Did you seek further therapy after a bad or harmful therapy experience?

I agree. I do admit that, even in the middle of my traumatic experience, I was in a much better place emotionally than many people in similar situations, therefore less vulnerable and less craving emotional support but rather looking for insights that would help me understand what happened. The way my mind works is when I get full clarity on something I have full freedom a.k.a power to decide what to do with it.

Even before that unfortunate thing happened to me, I had developed a habit of focusing on understanding my own needs and motivations and where they come from thus understanding what is and isn't in my best interests, as opposed to blindly following my passions and fantasies. This empowered me to develop critical thinking, to think independently for myself, to trust my common sense and intuition rather than to rely on opinions of all kinds of "experts". That's why I didn't get completely engulfed in the turmoil of all kinds of powerful emotions that harmful therapy situation entails, though I had felt every single one of them to the fullest. I consciously and intentionally made it my priority to create a distance between my emotional storms and the part of myself that I would call an "Observer", a wise and neutral part that watched what was happening and judged it objectively. This "Observer" is what I identified myself with, not my emotions...But this goes beyond the psychology level, it's a level of spirituality, which may not be the best subject to discuss here, though these two are inseparable IMO.

The bottom line is that yeah I was in a better place than most people in this situation and didn't crave emotional support as much.

I don't have a great support system especially when it comes to my mental health. My family's idea of helping me when I'm suicidal is to say "Just don't do it". They don't want to hear my issues, even though they love to share their own issues. My fiance will listen, but he tries to "fix" things. The support here on PC really helped me through it, but it didn't provide me with the safety I needed, and sometimes hurt. The counselor from the crisis house, the group T, and advocate were only temporary supports. But I knew I wanted a T because it had helped in the past.

I don't know how long I would have made it if I didn't find my T. It was hard enough losing ex-T and then the next T not working out. But I would have kept trying.

This is something I identify with very closely, I even described my version to others in a very similar way and words, Observer and all. I often wonder though whether the same mechanism and strong conscious identity is not also a form of fear-based, exaggerated avoidance. It is clearly a powerful self-protective mechanism. One of the therapists I worked with often talked about my strong resistances, and this fierce independence and inclination to come to my own conclusions in nearly every situation certainly generates a certain kind of immunity and detachment from external influence, also meaning that I often see the therapist (people in general) and my relationship with them in a way that many have described as analytical to the level of intimidating.

The interesting part is that I am definitely not unable or unwilling to engage or even get deeply engangled in situations that I am interested in, and can get pretty obsessed with finding my own truth in them. So those shorter term, occasional consultations are what I have figured are the most beneficial for me. One of my therapists just tried to convince me recently that this is resistance and is not in my best interest. I do consider his views but have no intention to go back to him unless I have a clear idea what the purpose would be, and I refuse to see this type of "resistance" as an emotional block. I guess this is just like most things, depends on quality and quantity. Beneficial if balanced but can create blocks if it's extreme, if it blocks getting in touch with my own and others' emotional nature. I certainly feel that all this protects me from probably ever really being harmed by a therapist (at this point, I think it could have happened when I was younger), but it also makes me fairly therapy-resistant. I like to read, think and talk about therapy, but on a more personal level I tend to be quite immune to it at the same time. At least as far as the so-called long-term depth therapies go.

i definilty can relate to this concept and feel similar. i have noticed that since ending therapy, this 'wise' part of me is even better at objectively and patiently observing my life and what is going on, instead of being so emotionally directed, like i was when i was in T. i image it as reaching a level of self maturity, and it has been this personal growth and level of maturity that i have aspired too that helped me to end and leave therapy. basically, i outgrew my T.

i don't feel that this 'wise' part of me comes from a place of fear, more from a place of logic, fairness, understanding and empathy, but i do agree with you that it is a powerful self protective mechanism.

similar to you, i also don't agree with your T who considers this a form of resistance and not in your best interest. for me, it is a self protective survivor mechanism that is effective in assisting me to make informed decisions about the interactions and relationships in my life, but does not stop me from feeling or experiencing those relationships....i.e. it is not hindering. i definilty have disdain for Ts who throw around this blanket term of 'resistance' without fully understanding what is really going on and feel they tend to use it more out of frustration to control or shame a challenging client when the T is having difficulty in bringing forth a desired full on 'emotional release' that they themselves are craving to receive from the client.

but that is a topic for another thread...

Same here. I also don't feel and don't believe that the "Observer" part is my defense mechanism.

Any defense, by definition, is an unconscious behavior aimed at keeping certain unwanted feelings or motivations from coming to surface and becoming conscious and it is doing so in order to protect the person from feeling pain.

The Observer does the opposite. It forces me to stay as conscious as possible of all my mental and emotional processes, which implies that I HAVE TO feel every single emotion I could detect to the fullest in order to be aware of it. Otherwise, how can you be aware of something if you don't feel it?

When people think that the Observer could be a psychic defense, I think they confuse it with what I'd call the Analyst. The Analyst often plays a defensive part because it uses logic and "rational" intellectualizing in order to avoid seeing some unpleasant parts of reality and feeling some unpleasant feelings that come with it.

The Analyst and The Observer have nothing to do with each other. The Observer doesn't intellectualize or analyze. It simply observes and it tries to do so as neutrally as possible.

Many spiritual teachings point to the Observer as the major factor in our personal growth. As they believe, the Observer is what our so-called Self really is, as it's neither our thoughts nor our feelings nor our beliefs nor our behavior nor any other of our attributes. It is the part that simply "takes a note" of what's going on without any judgement whether positive or negative.

But yeah, this is an entirely different subject . I am afraid I've digressed too much already.

Yes I mixed up the phenomenon of that Observer (I also derive my description from spiritual concepts) with intellectualization a bit. My view though is that these these things are interconnected, exist more on a spectrum rather than isolated "entities" within us.

Are all defenses unconscious? I don't think so. Perhaps depends what we call "defense". I think the most mature mechanisms derive from prior understanding and awareness and conscious choices. I don't even think that avoidance is always unconscious, I know I do a lot of it fully knowing what I am doing, that can actually be sometimes the most annoying part, being aware, knowing how it works, and still doing it. Like an addiction, when someone is already out of the uncomscious denial phase yet keeps running the cycle. That was my main reason why I stopped going to regular therapy sessions as well. I merely just used it as a form of "drug seeking", but it took a while and was not linear at all to break it. I was well-aware for a while that my therapy turned into that, even told my Ts, who did not seem to see it as a problem at all, of course, it kept bringing them jobs and their own form of it, I believe.

But going back to the OP topic in this context: I often think of going from one (useless or harmful) T to another as a form of harm reduction, not solution. I had several addiction-like issues in my life, both substance and behavioral, and harm reduction absolutely did not work for me. It puts me back into the same cycle, or a different one, real quickly. That was also my experience with the two therapists I have had, even after I stopped the actual sessions and just stayed in touch via email. Still bursts of obsessions via email, and it was surprisingly easy to pull the Ts into it with me as well. It's only been most recently (past two weeks) that I have finally decided to put an end to these relationships for good. To end the harm reduction approach as well and get really sober from all forms of it. We'll see how it goes. Of course not suggesting this is a general mechanism and how it goes for everyone or even most, but has been my experience. I ended up using therapy as an escape, avoidance, distraction to really deal with some of my problems, and I was only unaware of this for a approximately half of it. The irony, and sucess part, is that the round with my second T really helped me to end a nasty substance relapse. But then I replaced it with the "therapy" itself, and that has to go as well. Okay, so I guess the harm reduction actually worked, therapy is certainly far less dangerous than what I was doing with alcohol. But not the end of the process

I've had a bad therapy experience. It wasn't just one T. It was intensive treatment and there was a lot of therapy and T's. I've stayed there for a year, which was the max time you could receive treatment there. After some months there, I started to get worse, more depressive and such. But I stayed. I didn't feel I had much choice. I was 18, I had had other therapies, my parents made me go and I had no one else. I thought I was the problem. I was just useless and everything.
Only a few years later, when I finally had a good T, I realised how bad T's they really were.

I've never seeked help for this, but I have worked in therapy on this, because at some points it just went clear how much it still bothered me and how much it had influenced me and it still does a little bit.

Seems it's usually presented as the only solution. In order for the system to stay afloat, more therapy must be pushed as the answer to everything that happens in therapy. Even someone exploited in the most egregious way would seemingly be exhorted to get a new therapist asap. I can't envision a scenario where this would not be so.

In my case it felt compulsory. I was not thinking for myself. I let the therapist think for me. Therapist said get with a new therapist, so I did it. Yes, mommy. I was in maximum infantilized mode. And because she used the word "referrals" often, I was talked into believing there was a network of trained "clinicians" waiting to treat my various disorders and pathologies, which had now reached a paroxysm of madness, not because of the prior therapy, but because I got lotsa issues!

Would you like to elaborate on another thread?

I think there's a connection, at least for me, between whatever it is that gets messed up in bad therapy, or was messed up and retraumatized in therapy, and what you describe as the Observer. An upset, chaotic mind kind of makes it hard for the Observer do its "noting", it seems like. Also if/when I'm blindly following a path outlined by authority or obsession.

One of the benefits of therapy is supposed to be that we become more aware of ourselves. But if the therapy itself makes it harder for the Observer to observe, then. . .???

I certainly have been like that, too. Even though I was fairly competent in some areas of my life -- or at least HAD BEEN. Who can tell for sure, though, because I had lost my husband and even though we had an egalitarian relationship, I had still come to depend on him a lot. And missed him horribly.

this is a fascinating observation you point out, using therapy as an escape or avoidance. from lurking around often on the online therapy/survivors forums over the years, i believe there is a lot evidence of many clients who actually do this.

i reckon i did too...especially during those times when a lot of my therapy was centered around the chaos of the relationship with my T, including all the ruptures. i knew what i needed to work on, what i wanted to work on (my sexual abuse truama), but was very easily seduced and persuaded by my T that we needed to spend that time focusing on what was supposedly going on between us in the therapy, in the relationship. for me, this is exactly where i believe much of the harm came from..it felt like as we spent my therapy time focusing on our 'relationship', it was mostly fulfilling his needs more than mine, and at both my emotional and financial expense.

this sounds like a good example of how many clients, especially the the very vulnerable or deeply wounded ones, possibly can get stuck into the pattern of believing that to actually over come their wounding, that they must seek the help from a therapist.

if you don't mind elaborating, when seeking other therapists to help after your harmful T, what was it that finally convinced you that you did not care to partake in any further help from therapists?

Yes, I began therapy after a very nasty experience. I only agreed to it, because I knew the psychiatrist. She thought it would help me heal from the hell I went through during my adolescence and understand myself better, so I decided to give her a chance. In the beginning I was suspicious, because I have been screwed by the profession. She demonstrated to me that I could trust her. So far she hasn't come up with absurd explanations to explain my 'issues'.

Misdiagnosis is what harmed me, and it was profound. I was diagnosed with all kinds of personality disorders (and treated like a piece of ****). With that came all kinds of reasons for my problems or issues. They came up with ridiculous reasons such as repressed memories of sexual abuse, and really bad parenting. Apparently my parents had personality and substance abuse problems which they do not. They even told me my family was dysfunctional. It was really confusing to hear all this, even though I knew none of it was accurate. At first I didn't challenge them, because they were professionals. Eventually I started to doubt them.

I was also diagnosed with dissociation, PTSD, and bipolar disorder. Actually they were diagnosing the side effects of medications. A lot of them couldn't think and come up with a diagnosis on their own. They all required medical records.

It was definitely all about conformity back then. The professionals had all the power and if I questioned them they saw it as evidence of a disordered personality. I heard how I would never recover and that my situation would never improve. They very were wrong about that. I defied them. How? I quit therapy, and stopped all the medications. My head cleared and life improved. I proved to myself they were wrong. It was the best thing I did.

Now I understand what happened and how ASD got confused with personality disorder.

I'm still healing. It is going to take years.

Sure, I can open a thread with this topic and elaborate on this. What specifically would you like to know? I am just thinking in terms of how to name the thread. I've never started a thread here before.

Sorry, I delayed the response. I often don't follow discussions. If you need to ask questions don't hesitate to PM me, as I don't hang out here all the time and may miss your posts. Besides, this things get off topic and I don't want to hijack threads.

Initially it was simply that none of the many therapists I talked to had anything very meaningful to say. And some were manipulators. I got tired of being jerked around and humiliated by this parade of phonies and nursemaids. The whole thing made me so miserable that I had take a hard look at everything that had happened. The more I looked, the worse it appeared.

And during this time I was starting to read about the therapy experiences of others online, and starting to see forest for the trees. This was critical. Therapy is extremely isolating and disorienting. Seeing others say the same stuff I was thinking helped.

Plus I read whatever published therapy criticism I could find (not much).

yes, i too found therapy to be incredibly isolating and disorienting. i use to believe it felt this way because of my symptoms and the exact issues that brought me to seek therapy in the first place, but now i feel quite differently and suspect it was because of the therapy and the method to how it was conveyed.

i too feel it has been quite helpful seeing others saying similar and is what probably helped me the most to be able to end with my ex-T...knowing i was not alone feeling this way about my therapy experince.

I am sure many therapists would disagree, but I think that therapy can easily (and probably often does) create a parallel universe, which takes the attention away from the issues the client went in originally. And then we should talk about the T relationship (or even want to, because it feels so important) all the time instead of the problems that plague us in everyday life. Sure, some aspects of the T relationship may resemble our other relationships, and bring up hidden paterns, but a lot of it is probably also specific to that one relationship. This was the point when I decided that I had enough of interacting with my therapists recently. They became far too self-centered and self-referential.

One of them showed relatively little interest in the issues and insights I brought up myself, and put the focus on the conflicts between us, insisted that I go to sessions to talk about our fights and disagreements, I really had the impression that he was projecting onto me far more than vice versa and imagined that we had similar backgrounds and roots to problems, which I don't think was the case at all. And when I told him this, he would get quite offended.

With my other T, there was indeed a lot of similarity, which became quite an irresistible element of our interactions and a main focus, kinda competing out what I was really there for, and then I got overly hooked on that and used it for distraction.

So my conclusion at the moment is that, if I want to use professionals to discuss specific problems and challenges, I prefer to consult with experts in that area who can and are driven to give practical advice and not get into the relationship stuff and emotional factors between us. Focus on that and move on. I much prefer to build and work on relationships that are present in my everyday life, rather than some kind of supposed template and pay a lot of money for it.

Golden words.

In every therapy I had everything went downhill the moment my real life problems were pushed aside and "The Relationship" with the therapist became the central focus, not because I needed it but because the therapist needed it.

I didn't even consider my interactions with the first therapist a "relationship" until he suggested that "our relationship" needed to be discussed. My first reaction was like "Ha? What relationship?" I was seeing him as an expert in the certain field who could, hopefully, help me sort out my numerous personal struggles, which, in turn, would help me start envisioning solutions. To me he was just a consultant of some sort and my "relationship" with him was no more of a relationship than it'd be with a medical doctor or a hairdresser, an auto-mechanic, anyone who provides service. To me the word "relationship" never applied to interactions and all sorts of communications with service providers.

Unfortunately, back then I was too unsure of myself and bought into the idea of the "relationship" and the necessity to "explore" it because I figured that the "expert" would know better. This was the main reason therapy caused me so much damage.

I just haven't had any really good therapy experience. I don't like the dumb things they say, or I can't stand to hear myself say the dumb things that I say. I don't understand what the process is even supposed to be, they do not explain it. I figured out the whole DBT/CBT thing and don't need to pay to hear the psy say the same thing every time.

I'm not in t anymore.

this was my experince as well.

agreed!

and i know the Ts and others may refute this by saying 'but the evidence shows that it's the relationship that heals', and my response is 'yes...to a point, but....'
i agree that you have to be able to have a workable relationship, one that involves trust, support, and a sense that they at least care enough to have an interest in your issues, but i don't think this relationship should involve becoming overly focused on analysing, sometimes over analysing, every interaction that is playing out in the therapy between the client and T. this is where i believe the therapy becomes too focused on the T and their needs and this is when it has the potential to become harmful, or at the least, unhelpful for the client and usually at the clients expense (emotionally and/or financially).

i was naive too and although i thought i was going for 'expert' advice when i first started T, it soon switched to 'we must focus on our relationship', and i was none the wiser nor did i challenge it because i thought he was the expert and who was i to question or doubt what he was doing?

i wonder if a lot of clients have been hooked into therapy because of this similar naivety?

I definitely think that if I went to therapy young, I could have bought into it much more and could potentially have had a very painful experience/lesson. I often have this impression reading the "romantic feelings" subforum, and in many other ways as well. But I started to experiment with it as a client when I was 40, being in the mental health field for many years (research), having been exposed to a lot of psych literature and education. Also signed up to PC and read this forum almost from the beginning of my therapy journey in 2015. So I was aware of and knowledgeable about a lot of things from start, plus definitely not a person not knowing who I am and what drives me. I think these experiences are the ones that made me both curious and also skeptical and quite resistant to therapy. But I still had the experience I described above, I did get hooked to a certain extent, in spite of the awareness. So yes, I absolutely believe that the business often thrives on naivety and faith, but also it can just be extremely habit forming. This is one reason why I am not much for treating harmful therapy with more therapy, even though there are exceptions and positive outcomes.

An analogy I can come up with is benzodiazepine drugs that were developed to treat anxiety symptoms. They are indeed extremely effective to provide acute relief, but extremely addictive as well, especially in people who are prone to getting hooked. And when that happens, it is no longer treatment for the original condition but a whole different problem, a very hard one to break for many.

I have had many sessions with many therapists, many of whom were dedicated and caring people. However, there is always one bad apple. This guy seemed oblivious to my distress and more concerned with his his upcoming lunchtime. During my outpouring of unhappiness and helplessness, he was attempting to stifle a yawn! And doing it as if I wasn't there watching him! He was clearly not suited for the job.
I didn't go back to him and I phoned his employers and told them of my experience and within a short time he was gone.
I feel no regret that he is off to another profession. He was educated in teaching, and there is always a need for them, so maybe it was better all around.
I continued to seek help with another therapist and then another as the years rolled by and they moved on. Never stop looking for help from caring people. If you don't feel good with the fit, then seek out somebody you will like. Don't try and go it alone please. Good luck.

I suppose the answer to your question of why do we seek therapy is simple. We realize that we are in need of help and we finally get up the gumption to find relief which is not looking like a pill, a shot, a bewildered family member, a noose, an instant fix, real or imagined. If we had friends who knew what and when to say it, how lucky we'd be. If we had a supportive family member, that would be good too. Life doesn't deal the cards, you gotta pick and choose and hope this will work. I believe that going on a long walk in a beautiful setting could be better than sitting in a room with a complete stranger, going over the same old, same old. But when ill, that would be a hard choice to make. So would choosing the right ear to listen to your pain. Tree therapy is not for everybody. When one can find what works for them in the sense of leaving much of the past in the shadows, Hallelujah!