Accepting I've been scammed

By my last therapist – who couldn’t accept me, even after 6 years together.

By myriad other therapists, whom I didn’t see for that long because seeing them didn’t help.

By my family, who set me up to take care of their needs, ignoring my own, so they would/might take care of me in the way that they wanted to. At least it was something. At the time something seemed better than nothing.

So I scammed myself, too.

Is it the truth that I am unacceptable? If so, then another truth is that this earth is h. .ll. Which, looking at the news, definitely sometimes seems to be the case.

Any suggestions for other ways to look at things?

I sometimes (lots of times?) experience myself unacceptable and the world as hell. At some other times I realise that this is wrong, it must be wrong.

I also realise that I need someone to teach me how to accept myself because I can't do it alone and my parents failed to do it for me. I need someone who accepts himself, accepts the world and also accepts me. I have been lucky enough to find this person in my therapist but I think in principle, it could be someone else too.

I personally adore small children, regardless of whether they are joyful or throwing a tantrum or serious or playful or whatever. When I look at them I feel they sort of show me something my parents took away from me - the right to be spontaneous, the right to feel and be emotional, to want things, to dislike and hate other things. To me, these random small adorable children demonstrate how to be accepted in the world.

I suppose for me, scamming is a kind of criminal thing where someone has set out to take advantage of someone else, steal from them, etc.
A more compassionate way to look at some of these things could be that you have been hurt and harmed by other people's deficiencies and mistakes. That's still very painful for you and very unfortunate, but the difference could be that the others did not set about all they did with the plan and the sole intention of harming you for their own gain.
For example, perhaps some of the therapists were well-meaning people who entered the profession because they thought they could help people and wanted to help people, but unfortunately the kind of therapy they were taught at school is one that is not actually helpful for people in your kind of situation. So I'm not saying it's not their responsibility at all, but I am saying maybe they didn't do all their training and learning with the deliberate intention of finding out how to hurt people. Even if that was still the unfortunate consequence.

It's hard to know why bad things can happen to us sometimes isn't it, especially if they don't seem to happen to other people around us. I am sure though that it is not because you are an unacceptable person! I think you've been unfortunate in these things. Perhaps the flip side of that is that you have come through them with great strength and perseverance?

If you've been scammed, I don't think it necessarily follows that you're unacceptable. Maybe it just means that the scammers are assholes.

I certainly know what it's like to feel unacceptable. It's terrible. I don't think you're unacceptable. I hope you find some way to feel better.

Thanks, feileacan, it helps a lot not to feel all alone with this feeling.

I'm very sorry, or sad, that I never lucked into a therapist who could accept me. It's what I expected from my idealization of the profession -- that's where the feeling of being scammed comes in.

Today is h. .ll, and I have no energy. But in a few weeks I'm planning to go along with my daughter and her family to see my son and his family on the other side of the U.S. The first time all the family will be together since the last 3 grandbabies were born.

I'm sad my family of origin didn't live up to what I expected. In the end, parents focused on parents' needs meant that it all fell apart -- my sister and I weren't sufficient, plus we got into arguments and had no experience about how to handle that. Maybe we hadn't had enough good nurturing, maybe who knows. So very sad, and my dream that things would somehow, someday be all "right" about that never came true.

Now, I feel like I don't have the "backstop" of a loving extended family, not just for myself but for my kids, too. Plus they have a mom who is still kind of unstable and depressed. But they seem to be doing OK, and maybe we can go on without that extended family? Hope so, because looks like we have to!!

Thanks, everybody, for your comments. I DO feel accepted here on PC -- even when different people and I have different views about things. Still, as a person I feel OK here. One of many good things about our changing social world, I guess.

Sadly, I think it is largely a matter of luck to find a therapist whose skills, abilities, temperament, etc. are a good match with what an individual needs. When I look back at the wasted years and time/money, I see that there was maybe very little chance of finding success in the therapist pool. I do consider myself lucky to have found the one I have now and I am so very sorry you didn't find one that you deserve.

I like the suggestion above o look at this in terms of your resilience. It's badly needed these days, all over the place.

When I feel this way I do tonglen meditation.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lio...suffering/amp/

I have suffered deeply in my life, but so has most of humanity and most of creation. Connecting with that through compassion helps me see both myself and the world with more tenderness.

You are not broken anymore than anyone else in the world suffering from any of a thousand maladies is. You are whole, just as they are.

I was very skeptical when i began tonglen, but the more I do it the more connected to so of humanity i feel, and the less uniquely bad and alone I feel. It's an easy sort of meditation as there is active visualization

I gave up looking for meaning in things like failed therapy. I find life largely arbitrary. Suffering and good fortune are not distributed evenly. People want tidy narratives. Good luck with that. I think getting scammed by therapy says more about the institution, the organization of society, and established hierarchies than it does about the victim.

Also, as someone said, most healthcare is a racket. I've been to 50-60 different practitioners past several years in pursuit of help with chronic illness. Most took my money and delivered little or nothing in return (though some gave it a good shot). I think most people selling cures or transformations are basically snake oil peddlers, or are vastly overselling what they do. Therapists especially.

I do too. But in order to get strong enough to try to do anything about any of that I feel like I have to accept the horribly unpleasant feeling/reality that I've been scammed. The naivete, vulnerability, neediness, weakness and psychological damage that other people had perpetrated on me before therapy. I need to accept what happened, because that's reality. I need to accept that's life. I need to accept, as BayBrony wrote

I've caused other people to suffer, too. Usually unintentionally, sometimes because the road to hell is paved with good (but unrealistic) intentions. In order to have a maybe realistic chance at affecting the organization of society toward something that causes less suffering, I need to accept reality as best I can. I need to accept it for me, too, in order to avoid as much additional suffering as I can.

What reality are you saying you need to accept???

The reality that I've been hurt, misled, and treated poorly. By people who I idealized for various reasons, including that's just what little kids do.

The reality that that was then and this is now and that old stuff doesn't necessarily have anything to say about what right now is or can be about. (especially now I've dug through or processed all or most of the held-onto internal c. . p. Don't know if that was really necessary in order to let it go, but it's what I have done on, what was I thought the recommendation of "professionals" at the time, years ago.)

This is an interesting post, here today. I'm sorry you have had these experiences. You don't really talk about how exactly you were not accepted though. In which way? Was it about specific features or a general, diffuse feedback?

I usually say to people that express similar sentiments that most often it's not that we are unacceptable, but that we trust, idealize and focus on the wrong people. Of course if it's coming from caregivers in childhood, that's a much tougher issue as there is little choice really. What I can share in that context is that I pretty much decided to detach myself from my mother at a very young age, like 4-5, and never truly engaged with her emotionally because we had very little in common. We got along okay and relatively peacefully but never had a close relationship. She criticized things, but from what I recall, it was more me not accepting her kind of love and care, refusing and rejecting her, up to the end of her life. A lot of that experience carried over into my subsequent relationships with females.

I tend to be extremely selective in who I trust and listen to, so this filters out a lot of the unwanted feedback. I also left therapists when I felt their approach had become too biased and skewed towards their expectations, then returned when I wanted to continue/hear what they had to say again. Some would describe this as resistance, and sometimes it can be, but often I think a good strategy. Not putting my self value dependent on them at all because I feel that therapy, and therapy relationships, are far too limited to reveal a whole, truly realistic picture about anyone. So I use Ts to address specific things, stuff where I trust their knowledge and skills, that's become my approach about it. And leave the rest. This is the result of experience though because in the beginning, when I first entered therapy, I thought I had a desire to share anything and everything with them. I actually figured I don't really have that desire after all.

I believe that my (repressed) feeling lack of acceptance came from my family of origin. It was a mostly a diffuse, disapproving feedback from my aunts and grandmother as well as a general sense that my mother didn't like me. I adapted by outwardly accepting their expectations and values, "being" a person they could approve of and like, though I had my own inside, in my own world. The two were just distinct. Outwardly I kind of clung to the family ways and values, in a detached sort of way. Hard to explain. The whole family was enmeshed, I think you could say. No other way of "being" there. To be really oneself, an individual, was to be rejected -- which was horrendous to me, too. And was eventually re-enacted in the last therapy, which has brought some of this more to the surface than had been apparent before.

Still, my outward, social complaint is that taking more than 50 years off and on, almost continuously for the last 20, in therapy for me to get to that seems like a scam. And I believe that's objectively valid. Some/many therapists may not know, but according to what they put out to the public about themselves and their profession, I believe they lead us on. Or at least led me on.

Yes, my learned tendency to idealize others, blame myself, and pollyannaism, a way to keep us enmeshed family members happy and feeling good about ourselves on the surface, definitely contributed to that problem. But internally I definitely TRIED to get to know myself, etc. The barriers were apparently just too great. Again, I put that on therapy -- to look out for, warn us about, look for different and better methods to help clients overcome issues like mine. Of course, if I were the only one who ever had this kind of problem. . .but I don't believe I am.

Well, identifying the problem is the first step toward fixing things. Maybe there is a different path for you and in accepting therapy isn't it, you will find what you need. Certainly sounds like you have put in a lot of effort and its just repeatedly backfired. Therapy is one way towards understanding yourself, but there are lots of others. Art, meditation, challenging yourself, travel, helping others etc etc.
Maybe you can channel the emotional energy that dragged you down in therapy to something that lifts you up.
The most important lesson I've learned in life is that i am really the only one who can help or save myself. It sounds like maybe you are rejecting your Reliance on others opinions of you, which will help guide you toward your own strength.

I hope this path brings you the peace and insight you haven't been able to find elsewhere

Well, probably those old enmeshed family relationships are no longer a barrier and you could create the life you want yourself, also without therapists given that it sounds like therapy was not a very satisfying approach for you? I am with BayBrony here: there are so many things we can do to feel better about ourselves. Therapy is really just one thing, it works for some but is completely useless for others, no matter how "good" a T is. I, for one, completely disagree with the notion many therapists claim, that the best way to "fix" things that go wrong in relationships in early life is through better personal relationships. For some, yes, but I don't think it's the same for everyone. There are many ways to discover personal values, contribute to society and create benefit for ourselves and others that do not involve directly pleasing other people emotionally or even connecting in very personal ways. So many ways to connect to our inner source and create a sense of identity and self worth. Instead of looking for and getting frustrated about what's missing, focusing on what is indeed there or creating it.

Thanks, BayBrony and Xynesthsia. I appreciate your points of view. But I feel somewhat dismissed by your comments and think it likely that you don't understand how limited I was to make decisions for "myself" in any way other than a rational decision-making process based on a cognitive analysis of what I "should" want or "should" do.

From that standpoint, I continue to believe that the psychotherapy literature and practice tends to mislead people who have lost, or never had, the intuition to "know better". And as part of the "helping professions", to whom desperate people sometimes turn, they have a responsibility to do better. Not that they will, necessarily, and then people are just s-o-l.

Hence this thread. Feeling scammed or s-o-l sucks, but better that than the denial.

What helps me some, in terms of coping with feeling conned or exploited, is to talk about it in strong language (here, other forums, in response to therapist blogs, yelp reviews).

I think therapy clients are conditioned to be timid and cautious when talking about adverse effects of therapy. Lot of subtle coercion and intimidation.

For me, knowing my therapist gratified needs at my expense, urged me to expose myself while she stayed largely concealed, then got rid of me on her terms... brings to mind a certain metaphor that people don't like but which seems appropriate:

I'm so sorry that happened to you, Bud. If it were any other environment therapists would be among the first to call something like that "emotional abuse". I don't really like that term for a variety of reasons, but it's a term that therapists have made popular and it seems fitting to apply it to your situation.

But, who is there in the public at large to notice or care about such things? Those of us who have been hurt by therapy are a very suspect group. I don't quite understand the social and group dynamics about it all, but it definitely seems to be the case.

What I do know, from personal experience, is that I was hurt and taken advantage of by licensed professionals in my community and there is no one in that community who cares about that. S-o-l for me. Sorry it sounds like that for you, too.

Seems to me nobody cares because not caring is better for business. To keep the product marketable, there has to be careful management of failures. Avoid the subject when possible. Keep things vague. Lots of smoke and mirrors. Blame the client using various well established manipulations. Clients who do not continue playing the game are persona non grata. Failed therapy is a non-event because the "right therapist" is out there somewhere and it's on you to track them down and have the failure erased.