Hatred toward therapist(s) and therapy

Based on my reading, I'll assume that therapists largely are well-meaning people. But nearly everything I read from them seems based on sweeping unfounded assumptions, showing an overarching tone of assumed omniscience and arrogance. My personal therapists seemed so wrapped in this theory that they abandoned cultural conditioning and common sense. And therapists I know outside of a clinical setting are insufferably vainglorious, seeing themselves as gurus and magi.

I can only comment on my own impressions and experiences. But my keyhole view only has shown me largely pretension and faith healing in the psych industry. There was a patriarchal current that ran contrary to my goals for growth.

I have always been suspicious of diagnosing oneself. Googling symptoms to diagnose, in particular, mental disorders, frequently don’t result in valid diagnoses.

You’re saying that your problems were ignored? Psychotherapy is of no help when the client waits for the clinician to ‘guess’ at diagnoses. You can’t expect to be treated for your ‘core problems’ if you’re awaiting questioning rather than participating in your treatment.

My advice would not include bringing your Googled self-diagnoses to appointments with a new therapist. Nor would I ask to be ‘fixed.’ You’re not a gelding.

Of it’s several parts, Psychotherapy assumes that the client is a participant in their quest for results. There is a great deal of introspection expected.

I do not ‘get’ the roil against the machine, here. I don’t ‘get’ the hatred of therapists and psychotherapy. Some here claim that they were damaged by therapists or therapy. Others claim that their experiences lacked efficacy. And others just seem miffed.

If you can release yourself from your Googled self-diagnoses I think that revisiting therapy may work for you.

Good luck.

I still cannot really see anything wrong or even strong about what you describe as anger/hatred towards the therapists and people in your family who treated you unfairly. I have done much stronger things than calling someone a ****** - in fact I don't recall using resentful/angry names and labels for anyone but unusually give people a much more complex feedback when I feel I am being treated unfairly or manipulated. I think sometimes that feedback can pierce through to a very sore spot and hurt some people profoundly because it gets into core issues. I consciously try to limit this kind of debunking illusions, facades and manipulations now but don't feel shy to use it when I face repeated ill will or mind games that affect me or those I care about.

I think anger and hatred are perfectly normal reactions to being wronged, manipulated, hurt etc. I also don't think it ever goes away completely if there is no resolution, especially if it is unfair - and often there is no resolution in the interpersonal world, people just stop interacting and move on in practical terms. Most people try to avoid direct conflict IMO - why many prefer passive aggression. I still feel hatred for the kids that bullied me in my childhood, even knowing full well it was ordinary, common kids behavior - knowing that does not take away the impact it had on me, some very lasting and ingrained. I also don't think I need therapy to "work through" that, there is nothing to work through really, it affected my self image and gave me some sensitive spots and will likely remain life long, but I am no longer self destructive due to it. It also, in many ways, equipped me with a hardiness and resilience that have come handy in many areas of my life, an ability to detach from useless attacks and maneuvers and go on without much injury. As a side effect, it has given me a challenge to be vulnerable in healthy ways in close relationships, but I feel this is still a better price to pay than being inhibited and vulnerable to manipulation. So, in some ways, I am actually grateful that those childhood things happened, as experiences and lessons learned very early. I also don't see a certain level of dissociation as unhealthy or unwanted, at all, if someone is aware of it and it's not extreme. I would not want to lower my guards to a paid stranger to mess with my self protection.

I also still feel hatred for my first therapist that is one of the biggest manipulators I have ever met in my life. I try not to look at his online media anymore because it just revokes my hatred and adds to it. But sometimes I feel an urge to check out what he is currently doing, and it usually triggers resentments. He was completely wrong interpreting that as innocent transference though and claiming that, if I did not resolved with him, I would keep repeating it. I never repeated it or even had similar feelings for anyone unless they were similar kinds of manipulators. I think it is a completely realistic and normal feeling and I would not want not to feel it and not being assertive - that would just make me pray to BS, gaslighting and twisted games.

I personally do not feel hatred toward the therapy industry as a whole, only that one T. I am very critical of both the conceptual bases of therapy and how it's practiced though and I doubt I will ever use it again because I think it just does not provide anything worth the money for me. It wasn't criticism I went into it with in the first place - I was completely open and enthusiastic for a while to the experience. What I think and feel now are conclusions based on my own experiences and reading about others', not some sort of a priori transference.

This comment is a bit dismissive in that it assumes that everyone with mental health-related issues will lack accurate and realistic perception of the self, others, and experiences. Mental health issues don't only include distorted perception and view of reality. It sounds like you are placing not only therapists (in general) in a "higher" position of know-it-all (or definitely seeing others more clearly than non-therapists), but also your own perception and opinions.

The fact that you don't get why some others are critical of therapy/therapists, why some have a dislike or even hatred for a specific T or the institution (usually based on quite extensive first-hand experience, not merely imagination and projection) only means that you don't get it and do not relate, nothing else. It does not mean that you are necessarily right about something you don't understand and identify with, it means that you have a different experience and opinion. But you keep responding on threads like this - why? Maybe throw a bit of introspection on why the urge to express strong views on things that you claim not to understand?

Absolutely 110% agree with this.

Thanks,
HD7970ghz

My therapy experiences ranged from useless to quite destructive. Mostly it was pointless nothingness, with a smattering of toxic dysfunction.

Use at your own risk. All sales final. May cause dizziness.

—

My experience has been that most therapists/shrinks are more empathetic than others who’ve not received similar training. They have their own experiences and are trained to draw upon their own resources to identify with the feelings of the client/patient.

I’m not aware of any specious methods that therapist’s use? I’m no fan of cognitive behavior therapy, although it seems to work for mild depression, &etc. CBT is the preferred therapy now. I think that it’s hooey.

I am so very confused when you assert that there is a system that breeds ignorant therapists. And then you reveal that you’re a therapist (bred in a system of ignorance, too?). I’m also confused about your method of processing feelings. I don’t believe that I need to accept fear in order to be rid of it. What you describe is more like — hmm — a digestive track that swallows horrible feelings whole, digests and expels them until another feeding. You describe the cycle of bipolar disorder, almost. I don’t always ‘hurt,’ though. And I don’t feel a need to be validated or accepted. I’ve been dealing with this crap since high school and I need no more validation (from the systematic ignorant, hurtful therapists?) and absolutely no acceptance. From whom? Those working for the clampdown?

This distrust and hatred stems from therapy or therapist? I’ve not yet read an account of someone so damaged but, certainly, I take them upon their word. I’m surprised, though, at the vehemence of the damaged souls — the slightest word of a single instance of poor psychotherapy practice and you’re invited to join the club.

Maybe I’m already far too damaged to suffer more. My skin is tough. I expect to rise and fall and I’m cognizant of my symptoms. I cannot, however, completely control myself. Not from the me that flies so high.

My symptoms.

I have become god.

I don't hate therapists. But I do depise them. They're not monsters obviously. I'm sure a lot mean well (although based on some testimonies here, some of them sound batshit crazy) but just because you mean well doesn't get you off the hook. They still claim a lot of stuff on their website using medical terms as if therapy is scientific (which it isn't) and they tend to not accept criticism well. Utimately, in my experience, therapy always ended up being ABOUT the therapist (their needs to feel needed, to feel competent, to get an ego boost, to be put on a pedestal by their clients, to "fix" themselves) rather than about the client. That's my main beef with therapists. I don't want to attend to the therapist's needs, don't want to be a "good" client. Not on my dime and on my time.

What I bolded makes very good sense to me. I went into therapy with people-pleasing, codependent attitudes and behavior that seemed "right" to me. I also tended to be obsessively self-critical, with what now seems to be a fantasy or illusion/delusion that if I could "fix" myself, or get myself "fixed" then that would also fix the problems in my family of origin and somehow, also, the problems I had in the rest of the world.

So I definitely DID want to be a "good" client. Being "good", or trying to, was part of the identity I went into therapy with. And it served the therapists' needs, too, until it didn't.

No more. "Not on my dime and on my time." And unfortunately, although I am certainly willing to "ask for help" -- I have in the past and could definitely use some pointers and collaboration to help me live my life better. But my experience is that there is no "help" out there for me in psychotherapy.

It took an awful lot of my money and time to come to that conclusion, however. Didn't serve me, doesn't serve the society at large. Who does it serve?

Only until I recognized what that system was doing. It took me sometime but I, unlike the majority of my colleagues, I didn't keep my eyes intentionally closed to make my life easier. As soon as I realized that I was in the system that promotes ignorance, I exited the system.

I understand though that some people here may mistrust me only on the basis of my profession and they will do so no matter what I say because for them I will always be one of "them" despite the fact that I too have been harmed by my profession. Whatever. I have no need to justify myself.

I never said that you or anyone needs to accept anything I say. Anyone can say anything they want and each one of us will decide what they will and will not accept.

Nowhere in my post did I invite anyone to join any club but, I guess, people see what they want to see

Have a nice day.

Countertransference is EXTREMELY common and is a product of being human. All therapists experience it whether they admit it or not. I think what makes a good therapist is one who is aware of it and chooses not to act on it.

Apparently a bunch of them do and wallah - abuse...

Personally, I believe the efficacy of therapy needs to be researched FAR more by third party organizations who operate double blind studies. Something about the whole concept of someone being so vulnerable with a fallible human being who has all the power in the world... Quite disturbing.. I know I walked into therapy with a preconcieved notion that it was SAFE. Is it?

Thanks,
Hd7970ghz

Yes. Quite.

Like Myrto, i found the system exists mainly to process the needs of the massive therapist class. They talk a lot about serving the client, but i think that is the big lie... therapy is for therapists. You are welcome to show up and try to extract some benefit from it, but you are supporting cast. The therapist is the star of the show. It was overt co-dependency but always with therapist needs at the center. My sense is that some or many of them are literally addicted to client worship, and feed off it parasitically and compulsively. Failed therapy threatens all of this, and that's why difficult clients get thrown off a cliff and replaced with new blood.

Sorry if that was a lame suggestion.

I wouldn't necessarily equate moving on with not being immersed in. I just wonder if the negative experiences with therapists can change neural pathways and was thinking of a possible way out, to regain positive connections. Take care.

I've never really been hurt by a therapist, but I have had some bad ones. The worst one just sat there and didn't say anything most of the time. But maybe that works with some people. I'm pretty much done with individual therapy. I do group therapy now, because I like to talk to people who understand what I'm going through.

I went to graduate school in the 1990's and some of my classmates were clinical psychologists in training. All of us in the psych program (there were about 30 over all the subfields in psychology and about 6 in clinical training) had to take courses in all kinds of assessment, clinical and otherwise. The studies about the efficacy of therapy have existed for at least 30 years, and double blind studies are not possible (because the subjects in the study know if they are getting therapy or anti depressants or alternatives like acupuncture), but subjects are randomly assigned to one treatment condition or the other. All the studies are conducted by researchers, not practicing therapists (and it would be difficult for a practicing therapist to have the funding to conduct these studies, as they are expensive). Some of them if they involve anti depressants are funded at least in part by the drug companies. But in the meta analyses, therapy shows very modest efficacy, but typically not very distinguishable at all from other interventions. I think if this research didn't exist, insurance companies wouldn't pay for therapy. So at least insurance companies believe in the effectiveness of therapy.

Some of these findings are in this article I linked below, but you can find at least some of this research on the web.

But the other thing is that even if we say therapy is effective, that does not mean any given person is safe in therapy. The fact that therapy is generally effective (and not all issues have been studied for their effectiveness, depression may be the most often studied) doesn't mean that all therapists can be effective with all clients in all modalities. A bad or unethical therapy, in turn, doesn't speak to the issue of whether therapy is generally effective. What needs to be more closely studied is why or how or when it is not effective, which would involve very different research issues and much more sophisticated and intensive study.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3408478/

This guy says it is not a science but a craft. I think he is full of himself -but I think that about almost all of them.

https://www.psychotherapynetworker.o...ttled#Comments

I agree. Even if you don't think psychotherapy is like medicine, it is researched somewhat as if it were. There are studies, for instance, about the efficacy of various chemotherapies for cancer. The side effects are well known, and there is research into possible mechanisms of action and reasons for effectiveness, or lack thereof. I believe there is also research into differences in effectiveness among individuals and what biological factors might distinguish those for whom a chemo is effective from those for whom it is not.

Nothing like that is currently done with psychotherapy.

Therapy cannot be studied like a medical intervention... because it's not medical in any way. It's a social construct and social experiment, and as such outcomes will never be reproducible and never be evidence-based. The biz continues to suggest they can apply something like scientific controls to human relationships, and thus it's "treatment". That's dishonest and ridiculous.

That depression meta-analysis is insane. It's the usual drugs-therapy mania. They mention "alternative" options but don't define that other than mentioning exercise and acupuncture in passing. Christ, hypothyroidism or nutrient deficiency or mercury poisoning can ruin your life and cause major mood disturbance. Would treatment for those conditions be "alternative"? There are many other causes. Instead they focus on therapy and drugs, both non-treatments and both cash cows that carry high risk of dependency and addiction.

If it's a craft or art, as he suggests, then why are these clowns making "diagnoses" and talking about "treatment plans"?

I like how he assumes his hypothetical client never considered that his/her own mother had a hard life. Always always the client is assumed to be the village idiot.

I don't know much about research limitations of whatnot, it certainly needs to be looked at closely. I do believe unethical behavior in therapy is higher than we will ever know and that disturbs me. So many ruined lived, souls lost amidst the fog of trauma.. terrifying stuff. Makes me hurt just thinking about it.

I disagree. I think there is a biological/personal component to psychological problems and a social one, and the interaction is not all clear.

I think a psychological/biological component might be studied, as I suggested above.

The influence of social factors on a person's psychological functioning -- how does one study that? My background is in natural science, not social science. And I think there is a ton of investigation into all kinds of things that fall under "social science" that just is not at all clear. The world needs a lot better social science in general, in my opinion. But until the breakthrough perspectives or paradigms or whatever it will be have developed, they aren't here yet.

ETA: My feelings of hatred toward therapists and therapy falls in the social domain. Even though it's personal in me, it's a result of social factors in my interaction with therapists and the institution of therapy. It provides a warning signal and motivation in me to stay away from those people.

The previous sentence above is framed in a natural science way, so it can be done. If, socially, people were interested in trying to do that.

You make many good points. Even though I have a PhD in a social science, I'd be the first one to say that there's much more we don't know about understanding human behavior than we do. However, the therapy efficacy studies are really simple and modeled after the medical intervention studies. For example, people interested in a study where they could receive either psychotherapy or anti-depressants enroll, they are randomly selected and receive either 3 months of therapy or 3 months of anti depressants. A control group, if the study uses one, is a group of people who are placed on a waiting list for three months (then they will be assigned an intervention after that time.

Fast forward three months, and the researchers assess symptoms of (say, depression) again. The typical results are that the people who had therapy and the people who took anti depressants are statistically doing better than the control group (nothing, but waiting); but therapy and anti depressant groups are not statistically different.

A meta analysis is a way of using statistics to see if there is significant effect of a large group of similar research studies and how large the effect is. It's considered more "scientific" (it gets used in medical studies too) because it aggregates across numerous studies and can estimate how "big" the effect is, how much, in essence, therapy helps people. And the usual finding is it helps a small, moderate amount, for example, in depression symptoms. There's another area of study that demonstrates that intensive therapy helps keep people out of the hospital, another reason why insurance companies pay for therapy. But even with meta analyses and many generations of studies, there's not a lot of depth to the research. I'm not interested in having a debate about the research as there is, as is said in law, "general acceptance" of the fact that therapy is modestly effective for many common issues, and anecdotes don't contradict that. I'm glad the research exists, and I hope one day that it grows to understand therapy in a more nuanced one. Lecture over.

Thanks, Anne, I'm sorry that you aren't interested in having a debate -- or even just an exploratory discussion -- about the research because I think the "general acceptance" of things as they are is a big part of what I see as a problem. Maybe not a problem in terms of maintaining social stability in the status quo but it is a problem in terms of advancing the knowledge and overcoming blind spots, including why are some people helped by therapy and some aren't? Why do some people get worse in therapy? Are there ways to better predict who might get worse and who is likely not to? Those kinds of questions cannot be examined by statistical studies of the sort that you described.

I agree most afflictions are due to combination of psycho-social, situational, biological, environmental factors, and these factors can be studied.

I'm saying therapy as an intervention is not medical and not scientific and most studies spin outcomes data to make it like something scientific and reproducible is going on. I think it's an attempt to legitimize and medicalize a practice that has a huge credibility problem.

If you report therapy outcomes for a group of depressed people without identifying the causes of depression, then it's meaningless data.

And how are they measuring progress? There is no blood test to show progress with psych or life issues. Everyone knows therapy clients are prone to over-stating benefits, as are therapists. You are trying to extract objective data from a heavily loaded, sometimes co-dependent, highly engineered, highly variable relationship that is more like religious conversion than treatment. I think the more you break it down, the more sketchy it becomes.