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Grand Magnate
Member Since Jun 2012
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#1
I've harped on/around this topic for awhile, and about my absence, loss, or damage to the ability to generate a sense of authentic self which therapy did not "cure" or resolve.
Several things in this forum seem to be helping, though, as well as the fact that I have been able recently to feel that my son authentically cares about me. Not sure about my daughter -- there's probably damage there, too, to her own, came down the whole family line. Sucks. They did their best, I've done mine. There needs to be more authentic help for people who would really like to do better. A couple of things that seem important for/to me, may be important/relevant to others with (somewhat) similar issues> 1. Trauma bonds, which koru_kiwi mentioned in a recent post and which I think I can see in some recent stories here and in another subforum, and therefore/maybe see better in myself as well. Why is it so hard for anyone to see these things, emotionally? Because even if we see them intellectually, sort of, the "person" who might really "see", if they had eyes, is hidden away, for safety. Good g. . , this is hard. Here's a link I found last night which is interesting. Simplisitic, makes it easy to understand: Trauma Bonds: Why People Bond To Those Who Hurt Them | New Leaf Center Seems that I likely replicated trauma bonds, and other effects?, from my family or origin in the (endless) therapies. Addiction and co-dependency, as the article mentions and which I had already identified in myself independently. From the article: Quote:
I'm convinced this morning that having someone in the real world who, somehow, a person can feel confident really cares about them is key to allowing the whatever it is that was lost/damaged to start to regrow or re-develop. That's not in any 50-minute hours necessarily and no way I could look for something I hadn't had and didn't know how to find. Last edited by here today; Jul 29, 2019 at 10:14 AM.. |
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#2
Regarding point #2, I have to agree that a real life relationship based on mutual trust and respect is far more healing than a 50 min session/week with a paid stranger. Actually there is no doubt in my mind that this is the case. When I was in social work school (I was thinking about becoming a therapist), I noticed that 95% of the students hadn't gone to therapy. You can tell by the questions they asked about the therapist-client relationship. They mostly had this arrogant sense of wanting to CORRECT and SOCIALIZE people. They had internalized a lot of these simplistic self-help/therapy beliefs about relationships and systems and what not and they were essentially aiming to socialize people whether they realized it or not. These people were also completely de-politicized in their thinking and behaviors. And most of us were career change folks. Many had worked in social services and seemed jaded as a result.
The program (most of the clinical social workers in my city have their masters from this school) accepted 80% of applicants so that right there tells you this is a cash cow for the school. They had graduate students teach the evening classes and half the time they didn't know what they were doing. (When confronted, the dean told us to address the graduate students directly using "I" statements.! I kid you not. Isn't it her job to check the qualifications of all instructors and remove any that don't know the material???) And the rest of the time we were learning the meaning of words like "empathy," and "compassion." A whole class learning about the definition of words! As if you can have these qualities by learning their definitions. In the practical portion of the schooling, we were learning how to have a very awkward and structured conversation which is unlike any conversation in real life. People just don't talk that way but that's how they teach you to engage. So the conversations become stilted and awkward. In some cases, I observed that therapists were creating problems where none existed or making normal behaviors seem "maladaptive." And the best part is that the program instructors/administrators/internship supervisors treated the social work students like s***! Lots of narcissists. My internship supervisor told me that she didn't like people. And it was clear form her attitude towards me that she had no interest in mentoring me. And she got strangely competitive with me. There would be no benefit to me. Even though I was paying for the privilege. Being a student was the same as being a client in therapy. Exactly the same! You are patronized, demeaned, and gaslighted regularly. All while going into debt. The quality of education was crap. There's no GRE required and they accepted 80% of the applicants so you can imagine how easy it is to get in, and the caliber of the student body. These are the people that come out of these useless masters programs, hang a shingle and start charging $165 for 45 mins sessions. After going through a demeaning student experience, they want to feel important and in charge. Viewing themselves as some kind of authority over their hapless clients is almost a given! They have contempt for clients who are questioning and "resistant" because it threatens their own sense of self. They need to rob you of your sense of self so they can feed their own emptiness and pockets. That's all it is! The client is there to prop them up and pay for the kitchen remodel. |
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Magnate
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#3
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I couldn't agree more. I've always been persuaded that feeling the support of a genuine, caring, soul could make the difference. Unflinching, consistent, unwavering support. And I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be with a T. However, in my experience, I've never encountered such.. genuineness. I've seen fickleness and insincerity. Maybe this elusive something is what drives some to seek Ts in the hope of encountering such authentic compassion and support. |
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Poohbah
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#4
I'm sorry you feel so disappointed in therapists. I've been lucky with all my ts and T2 in particular helped cultivate a very strong sense of myself. When I first started seeing her I was traumatised, insecure, suicidal, saw no value in myself as a person. She changed all that because she made clear she liked me as a person, believed in me, saw a huge amount of positive qualities in me, and showed me that it's okay to grow up and become adult and STILL get one's needs met, albeit in different ways. This T was so completely genuine as a person and obvious in her liking and care for me, that I trusted her 100% and grew from the work with her. It was definitely not a trauma bond but something very beautiful and real.
The work wasn't 'finished' with her due to the fact I have ongoing difficult life circumstances, but she was the T who enabled me to move from functioning permanently in child mode to actually feeling more adult some of the time. I saw her years ago, but I still think about her, miss her and appreciate the impact she has had on my life. Could I have reached the same point with a close friend or partner? I very much doubt it. Who could have the emotional resources and ability to sit with me week after week and listen to my story, my feelings, without being burnt out or feeling resentful that I wasn't giving anything to them? This may well be possible for some people, but I simply didn't, and don't, have people in my life who are that giving. I needed a therapist, and now I need another kind of therapist (T4) who is very different, but wonderfully accepting and compassionate and loving as well. Did I say loving? Yes she genuinely is. I wish everyone could experience the therapists I've had. I see so much disappointment, bitterness and anger about therapy in this forum - and I know there are good reasons why. I hope this brings hope that some therapy relationships are healthy and change people's lives for the better. Therapy seems to be better regulated in the UK from what I understand; not sure if this explains it. |
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Grand Magnate
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#5
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It's possible that there was/something in me that contributed to that but I don't know for sure what it is or how to "change". No therapist ever told me what it was, either. My last therapist terminated me after 6 years saying she "didn't have the emotional resources" to continue. I'm still like "are you kidding me?" No, she wasn't. Maybe/probably she never liked me and I couldn't tell the difference between the genuine and the fake because the affection in my family was relatively fake. Depending on and expecting previously traumatized people to distinguish that in a therapist is unrealistic. Yet the profession and their "ethics" still do. How do I know the difference now? I've gotten a little bit of a clue from a support group I lucked into and have been a part of for about 5 years. I still don't really trust that they like the "real" me, whatever that is. But I've been straightforward and myself several times when it seemed to go against the grain of what others wanted or expected and I haven't been rejected yet. Maybe tomorrow, who knows, but maybe not, either. |
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Poohbah
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#6
I think a significant part of the problem is that those of us with trauma tend to unconsciously navigate towards people who will replicate the patterns we have learnt with others. Obviously this is as true in relationships outside therapy as in it.
Both my first two ts were assigned to me as I didn't have a choice who I saw due to the circumstances in which I sought therapy. Both of them turned out to be exactly what I needed at the time so I was incredibly fortunate. Had I been left to choose a t, I'm not sure I'd have been capable of discerning a good one. I saw another t some years ago who I did choose but looking back she wasnt a good match. My current one is and I feel I'm in a place where I can know and seek out a respectable t. It's a very difficult issue and the only way around it really is better training and regulation of therapists so that people can't go into the profession to exploit the vulnerable, consciously or otherwise. |
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Grand Magnate
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#7
There's a lovely description in another thread this morning about a trauma loop and how that can work. I recognize it in myself -- I recognized that I flip-flopped between compliant and --- something else -- in therapy and mentioned it to the last therapist near the very beginning of the therapy! This seems like a primitive, binary (relatively uncomplicated) situation that could be taught. Not just CSA but -- I hate the terms -- narcissistic abuse and neglect were the likely factors in my case.
So, then, what to do -- what can the profession and/or a training experience do -- for therapists, like my last, who likely had had her own (narcissistic) abuse and neglect and it had not been resolved. |
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Poohbah
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#8
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If therapy training isn't regulated enough, the profession is going to be full of people with unresolved issues who are drawn to it out of a need to focus on others and not on themselves. Many of those people genuinely want to help others, but they don't want to look at themselves in the process and this is where BIG problems and reenactments start. It's a massive problem that's for sure, but it's not the clients fault, at all. Training for therapists needs to be top standard, this is people's mental health they are dealing with. It means making sure trainees have their own regular therapy, and once they start with clients, their own supervision as well. Better filtering out of people who have not reached a sufficient place in healing would be important, but difficult to put in place. |
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Grand Magnate
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#9
I told the therapist that I felt like a zero. Well, actually I told her I felt like a “singularity”, a point in a graph where there is nothing there, but you can’t really see it because there are points all around it.
I could describe that years ago. I don’t feel so much like that now, although it’s a little scary to say that, because what if just saying that is enough to have all the rest of the points squash me again? Don’t think it will happen – the PC Psychotherapy forum is a pretty big place and I’ve also been a point in my support group of 6 people for maybe 5 years now. I think that feeling is related to the absence of a sense of self. There was a proposal for the DSM V to revise the personality disorder descriptions to do away with the categories and to include 2 basic factors – the lack of a sense of self and poor interpersonal relationships. That proposed revision was scrapped because practitioners thought it would be too hard to change. Or something like that. Therapists, in general, from my reading and my experience, are doing zip for the sense of zero in the sense of self. Can anyone else here relate to feeling like a zero? It’s also true, that sometimes I could be grandiose, all about me. Like in my singularity the point that wasn’t related to the larger world WAS the whole world. A very lonely world, of course. So things would flip-flop – all about me, or all about another/others. I knew all this – I tried to explain it to therapists and they didn’t get it or couldn’t help, or something. Most likely it’s what Lonelyinmyheart wrote: Quote:
But the topic of listing the harms that therapy can cause has come up on another thread, and I was wondering if anybody else understands what I am talking about and has a good way of describing the harm? |
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Poohbah
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#10
I am very interested in the sense of self topic, not necessarily from the exact points of view you are presenting. But the questions of how someone can detect that someone else has a problems with sense of self and what can be done to repair the self are very interesting to me.
Regarding DSM-5, there is the alternative personality disorders model that indeed assesses the level on functioning of the personality and based on this model, the issues with identity and interpersonal functioning is indeed central and all other specific behavioural symptoms are secondary. Using this model also enables to better capture currently sub-clinical cases - people who do not have enough particular symptoms but whose identity has still considerable disturbances. I started masters in psych this Fall and I'm hoping to do my master's thesis on this topic. I also totally agree that in order heal or recover or start forming perhaps the first time in one's life a more coherent sense of self, there must be someone Other there who is trustworthy, reliable, patient and stable enough in their own self to offer themselves to be used for this purpose. I can say without any doubt that for me my T has been and continually is that Other. What I haven't fully understood is whether he fully understand what he is doing for me. Sometimes it seems to me that he indeed does know and he knows even better than me what he is offering to me. Some other times I'm doubting that he knows because what he is doing for me seems more than one could ever expect from anyone. So, I hope that over time I will also figure out, what is his knowledge about what he is offering to me and where did he obtain this knowledge - is it something that stems from his personality and it's based on his intuition mostly or is it something he was trained at some point to do as well. |
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Grand Magnate
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#11
Are you familiar with Heinz Kohut's theory of the development of the self and the 3 self-object functions? I did quite a bit of research several years ago about that. And I believe I can identify, I have some sense, when those are "working". I think I know what is missing for me and when I became aware that my last T was not someone I could "twin" with I suggested that we could still work together on the development of my self from a kind of theoretical standpoint, exploring what would a "twin" be like for me, and the feelings that I had for a great-aunt, who was the closest of that for me. The therapist refused to consider it and that led to the ensuing conflicts that led to the termination.
So a question is, if a therapist is not sufficient in their own self to be that Other for a client, is there some other way to move forward? I think It's inadequate to say, when a therapy relationship like mine failed, that it was only the original damage that was exposed and not additional damage heaped upon it by trying my best, in the best ways I knew how, and being failed by the therapist. |
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Poohbah
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#12
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
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Grand Magnate
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#13
Quote:
Quote:
They are questions and potential claims that I am interested in, however, so I included them in my post. I will disagree with one statement you made, bolded above. It is my experience, with so much numbed out, that I have NOT been able to assess the damage. I said that in the earlier post. I understand that you may not be able to understand that experience -- but it is mine, and while I respect your thought that everyone can assess how much things affected them for themselves, I disagree. I don't have that information, or a full perspective available in my consciousness, or something. . .yet. Maybe never, time will tell. That is my subjective experience about it. |
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Poohbah
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#14
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If the person is not able to assess the effects on themselves then ideally there is someone Other who is able to accept and tolerate this kind of situation long enough until something starts to emerge from this not knowing and not being able to. And this other must have a good enough sense of self in order to not be tempted to impose their own understanding of the situation because otherwise there will be no space for the person to emerge. This is something that takes lot of patients because as you said, it might take a lot of time to emerge and there is no guarantee that it ever will. But I don't believe it is something that can be given or done to someone, it can only be facilitated. |
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#15
I've experienced the "twinship" thing many times throughout my life - I wrote about parts of it several times on this forum before. Whenever I experience transference, this also tends to be the main form/origin. I think the first one was with my father, then friends (I recall one even from kindergarten), teachers and other mentors, sometimes even public figures I don't even know personally or imaginary figures from literature. I was drawn to Kohut's work in the first place because I felt kinda blown away by how well his theory described a very important feature of my life experience. It was definitely a key (and very effective) element of my personal development and it still is, I believe, although I don't seek it nearly as much these days. But when I find someone new that fits the pattern, it can still always be quite intoxicating in the beginning at least. It also often turns into what we could describe as erotic transference (no need to be in therapy for that, just in everyday life) and I always need to be careful to recognize this because I can complicate my relationships unnecessarily if I don't exercise some restraint on how this tends to drive me.
There is an absolutely essential element for it to happen in my case, which the term "twin" implies clearly: the other person has to be highly similar to me in many ways personality-wise and in their interests. Projection, transference etc does not cut it for me if there is not a good dose of reality behind the perceived similarity, it just won't last without the objective reality (that usually unfolds/becomes known with time) for me. I definitely felt this way with my second therapist (also how I chose him very consciously), but we didn't really use it for therapy much as I didn't need that type of work/focus at that point... but it was always there in the background, I think mutually. His favorite therapy influence was also Kohut and self psychology - not surprisingly. It made my interactions with him very pleasant, but I don't think it made it more therapeutic - again, probably because my issues had nothing to do with personality and self-development other than I needed to develop better habits and discipline. Surely I can use a good model for that, but I'd already had many before - my issue was lack of practical action, not lack of knowing what and how to do. I absolutely don't think this developmental approach would work with just any therapist or person, even if they were the best T on Earth, if the similarity feelings and experiences were not there quite significantly. I also think children need to be lucky to experience it early on with a parent, because just being a parent (however loving and supportive) would have never been enough for me at least. I was lucky to have the kind of father I had (we had so much in common) and certainly never felt anything similar with my mom (who was extremely different from me). This imbalance in early life "twinship" has become a main cause of the gender bias I still have this day, albeit much less than when I was younger. Also, if I wanted to use this twinship concept for self-work even at this point of my life, I would never do it with a therapist. Therapy is way too limited for this thing to be satisfying, rewarding and useful for me. I know I said above that sometimes I even found imaginary "twins" in books, but that's never the same level as a real, mutual human connection. I think I would likely also suffer if my "twin" was a real person I know and can interact with, but all sorts of rules and regulations were limiting the relationship from developing naturally and fully. I would much prefer a friend or colleague, and someone who feels the same way at least to a certain degree. Right now, I have at least one colleague who fits the pattern and I am already sad in advance that he will likely leave the job in 2-3 years. But I know I'll find new ones, I always do. I think that once you have developed this "sense", it can be a pretty fool-proof sensor and filter to find these kinds of people. I also love now to have trainees that fit the bill - it makes mentoring a lot more fun and effective. But, just like in therapy IMO, I can never use the same method in mentoring if the baseline similarity is not there, for real. Last edited by Xynesthesia2; Nov 12, 2019 at 02:31 PM.. |
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Poohbah
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#16
The devil you know vs. the devil you don't?
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Grand Poohbah
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#17
First, I am aways so glad when you talk about the PC group being of help to you. It is to me too.
I am also saddened for all the heartbreak you found in therapy, the discouragement and sense of nonacceptance. I agree about the trauma bond. My T and I are seeing this with us, and trying to overcome, but it is more powerful than any ocean undertow. The other idea that resonates is that the roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander have an allure when therapy has one or two traumatized individuals, and they will unconsciously entice each other into different roles at different times: Quote:
The hope here is that some time during the replay, one or both wake up and see it, call it out, and intentionally do things to combat it together. Quote:
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Grand Poohbah
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#18
My T told me about Kohut's twin theory, in suggesting my marriage had provided that for me. I dont think I understand the theory well enough, if you have time to explain?
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#19
I was going to say but forgot, the trauma bond is the wrong kind of "twinship" IMO, for progress and development. It can feel good in the moment, but it does little else except validating and reinforcing an already negative pattern. If we are just looking for sympathy/empathy, maybe fine. But if we want solutions and to get out, absolutely not, in my view. I never like to commiserate long. This is why I don't like to establish/keep significant relationships with people who struggle with the same issues as myself but still in the struggle state and haven't found a way out. I know this is often not nice of me, but my preference that I find healthier for me.
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Grand Magnate
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#20
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