and neither of these are true. Both the therapist and client are responsible, but I am the client, I am the factor that is in my control, and more importantly, I am responsible for finding a therapist who IS responsible, so really I lean more towards b, even if it is not absolute.

What my Not Exactly Therapy taught me was that I want two different relationships, instead of a dual relationship. I want a) Real Therapy and b) real, healthy, functional, loving and mutual relationships outside of therapy. I would never have figured this out, on an emotional level, if I hadn't first experienced the Not Exactly Therapy, the transference enactments, and why they were bad for me. Even if I knew what the books said, I had to make the mistakes to learn from them.

I can tell myself, oh, the therapist acted like more and less than a therapist to me, so she was awful and wrong and caused this pain.

But that's not true. She did not cause the pain. The pain, my pain becoming applied to this situation, was caused by my own cognitive blurring of the therapy and the intimate relationship. I want her to love me AND be ethical. I want her to want me AND protect me. I want her real feelings AND to not get hurt. I was the one who set the trap in my therapy, with my own expectations, because when she failed on either count, in my head I turned around and recriminated her with the double standard. When she was being my therapist, I internally blamed her for being secretive, and when she was transparent and emotional, I internally blamed her for not being my therapist. So anyway, I ultimately got exactly what I was asking for, which is also the only thing I would have accepted at the time, even though it was guaranteed to hurt me in the end.

But even if I never faced that pain in therapy, it was already hurting me unconsciously, it had a grip on my behavior for my whole life until it became conscious, because I was avoiding situations that would bring it back into consciousness. It was always there, limiting me, and I was already always suffering for it. T did not create the suffering, she just forced me to recognize that it was there all along, bring it back into consciousness and try to find a resolution this time.

How can I hold my T responsible for my suffering? She was doing the very best she could. These feelings are intense and overwhelming and hard to sort out. She was trying so hard to do the right thing and she still "failed" because, though I was trying my best, too, I was unintentionally also setting her up to fail. It is mutual. It is karmic. You get back what you put out there, and no force in the world can protect you from yourself. That situation doesn't look the same for everyone, but I believe the underlying principle is always true and manifests in its own way.

Respectfully, budfox, I am not at all implying that this situation has anything to do with you. But, if you can take something from it, that would be cool too.

is it really empathy if one is not understanding or is missing the point? I mean just in general. I doubt I would consider it empathy if I was misunderstood or the other had missed the point.

Funny, I just sent an email to my therapist that contained basically what you are saying...here is part of it. He hasn't responded yet, I'm assuming we will discuss it tomorrow.

"Essentially, I'm walking down this road and looking at the loss except this time, I'm feeling it rather than pretending things are okay. Those things that carried over. When my mom would clean the house, or make dinner, go shopping...the times that those things happened I've carried with me...essentially replacing lost love with a clean house, or shopping or cooking. I have been hard on myself for feeling sad, way to hard. If I'm walking through those memories without the protection of denial, but basically naked.. then sadness is appropriate. The absence of pain would really be abnormal.

And I still want a mom to walk down that path with me, I shouldn't have to do it alone. I want a mom to tell me I'm great or to hug me when I'm overwhelmed to drink coffee with, to help ease life when it becomes too much. When people write tributes to their parents, I ache with jealousy.

When I was a little girl, I'd often fall asleep praying that I'd wake up and my mom would magically be ok. I didn't care that we were poor and lived on welfare or that I had crappy clothes, I just wanted her to be okay. I still sometimes wish there was a drug that would do that for her. But not for her, for me.

Things get narrow here for me because it's hard for me to imagine that I won't always want that and that it always will be painful for me not to have that with someone. There isn't a place where I can go and pick out a mother and say, love me, want me, make me your pride and joy, let me tell you the awful things I've done and still love me even if you're disappointed.

I feel broken because that is a void that can't be filled. It's impossible to imagine that even the best therapy can ever heal that sadness. I don't know how a person becomes whole without something so basic.

When we do the exposure therapy, you become that replacement and then I become needy, angry, frustrated, and sad. It's weird. I know you are not her, you can't replace what was lost, you can't fix it....and that intense emotion overwhelms me. I'm in an emotional state of being alone again but this time I'm acutely aware of it and the rest of my world falls apart. What is your role? To bear witness to the destruction? Why wouldn't I want to harm myslf? When I'm alone and in pain and I can't see the present world, what reason would I have to live? "

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

Maybe it is just sympathy, who knows. I'm imperfect too. Fortunately I cannot harm someone by feeling either a little empathy or sympathy.

But, I think empathy is primarily a felt thing, I didn't write out or post my empathy... I am only reporting that it existed to clarify that I don't have an ulterior motive.

What I can't understand is when someone pays hard earned $ for therapy but they berate their therapist or perceive they are being harmed by their therapist AND have no attachment to their therapist.

Masochism? I don't get it.

Traumatic bonding variations.

MP: Out to get me, I don't think that. But I am not the only one who took your initial comments as a sort of therapist-like invalidation of client vulnerability, client harm. And you were lecturing some, stating things that are self evident as if I am a moron. Exhibit A: "Like I have said to you before, there are always two sides to the story." However, I am not clear where you are addressing me and where you are speaking generally, so not sure how to take some of it...

Of course I can take things from what you say above. There are things I do relate to, things I have thought myself. But it's a very long post and I have no idea what to do with so many thoughts and ideas, here in this thread.

It's great that you have a measure of forgiveness for your T. I do too, always have, and much of my outrage is for the system. But I also can see quite clearly that she failed in ways that are not ok, while sticking me with responsibility. It was abusive, dangerously so. I bent over backward to understand how she is wounded, how she was triggered. I read books that discussed T vulnerabilities. I tried to get her to help me understand her pain. She refused to be honest and transparent. In a way I became the T at the end, more mature, and more diligent. She was able to act erratically and with self interest. The system supported all of that, because the T makes the rules.

I dont understand at all these notions of this being just another relationship, or letting the T and the system off the hook cuz Ts are human. If the T is going to act out their own personal drama and unconscious impulses, then I fail to see the point. And given that the client is sometimes in an extremely vulnerable position, this sort of duplicity can amount to a an unethical and destructive train wreck. I paid precisely for the privilege of having the other person's neuroses sufficiently contained to keep me safe.

I don't understand how people love a stranger they pay to sit there, or roll over and submit to those guys or any number of things people say they do in therapy or with a therapist.
I accept I don't need to do so. I like reading about how other people do therapy - but I certainly don't understand how or why other people do it the way they do.

Thus, the need for dialogue. The need to ask questions and try to find ways to answer them. The need to try to find a place of understanding various perspectives and experiences, or at least to have some patience with the fact that everyone's experience is personal and real and can be approached with respect for the individual.

Well said and I think this is an apt analogy -- surgeons needing to wash their hands, therapists needing to cleanse their neuroses.

I would add though that even if a therapist has done extensive therapy of their own, that is no guarantee whatsoever that they are psychologically and emotionally healthy. Their therapist might have been messed up, and theirs before, like a dysfunctional family that passes its pathology through the generations. Or any number of things could have gone wrong, the very things that we as clients go through.

Strongly agree.

We're reopening this thread. Please, everyone, even if you find that you strongly disagree with another member's remarks, you still need to keep your replies within the guidelines and avoid personal attacks.

See also: http://forums.psychcentral.com/psych...ment-here.html

Having done just that -- try again with another therapist (actually several) -- I cannot recommend it. Made things worse.

The assumption is that the problem was with the particular therapy relationship, rather than with the system, which seems specious. So a client who has endured some degree of recapitulation of early attachment trauma (or any significant negative outcome), and is now in an even more vulnerable state, is encouraged to play another round of russian roulette with a total stranger whose own emotional and psychological health is unknown, whose methods will likely be undeclared, who might have trouble properly acknowledging the harm done by the previous therapist thus subtly invalidating said harm, and who is effectively taking the client's money to clean up the mess made by the previous therapist.

No matter what happens in therapy, seems the advice is always… more therapy. What if there is a second round of wounding in therapy? Should the client seek yet another therapist? Can you imagine that conversation?

client: "Yeah, hi, I need help sorting out two levels of therapy retraumatizing, plus the original trauma and some other issues.
therapist: "I see. Well you can trust me. I estimate you will need a minimum of 20 years of therapy."

Maybe the sensible thing to ask is -- was therapy a good idea in the first place?

I can't remember who it was but someone on here a while back was organizing a sort of activism page for therapy abuse, collecting people's stories so that they could be put online and act as a counterweight to therapist agenda.
Maybe activism of some sort like that would help bring you some peace???

I guess I personally don't see it as very significantly different from.medical practice. There will be some surgeons who seriously screw up creating permanent harm. I don't think anyone would argue that ALL surgeons are bad but we do know they make some bad mistakes. Of course you can die without a surgeon but there are people on here who feel.they would have died without their T's also.

The difference and part of what seems to bother you is that is a surgeon screws up you can take the evidence to the hospital/lawyer etc and say "look they screwed up. They cut off my leg Instead of talking out my gallbladder" and there will usually eventually be some kind kd recompense amd the potential for the doctor to be suspended or disciplined either by the hospital or the medical board.

With T, how does one PROVE harm when the assumption is that those of us seeking T are messed up to begin with??? How do you find justice? You can bring a case to the state board but the difficulty in proving harm makes it hard even with egregious abuse like having sex with a client.

Activism could change that if enough people pushed for further oversight. It used to be that every doctor gas a little town office---now all of those offices are associated with hospital groups which helps manage risk by having each case reviewed by more people . its not impossible to see Ts moving towards being required to provide multi tiered protection of a client

I just wonder if pursuing something like that might help and I know someone on here was collecting stories at one time.

Thanks, so how did it go?

I haven't followed entirely all of this thread, LOL! However, I want to clarify, my original question was is therapy inherently flawed, and nothing to do with bad therapists. I think the system itself is set up such that clients like myself will inevitably be hurt, regardless of the therapist and technique. Whether say, you are BudFox with a therapist who drops you entirely when you become attached, or even if you have one like mine, who is certainly more competent and has my best interest in mind.

Maybe it is inherently flawed, or maybe I am just a ticking time bombs in relationships, and everything hurts. Or maybe I'm just sulking that my therapist doesn't love me, and thinks that somehow being broken hearted yet again is going to magically heal my broken heart.

To be honest i am just venting and giving my perspective (like everyone else). I dont feel inclined to pursue formal activism right now, though i appreciate the suggestions,

I am also trying to purge a huge backlog of pent up material that has built up since being shut down by my T, which has also seemingly triggered an internal fragmentation of sorts resulting in a compulsion to think and talk about it.

I dont want the burden of proving harm through some official process. Yelp is one easy way to get visibility.

I get the comparisons with medical practice, but to me the two are worlds apart. I see religion as a closer analog, or prostitution.

I see your points. However right now I'm personally not interested in evaluating the goodness or badness of therapy as a whole, because a) even though I think there are some flaws, my opinion won't change anything and b) there are a lot of problems in the world and I have to solve my own first and foremost. I am just expressing some insight on how I personally am able to make it useful for me in case other people can find that helpful. I have found that if I take the right approach to therapy, it is valuable to me. Whether or not or how it causes harm to some or what should be done about it is a different question.

I'm sort of wondering what kind of response here would feel supportive to you. I'm somewhat confused as to whether you are venting or seeking a debate.

To address the OP. I USED to think that therapy was inherently flawed in that way.
Over time , sitting with my pain, exploring it, and learning to parent myself have actually done their work
I am finding more transformative change than I thought possible.
But I am the first to admit that my T is one in a million and I don't know how to explain how those things happened

Thanks for all who have responded to this post. Good or bad, it has given me much to process. Not sure I can do it alone though. It's like being caught between a rock and a hard place.

I'm really hoping this works for me too. I'm sitting here still heartbroken and just devastated, why cant anyone love me.

I understand how you feel. I have the same sort of core wounds. I've had plenty of rejection and deprivation in my life, and then to get that in therapy, AND be encouraged to see this as a good thing and some sort of therapeutic device... what do you even call that? Feels like abuse.

Hope you find some answers and some peace.

I certainly left feeling--even my own therapists hates me. It took me a while to decides my therapist's default behavior was domination and contempt and my experience with him didn't reflect how I related to a wider world, or even another provider.