When your t shares too much about their private life.

I feel bad about my own life and when I hear about ts and when she self discloses too much I begin to hate my own life.
She talks a lot about her children and is always going to visit them.
Yesterday she cried in session(again) because she had neglected one son and now feels as though he slipped under her radar.
I felt really bad for her but also for me because I didn't have a good relationship with my parents and when I hear how much she cares it really tugs at my heart strings.
I would like to tell her this and eventually I will. I just get very upset and now I try not to upset my own clients or tell them too much about my life.
I see how they try to find out information but I don't want them looking after me like I had to look after my t.

Sounds like your T needs her own T. That's not cool and I think you should bring it up sooner than later if possible. maybe I'm letter form if it's hard to talk about.

Sorry Mona but who was paying for this session? Isn;t this meant to be your space and not hers? She is not very good at being a therapist.

That's putting it lightly

Well, I don't know what and who she cares about, but it does not sound like she cares about her job and professionalism, at all. Maybe can provide an example how NOT to do therapy?

It is giving me great insight as to how not to do therapy and how to make your clients feel bad.
She is very real and relational and sometimes it's nice that is real and doesn't always do everything right. She has thought me lots, some good some bad.
I am paying for my sessions, I think I might start charging her.
She is one of the most popular ts in my town. I do think she takes the piss with me at times but it also works to my advantage. She bends the rules for me at times and for that I am entirely grateful, it doesn't stop my feelings getting hurt though

I wouldn't even bother explaining to her how you feel. I dropped my last therapist just because she spent too much time talking about herself and that wasn't even about emotional or hugely personal issues. It's MY 45 minutes! I would find a better therapist. (And the fact that she violates boundaries and you like it isn't mitigating. Loose boundaries--even in your favor--won't help you in the long run and may cause problems.

This. And the fact that you think it is mitigating worries me mona. On a number of levels.

One of my T's uses self disclosure very well , but it's always relevant to me and my therapy - he also says you have to be careful not to turn the client into your T. Your T needs her own T / supervision , this shouldn't be happening and must be very confusing for you.

Would you bend the rules for your own clients? Some of them? Any of them?

Not everything is black and white.

Having clear, consistent, ethical boundaries for your clients needs to be black and white.

Ok I am stepping away from this forum for the foreseeable future because of judgement.
Thank you for all of your replies and responses and thank you for all of the support and friendships I have made.

Mona, it is of course fine to step away from the forum, but I would perhaps try to consider a little why you get these "judgmental" comments in nearly every response when you write about this therapist. I don't think it was anywhere similar when you wrote about the other T that you saw for a time. I don't think the judgment is targeted toward you primarily, but I would not dismiss feedback that so massive. Otherwise what's the point of these discussions?

You chose to disclose that you are a therapist on this forum. I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about a practicing therapist who thinks the behaviour you describe in your therapist is acceptable. You are very defensive any time anything on the subject is raised. I sincerely hope you reflect on why that is.

I knew this was hitting stuff and I'm sorry Mona - what this is hitting is very painful. I don't feel people intend to be judgemental or shaming , we just see you getting continually hurt.

What sort of support do you want here? What sort of response would be supportive instead of judgmental to you?

That doesn't seem quite fair. the OP has not asked for opinions about how she practices Any number of self identified therapy students, and some other self identified therapists, even those who speak about seeing clients themselves, are not subject to such scrutiny. Certainly I have questioned whether any number of these people should ever be let near a client even with a supervisor. There are articles by practicing therapists who talk about how hard it was to leave abusive/bad/insane therapists that they hired while practicing. Acting as a therapist seems to have little to no bearing on what someone does with the therapist they hire.
It was a constant theme in "in treatment" as well.

I feel like this is the same as someone in an abusive relationship so I try and support the person but sometimes get so annoyed at the abuser. I am sorry Mona.

Every relationship I have been in that has hurt me has been one where I describe the person as different and not like others and we have a special bond. We don't and I am being manipulated. If a person really is special and a bond really is special then it doesn't need to be hidden. I fear you are not a special person in her life but a person she may be manipulating. I wish you strength and courage to get out of this situation.

i personally love that my T shares a lot of personal info but it does play on my deep desire to become friends at some point. we seem more like that already

Thank you for your post sd.

Mona,

I am sorry you are getting all the judgment, hooking your profession with your experience as a therapy client. It is an unfair connection. There are so many people here that are in professions where they are responsible for the care of others, teachers from preschool on up, medical doctors, caregivers, etc., that are in precarious mental states, and members on PC promote their going to work and being the responsible adult that their chosen profession requires them to be. Many were still on their game and some not so. Yet, as a mom, I would be horrified to know the dicey mental state that many were in while they were taking care of my child or any other child, especially those underaged or developmentally disabled.

Several years back, I had a conversation with my previous therapist who said of another student/therapist in training that did not have a stellar therapist, that she could still learn from that therapist on how she did not want to be as a therapist and formulate what makes a good therapist and help herself to move forward in her life.

I have had good therapists, bad therapists, and so-so therapists. If you were my therapist, my hunch is that you would be one of the good ones.

All the best to you Mona.

For me, the point of these discussions is not to pass judgment and put pressure on someone to leave their therapist but to share my own experience that may be of help to the OP. If I have no experience I do not post or if the post affects me, I let the OP know that I hear them. When I feel judgemental I ignore the post and keep my fingers away from my keyboards.

Just my two cents.

I was responding specifically to the "black and white" comment in response to someone questioning her about her clients. At that point she chose to engage with the question about her clients. I don't see how at that point it is unreasonable to comment on it.
For me it's not the abusive therapist who is of concern, it is the OP's statement that boundaries aren't black and white in reference to her therapist's boundaries and her own as a therapist.

I personally would not hire a therapist that would not break the rules — THE BOUNDARIES!
Woe is the therapist that uses a cookie cutter approach with their clients. I can only do me. I need my therapist to be above Black or White thinking. I did enough of that kind of thinking myself and it ruined my early life.

Rules, i.e. boundaries, serve as guidelines.

What one does in therapy and how a therapist practices is not something that should be or needs to be hooked together by faceless strangers on an Internet forum. Who cares if someone shares their profession. They like most, come here to be supported. This board often holds certain people to different standards, many times out of convenience to what's happening in their own life/therapy at the moment. The patterns are there.

For me there is a difference between boundaries and boundaries. Some are really black and white and oversharing for me definitely belongs to this class. For me a T who talks about his own stuff in my session where I'm paying for it is total no-no.

I know quite many things about my T because I'm very good at finding information from internet. I've told him the information I've found and me knowing these things does not make him uncomfortable. He probably would not have told me these things by me just asking though and he definitely wouldn't have volunteered this this information.

Sometimes, very rarely, when we have talked about something more abstract related to psychology or psychotherapy, when I've expressed some of my opinions on these topics, he has also stated his opinions. I have always caught it very quickly and told him that if he wants to really have these kinds of discussions with me then we could have them but at some other place and other time and I definitely wouldn't pay for that time. In session, even when I raise such topics, his focus should not be on engaging in an intellectual conversation about it but trying to figure out what's the underlying emotional theme. That's what I'm paying him for.

I've understood that I have very high demands for the therapists that I'm willing to hire and I'm really not willing to compromise here. If I would not have found a T who satisfies my requirements then I would not have started therapy at all. For me bad therapy is much worse than no therapy at all.