Poll: Ever been rejected or disrespected by a therapist?

No, although there have been moments I have felt rejected. After the borderline'ish 2 year old'ish fog has faded I've always understood that that was not really the case.

Other — we’re still talking about it, results tbd :/

Yes, went thru a bizarre rejection, and with other therapists there was vaguely insulting or antisocial behavior.

BTW, that guy Lambert in the video is full of s**t. Ok he gets one gold star for talking about therapy failure, but he is just another weasly and paternalistic talking head putting failure on the clients.

He's yammering about "psychological test data" and "computer models" and other BS contrivances, trying to make relationships into medical or scientific entities. It's absurd.

If it's so hard just to establish the basic impact of therapy on the client, and you can't just ask simple questions and get reasonable answers from the client, and the therapist can't process those answers without distorting everything with bias and wishful thinking, then something might be wrong.

What these buffoons ought to be saying is... we have no clue what will or will not help a given person's psych/emotional/life problems, engineered relationships are inherently risky, that will never change, thus proceed with extreme caution.

ps: This is the bias that he and seemingly all psych professionals are beset by:
https://yourbias.is/self-serving-bias

One therapist dumped me and I felt really rejected. Later on she took me back and we worked it out and she apologized for what she did. She ended up being one of my faves.

Yes and we talked about it and worked things out. I sent her an email and expected her to read between the lines. I asked her to call me and because of how I worded f the request she misunderstood whay I needed. So she responded that it would do me more harm than good at that point of she called. I was really hurt and shut down and didn't explain what was really happening. It took me a couple of weeks of being angry to tell her the full story so in the meantime she told me I should cut back on out of session contact. Eventually, after I told her about the miscommunication we worked things out and how I would go about letting her know what I need even if I don't want to type it in an email.

I felt rejected when I asked my T at our last session if I could come back and see her in the future and she said no, she was closing her practice. She had made no mention of this at all until I asked ☹️

I have been subject to institutional betrayal, coverups, smear campaigns, alteration and falsification of legal health records, threats and intimidation, gaslighting, manipulation, corruption... And there were quite a few of them involved; protecting one another at the expense of my credibility.

I am in the midst of this now. For a few months now I have been struggling with, and am being pummeled by, my feelings for my therapist. I am not in love: it is not romantic or sexual, simply deep love.

I have educated myself as much as possible. I understand transference, the therapeutic bubble, and attachment theory. It doesnt help. I finally was brave, honest, and completely vulnerable with my therapist. I said straight up, looking directly in her eyes "I love you very much". She told me to go out in the world and have "real" relationships (her emphasis on the word real).

So I feel very disconnected and terribly hurt. I dont want to risk or be honest anymore. There is a huge rupture in our relationship. It feels like the few feet that separate us in the therapy office have become a chasm.

My whole big issue of not believing I am worthy of anyone's love, well, she has proven this to be true.

And, for how in tune and amazing she usually is, it's like this is her blind spot. She can't see what is going on or she simply doesn't care. I am ready to quit.

We were talking about goals last week and she asked what I would do if I did have more energy so I mentioned being better at household chores and she literally rolled her eyes at me! I don’t understand how a therapist doesn’t get that that is hard for people with depression and it can change my mood. She could have said dream bigger or something but nope. I was supposed to see her this week but due to a power outage got postponed to next week. Definitely planning on confronting her. How am I supposed to open up/be voulneravle if she laughs at me? Doesn’t feel like such a safe space right now ☹️

Thanks everybody for your votes and your comments.

It is discouraging to me to see that it did NOT work out for almost twice as many people who talked to their therapists compared to those for whom it DID work out.

Of course, this is a very unscientific poll, but still. . . A big slap in the face, it seems to me, for the general advice to clients to "talk to their therapists".

Well, maybe if the therapist is a genuinely disrespecting person, or someone who can be triggered into disrespecting other people, then that's something a client needs to come face-to-face with? And, if things DO work out with the therapist, then the client can learn something else, I guess?

Still, for me I'm left with the question -- how do I deal with people who disrespect and exploit me? I may be able to tell a little better now, after the horrible experience with my last therapist, but I still don't know very well what to do NOW. And not only do I feel kind of incompetent to deal with the world, still, but the world now seems to be a very hostile, exploitive place in general, if our society's licensed "helpers" are like that.

But maybe that's just reality. So, maybe I can "deal with it", even if I feel very ill-equipped to do that? Fantasy and denial, which I seem to have learned in my family and culture of origin, are not good options, either, in the long run.

I think one can tell how something was off/wrong/failed and derive a benefit even where the therapist still acts like an a sshole about it. So, to me, there are two parts -the part where I recognized and stopped for myself something that the therapist was ****ing up, versus an expectation that the therapist was going to care about how much they were ****ing up. I never believe a therapist cares or even thinks they can fail -such is their arrogance.

I've got a therapist currently under government inspection. I believe he is suspended atm. I called them from ED in crisis as they have the authority to admit me, and the duty therapist/nurse told me to "grow up and act my age". I had another ring back the hospital in a few minutes. I was in for 10 days.

There's some truly idiotic professionals out there in the mental health system. Which is why you hang on tight to the good ones, those who care about you and not clock on clock off.

I got into the same sort of mess, though I didn't quite say what you said, and the response wasn't so condescending.

The premise underlying this scenario -- becoming infatuated with a hired nursemaid, revealing said infatuation, getting handed some absurd rejection (usually packaged with patronizing lessons), then using this degrading experience as some sort of healing or growth tool -- it's utter excrement. Disgraceful what these demons do to people in the name of "helping".

I had one therapist who was convinced the whole problem was my diet and tried to get me to stop eating sugar. I know sugar's not good for me, but that is far from being the whole problem. I only saw her a couple of times before I quit.

The mess(es) I got into with therapists, and the underlying emotions which I revealed, were different but the result was the same. What I bolded in your quote above I can definitely identify with. It has been very harmful to me and to my ability to trust and to function well in the world.

Even if this happens only to a minority of therapy clients, the effect on our individual lives can be enormous and, sometimes, near devastating. Possibly entirely devastating, as we don't know how many people take their own life after having such experiences in therapy.

By ingnoring and dismissing this effect, the profession as a whole continues to propagate practices and "therapy" which harm individuals. I know this effect from personal experience. I can identify with and understand similar experiences from other therapy survivors. But the problem continues to be dismissed by most in the profession.

Almost all of the above happened to me too! What is WRONG with people who do such terrible things? Are they just POWER HUNGRY, ARROGANT, NARCISSISTIC, CONTROL FREAKS??

You mean that NO ONE HELPED YOU?? All they did was HURT YOU??

Yes they are.

It's very sad to me that this happens to clients on such a large scale. We know that the therapeutic relationship is the most important aspect of our healing. We know we have feelings for our therapist; it's supposed to happen if things are going well. And, those things that go hand in hand, loving our therapist and (for some of us) wanting some type of physical affirmation (hugs...something...please therapist don't leave me hanging), they are going to occur if we are with the same therapist long enough and they are competent.

So, how come the highly educated, well trained therapists always seem to be blindsided by these things and have no clue how to handle them properly? Love enters the room and the way they handle it, well it reminds me of a scene from the cartoon movie "Inside Out". They bungle terribly. They hurt our feelings and reject us (after working oh-so-hard to tell us it's a "safe space"), and in some, actually many, instances, end up terminating us as clients because s*** just got real and they cannot handle it.

Now, I understand completely therapists have to maintain proper boundaries and I respect the ones that do. I am not talking about them reinforcing they cannot have dual relationships with us; that we will never be friends or romantic partners. And, I think it's possible many of them fear this is what we are wanting when love enters the room.

I am (obviously, right?) having a terrible rupture right now. It's all I can do not to quit therapy because of it. It's seems like since love and (how come you don't ever hug me, what's wrong with me?) entered the room it's been a train wreck. My in tune, knowledgeable, awesome therapist has fallen apart. She knows there is a rupture. I can feel it in how she is treating me. And, it's not like I haven't clued her it, with stating I am struggling greatly and trying not to terminate. She won't go there and won't help. I feel like I am begging for help (because I know terminating is, in the long term, not the right thing), but she is letting me flounder to try and get through this all myself.

Argh!

My sense is that a lot of therapy clients endure various subtle humiliations and degradations on a routine basis, but are conditioned not to seem them as such, and to instead see these things as an inevitable part of "the work". Feeling bad is progress!

Yes I have been rejected and disrespected by a therapist, who used multiple harmful, brutal and inaccurate “interpretations” etc. We did “talk about it” but couldn’t work it out..