APA article: "Termination and abandonment: A key ethical distinction"

Really perfectly stated. I agree 100%.

Something I've gotten better at since therapy is not trying to control others when I am uncomfortable with what they say and do. Not always successful, but I have gotten better at it since therapy.

Just because I am experiencing bad feelings doesn't necessarily mean someone should have to change to make me feel better.

My damage from therapy happened long before my co-therapists became so enraged and tried to intimidate me into staying with them. Had I been viewed my dynamic with them more objectively, I like would have had far less damage. Had I understood how infantilizing the relationship, I might not have consented. Had I been aware that my "treatment" was haphazard faith healing rather than science, I never would have allowed my therapists authority. So I'm grateful for sharing critical thinking, even after the fact.

I'd hope that therapy would encourage a tolerance of differing experiences, particularly since nothing of consequence results from these discussions. The more these threads appear a "threat" to some, the more it confirms MY experience-- that therapy was no more than an illusory exercise.

I really don't understand people wanting to control what is posted here or not posted here. It does seem like some feel threatened. I do wonder why some of those who say they are in good therapy situations get so defensive and upset.

I think most posts here are positive about therapy. I guess how you see it depends on which "side" you are on. There really are only a few of us who speak out regularly about the abuses in therapy. It's not mostly negative at all.

What I appreciate about bud's posts is that he sees a systemic problem and raises questions that a healthy system will ask of itself. I share his concerns.

I'm fortunate to have a therapist who hears and accepts my complaints about the industry. Unlike bud, I have a place where I can talk about these things without being disparaged. It's very hard to find a therapist who won't blame the client, so I really get what bud and others who have been treated similarly are up against. It's troubling to see him attacked here on such a regular basis. All he is doing is saying there's a problem in the mental health industry. That is not a radical or unfounded notion. And it does not negate the experience of anyone who has found good professionals.

I don't see anyone ever objecting to people sharing their bad experience with therapist/pdoc. I consistently support people who are in bad situations. It doesn't effect my own therapy whatsoever but I do get upset on behalf of people ( especially I am mortified reading about ongoing sexual abuse of clients). Once again I might be reading on different threads but I have never seen anyone objecting to others sharing bad session or bad therapist. We have people on this forum who are really struggling, I am yet to see anyone having problem with this.

As about posters making generalizations, of course they are entitled to it. Same way others are entitled to reply with "it's generalization". No need to be upset or argumentative at all. I don't see it as anyone being threatened.

I am not threatened if someone says "all/most (insert a group of people I am not part of) are morons" but it is not going to make it less of a generalization. It is inevitable on any forum or in real world when someone makes generalizations, someone else would say "that's a generalization or stereotyping". No one would disagree with somebody's personal experiences though as we weren't there and they are personal .

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I just wanted to add an example from the current thread about t who is annoyingly taking notes all session and refuses to stop when client is annoyed ! People are very supportive of a poster and make suggestions what to do and how to get out of this etc I can't imagine anyone telling a poster to shut up about her Ts annoying methods of conducting therapy.

It would be a bit different if a poster made a thread titled " most/all Ts on this planet are taking notes all session" and go on suggesting the whole profession is bogus because of that . I doubt anyone would be threatened by such statements but it wouldn't elicit as much support. No one can claim what most therapists do this or that as no one knows "most" of any groups, people would want to share that their therapists aren't taking notes, therapy isn't a bogus since people have experiences of being helped and then such thread isn't "sharing bad experience" but rather generalization.

Again no harm or crime in such threads. It is ok. It is not against guidelines. I just think it's inevitable that it won't raise as much support due to being driven by a very general stereotype. It does not mean people need to get angry about it or call each other names. It is just what it is.


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Thanks ruh roh, well said.

It is very hard to find a therapist who won't blame the client and who can tolerate serious inquiry. I know, because I tried.

If long-term therapy ends abruptly and prematurely, there are bound to be many revelations in the aftermath. For me there was a several months' long process of internal debriefing and deprogramming. If you discover that T was subtly using you for her own gratification, many questions and some nasty feelings will arise.

If T refuses to engage you on this, and instead suggests you are to blame and she was "just trying to help", you are stuck with all the accumulated *****. The pent up feelings need a release, or they will turn into a tumor or self hate or whatever. So yea you are so right, people need an outlet to speak out where they will not be disparaged, but such places are almost non-existent. Even the literature is thin on this stuff. BTW, one of the few places I know of is Missbella's outstanding blog.

eta: I do think the temptation to engage in wholesale therapy-bashiing is a problem, but I think anyone whose experiences in therapy have been consistently bad enough for long enough will ultimately end up going there.

How could one discuss a system or business or profession by only discussing it from an individualistic or experiential standpoint?

It's just discussing therapy at the macro level instead of at the micro level.

Definitely agree with this. I found I was thinking micro when immersed in difficult therapy, but afterward the macro view was totally necessary to understand any of it. Forest for the trees.

I agree about discussing therapy on macro level. I am interested in learning about different therapy methods for example as I am not that familiar etc I agree it can't be always based on individual experiences. But it could be done without generalizations.
I like discussing different teaching methods too, including the ones that aren't successful but that's different than stating "most teachers suck".

I do understand it must come from
Frustration, when one had bad experiences it is natural to generalize being in Pain but at the end it's just harder to support general bashing statements.

Sorry my phone is acting out

At this point in my life I am not looking for support here. I just want others who get harmed to know they're not alone and there are a LOT of problems with the therapy system as it is so they don't need to keep blaming themselves. I want to support them. I myself do not need support from this forum. That makes me laugh. LOL.

This is very true for me. I didn't have this attitude immediately after the awful abandonment. It developed from a lot of things that happened afterwards and from a lot of blaming I got here. There were a number of things that led to how I feel about therapy now. And I am SOOOO much healthier without it. I just think others should know they can get there too without therapy if they are harmed by the profession. People here so often say just go find someone else, but bad or mediocre therapy is way worse than no therapy.

Thanks MB. Yours too, consistently.

Thanks, appreciate what you said here ex vivo.

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That is not true.

One primary reason professional organizations exist, including the APA, is to protect the integrity of the profession.

The APA itself says the code is to protect the public:

"This Ethics Code is intended to provide specific standards to cover most situations encountered by psychologists. It has as its goals the welfare and protection of the individuals and groups with whom psychologists work and the education of members, students and the public regarding ethical standards of the discipline."

I think the article would have been ok if about liability or protecting the therapist, and the APA has sections about that, but not under the ethics section by the ethics Director. He is teaching other therapists, leading by example, and is setting the ethics standards of the APA.

It amazes me that some people think it is perfectly all right to shoot down an entire profession but then are offended when others react against said over-generalisation.

There is a difference between saying: ‘i had a horrible therapy experience, it sucks’ to people going on about all therapists being the devil’s spawn. Casting such judgments on some honourable, dedicated men and women in the profession is appalling. Regardless of which type of distinction it is based on (profession, gender, race, whatever).

The reverse wouldn’t be accurate either i.e. saying all therapists are perfect and that therapy is a bed of roses. Then again, this is hardly what one reads here, is it. People either state their specific good experiences or castigate all therapists as god-like idiots who prey on people.

I dunno. I see it as coming out of people's pain. I have a great therapist I adore, but I don't see other people stating their negative opinions and even overgeneralizations about therapists as appalling.

And I think many people state their specific bad experiences as well. Lots of us have very mixed feelings about therapy. I sure do.

I don't think therapists are god-like idiots. I think the profession in general often tends to see itself (and by extension often its practitioners) as god-like beings who know more than the client does about the client and often treat clients like idiots that the professional can prey upon.

I'm not offended at all when anyone says anything here (anymore). LOL. I am not controlling of other people here. People can say what they wish as long as it is within the guidelines of the forum. I think it's strange and odd that there are people who want to control what others say.

I don't think all therapists are evil and I don't think that is the point. The profession could use a good overhauling so that so many won't end up worse off. That is what I would like to see.

It sometimes happens that posters call for a subforum specifically for bad therapy experiences, a request I don't understand at all in a general "Psychotherapy" forum; I mean, bad experiences are part of the process. The Romantic Feelings subforum makes sense to me, but a Bad Experiences subforum doesn't. (I believe the idea has also been rejected by those who run the site.)

And to me that's an attempt at controlling what is said here and shuffling it off into a subforum that may get much less traffic. We're all adults. We should be able to accept the existence of opposing points of view. If you know a thread is likely to go in a certain direction or has been started by a poster with a certain point of view...it is not like you are required to participate in it.

I agree.

I also think it is BULL that this place is mostly negative. I went through the first couple of pages just now of this forum and i don't see mostly negative AT ALL. In fact someone posted a specific positive therapy thread and barely anyone responded to it. Why is that? Overall most threads are NOT negative. They are positive or people looking for advice and most are just that, advice.

It seems like people care more about protecting the profession than about the people who get hurt by it. That is what is appalling. And people trying to find some reason to blame the client for the therapy failure.

I don't think the protestations are about "protecting the profession"or blaming the client as much as you might think. They can and do end up doing that, I agree, but I think that's (often) a secondary effect, not a primarily motivation. I can't speak for others, but when I reflect on some of the more butt-headed things I've said here (and elsewhere), something more complicated and insidious was going on in my head.

Sometimes it's hard for me to read (even legitimate) therapy criticism here because it needles at an old insecurity. Budfox and I recently got into it over the legitimacy of life problems as "medical disorders" and therapy as "treatment" for said disorders. He really wasn't saying that you, Argo, do not have a mental illness, you're just lazy/stupid/childish (you know, insert moral failing). But I heard that as an implication anyway because it's a shockingly common attitude that I've faced from people close to me, and it made me defensive. And my defensiveness was less about protecting therapy and therapists than the legitimacy of my own concerns.

Then there's your run-of-the-mill cognitive defenses that come in, including but not limited to "Therapy must be legitimate because, if it's not, then I'm royally ****ed and that's much too painful to contemplate" and "That bad therapy outcome must have had something to do with X client factor, and since I don't have X, I'm safe."

We use this latter defense all the time, often unconsciously, to restore a sense of control and distance ourselves from painful things: "She got raped because she was drunk. I don't get drunk, therefore I won't be raped." or "He's homeless because he uses drugs. I don't use drugs, therefore I won't ever be homeless."

I'm fairly certain I was guilty of this cognitive fallacy when I latched onto the detail that Jessica from the article upended furniture, even though, as somebody pointed out, that was only mentioned in passing. I think my underlying thought process was something like this: "Jessica upended furniture. Upending furniture is bad behavior, so it must have caused the bad outcome. I don't upend furniture, therefore I won't be terminated."

A fair or correct assessment? No. But, again, my fallacious reasoning wasn't motivated by a desire to protect the profession or even blame the client. It may have done those things anyway, but my motivation was self-protective, not malicious.

Then there's just the fact that this is the wilds of internet anonymity, and it's easy and fun to be inflammatory and argumentative. I suspect if we all met in person every Saturday at 5pm, we'd behave a lot differently. I know I probably would.

I guess I have two reactions when I see posts that make negative generalizations about psychotherapy (there is a systemic problem, those guys think they're gods, it's cult-like, and on and on). My first is that these are inaccurate, because they do not describe my therapy or my T at all. So I try to counteract the generalizations because I think they are untrue. Not untrue that a person had a bad experience, but untrue that the bad experience is the norm, or a necessary and inevitable result of the therapeutic relationship, or whatever.

Second, when I see these posts, I worry about people who might be reading this forum and trying to decide whether to get help. Pursuing therapy is scary and difficult; admitting you need help is difficult. I imagine someone who is severely depressed and considering therapy might find, in these conversations, another reason to lose hope. And therapy does, sometimes, help people.

I'm not real involved here, but I do think there's a strong negativity on this forum lately that wasn't present when I first read it.

I think someone who is trying to decide whether or not to try therapy deserves to see that there are many sides and experiences that others have had with therapy. For some, it was positive and they think they it saved their life, for others - they had an adverse experience which was haunting and devastating, and still others somewhere in the middle. I think a client going in deserves to know it is not always as beneficial as the industry portrays itself. Even the guy who runs this site admits that therapists won't tell you that they know they can't always help someone. The lack of transparency in that profession concerns me a lot - and I believe prospective clients have a right to know the good and the bad and the amount of guessing and hoping rather than certainty that those guys engage in.

It took a couple of years for me to get the first one I see to admit she had no idea whether therapy would help me or not. It was good for her to finally admit it - I had known it all along -but her insistence that she was "an excellent therapist" was not useful to me at all.

I think this is super important -- speaking for myself, reading stuff about adverse experiences in therapy (especially here on PC) actually allows me to prepare myself with eyes wide open and engage a lot better with the therapy I'm currently in.

Else, looking at therapy entirely as a field comprising of benignly altruistic folks who will always have my best interests at heart makes me distrust myself (specifically coz my therapy experiences haven't all exactly been positive) which in turn ironically, messes up my therapy experience.

And, also is kinda crazy-making (especially brings up my anxiety that I somehow have the ostrich-head-buried-in-the-sand attitude going on).