A Former (Hurt) Client Thinking of Becoming a Therapist...

I think it would be a good idea for the OP to speak with her therapist about wanting to become a psychotherapist. This is similar to many people with certain types of health problems wanting to study medicine: they get an opinion from their physician on whether this is a good idea. In this case, it would be a good idea because the OP's therapist knows her well and has obviously gone through the steps to become a psychotherapist.

I think if you enter a field knowing there is reasonably high chance of inadvertent harm, it's basically unethical.

In my experience, most healthcare practices and healing interventions overwhelmingly benefit the practitioner/system rather than the consumer. There is a lot of talk about clients attaching to therapists, but therapists also attach to clients, like a parasite attaching to a host. Doctors too.

Seems most people get into healthcare with good intentions, but end up mooching money from vulnerable people and giving nothing much in return, or creating new problems.

People who are alive today because ambulance arrived on time, surgeon performed surgery successfully, CPR was done on time, nurse noticed something is wrong, GP ordered tests on time etc etc would most certainly disagree that most healthcare professionals are just mooching for money and give nothing in return.

Obviously people who didn’t receive proper health care feel otherwise. That’s why it’s so very subjective. People who had bad or harmful therapy obviously hate therapists and believe therapists in general just money grabbing abusers, and they have rights to feel this way. Those who had good experience or possibly had their lives saved by mental health professionals obviously beg to differ. That’s why generalizations hold no value as they are based on personal bias only

OP is thinking about going into a helping profession. It’s wise to talk to someone in that profession. Talk to your therapist and see what he/she thinks. Do research on other fields one might go. There is a risk in every profession. As long as you have deep understanding of your reasons behind career choice and those reasons are honorable, you are insightful and mindful in general and professionally speaking, you are aware of other people’s needs and your own shortcomings, I don’t see why you can’t become a therapist. Your concerns are very valid plus you already work in a field of psychology, which already indicates you are on the right path. Good luck with whatever you decide

I don't see therapy as a "helping" profession at all. Even where it might be something someone has found not completely useless. In the sense that a therapist is helping - all professions are helping.

I absolutely agree. If you see the therapy world through poo-tinted glasses, of course everything is going to look like crap. And that’s even if you are presented with valid evidence of others’ positive experiences! Your cognitive dissonance leads to a view that says there must be something awful they’re missing because my individual experiences don’t match up with theirs. It’s understandable and not your fault, but the generalization of one person’s experiences into an all-or-nothing conclusion is simply false inductive reasoning. Some therapists heal, some harm. Some therapists are ethical, some aren’t. Rather than drawing a black and white distinction between the goodness or badness of the field, it seems much more useful to learn how to navigate its shades of gray in order to increase one’s probability of having a positive therapeutic experience.

It does amaze me how many people want to become therapists because of the idea of helping. If you want to help someone, become an honest plumber or car mechanic or hvac repair person - those seem about a million times more helpful than a therapist could ever hope to be. And this is from working with those people -not because I was harmed by them. Getting them to talk in preparation to be a witness is an exercise in seeing how they really view clients and how they view themselves.

Yes.

I never would have believed this pertained to my therapist until I inadvertently provoked her during a rupture. It was absolutely devastating hearing her ‘true feelings’ spill out and seeing the years of false validations and lies unravel. I cannot imagine how I’d be painted if I ever had to go up against her in a lawsuit or complaint.

I actually do not have a therapist at the moment, as I don’t feel that my need for one is high enough right now such that I am willing to pay the expensive price. I have, however, drafted an email to a previous therapist (she is open to this kind of communication) who helped me recover from my traumatic therapy experience, asking for her brief input on the matter, so perhaps I will edit and send that.

And I’m someone who has seen both sides. And the in-between. I’ve seen 11 individual therapists (not including a couple that I only had a single session with, and many more group therapists). Most of them (and/or my therapy experience with them as a whole) I would subjectively categorize as mildly helpful for me, but mostly it was a short-term kind of feeling better. Some were a little more helpful than others, some were essentially neutral to me (neither helping nor harming), one traumatized me, one was extremely validating of that experience and helped very much in the immediate short term, and another helped me recover from the trauma long term. In some ways I feel almost “lucky” to have experienced both sides (although I wouldn’t wish my traumatic experience on anyone). I’m still struggling some with the idea of becoming a therapist, but what if everyone who ever wanted to become a therapist felt this way and let it sway them to NOT become a therapist? I mean, someone has got to do something... I know over-diagnosing and misdiagnosing and needlessly pathologizing are very real problems, but still there are people out there looking for help in this arena. And who’s going to help them if everyone just decided that the therapy profession was too risky to even bother with? I supposed a medical doctor could always just prescribe an antidepressant, but of course there are many potential problems with that too. And while I would love to think that family/friend support and social connection is enough for all people, I don’t believe that’s always the case. So, I think someone’s got to do it. It’s just a matter of how can we make this field/profession better/safer.

Just FYI... drawing a black and white is exactly what you did here. This is the standard way of framing the question of therapy validity. Therapists are either good or bad, ethical or not. Clients are resistant or open to change, lazy or willing to "do the work", yada yada yada.

This is a red herring. You have to look at the relationship itself to see why it is often destructive and exploitive and abusive. All therapy is unethical in some ways. All therapists harm in some ways. Even therapy that seems to be going well might be digging the client into a hole of external validation-seeking, loss of autonomy, skewed perspective on relationships, etc.

Seems the reason people want to get into the profession, even knowing the dark side, is precisely because of the good therapist/bad therapist binary. Hey, i'll just be one of the good ones.

But a plumber could never have helped me with my eating disorder or helped me recover from my trauma in the ways that therapy/therapists have. True, they also probably couldn’t/wouldn’t have hurt me like a therapist/therapy has either, but they could (whether intentionally or unintentionally) do some significant damage to the inner workings of my house. But does that risk mean that no one should go into the plumbing profession?
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve experienced both sides of the therapy profession (referring to being both tremendously harmed and helped by it). Both experiences feel equally real, valid, and meaningful to me. At this point, my feeling is essentially that someone’s got to do it, and I think it could be very valuable if that someone is someone who is first-handedly (is that a term?) aware of both the harm and help that therapy can cause. Don’t get me wrong though- I think the field does need a lot of work as it stands right now.

Kiwi - Does the field of psychotherapy interest you beyond just your desire to help?

IMO, the most successful in any profession have a genuine interest in the field they are working in. For example, the best doctors I know are borderline obsessed with the science of their field and that interest keeps them current and passionate. The most dangerous seem to be the ones who don’t fit that description and have ulterior motives - for example ego, desire for power, a strong need to be needed, etc.

Also, I’d be sure that you’ve thoroughly flushed out your ‘stuff’ and are very stable so you aren’t easily triggered by clients. I was damaged by my therapist’s heat of the moment reactions to my own strong emotions.

But see I haven’t just told myself that if I go into this profession then I’ll “just be one of the ‘good’ ones.” Because I’m very aware that “good” is subjective and not well defined at all, either. What is “good” to one person may be horrible to another, or neutral to yet another. And that is why I am conflicted and started this thread - because I know it’s not that simple.

How do we measure harm? It is even ethical to try to objectively measure such an inherently subjective experience? I think in some ways it would’ve felt insulting or invalidating to have someone assign a value to how traumatized I was by that one therapy experience I had. I mean sure, you can hand someone a questionnaire with descriptions of certain symptoms and have them circle a number/value next to each symptom in an attempt to quantify the severity of that person’s distress, but I believe this is flawed in multiple ways. I had to do this at the clinic I went to (where I was traumatized), and never mind the fact that it just felt so impersonal and invalidating, but the results of my scores on each of those questionnaires each week didn’t feel to me like they accurately reflected how I was doing. I answered every question in a way that felt honest to me, but then when I saw the end “score” or how those results were being used to draw conclusions about my “progress” and whatnot, it felt misleading. And at the end of “treatment,” their conclusions about be based on my quantified “scores” on those assessments just felt so off, and thus their recommendations for further treatment also felt off. Needless to say, I did NOT follow their recommendations for more treatment of a specific kind for specific “problems,” and thank god I didn’t! I had new problems after leaving that clinic (trauma), so I made a decision based off of my own subjective experience (which was denied by the traumatizing clinic), and that was to start EMDR therapy for the trauma. It also meant decreasing the frequency at which I went to therapy (from once a week at the clinic to once every three weeks with the EMDR therapist). Anyway, bit of a tangent, but point of that was to say that while harm by therapy should not be ignored, I’m not sure that attempting to objectively measure someone’s subjective experience of harm is going to be beneficial. It could be, I suppose. Quantifying symptoms/feelings has hurt me, but again, it all keeps coming back to the fact that individual experiences are just that... individual. Maybe other people really appreciate and benefit from having their distress quantified in such a way. So just some thoughts when it comes to thinking about how we can address the harm caused by therapy. I know with the medicalization of psychology and the push to make it more of a science, there will probably be many people who say that we need to find a way to quantify harm and look at it objectively, but I just feel this can’t be done without also causing harm to some folks due to the possibility of error in measurement and likely poor measuring techniques that may further victimize/pathologize/harm a client or put the one measuring (likely the therapist) in an even greater position of unnecessary power.

Absolutely. It is all so incredibly fascinating to me. I think about it all the time and do my own research - not just on the subject of harm or on the specific disorders that I have been diagnosed with, but so many different areas of the field. I check out informational books from the library, read articles online, and would go to my psychology professors’ office hours when I was still an undergrad not because I was having difficulty understanding the material of the class, but because I was just genuinely interested in chatting about various psychology topics. I sit and ponder about concepts and theories that I have learned about, so much so that sometimes I have even stumped my professors and had them tell me that they don’t know the answer to a question or that they hadn’t considered it before. I was never super big into school and couldn’t care less about quadratic equations or the history of Europe. I had little motivation to learn those subjects, but I was always eager to study psychology ever since I took AP Psych in high school (I did by far the best on this AP exam than I ever did on any of the others I took). It’s really the subject that interests me the most (and not just by a narrow margin, but by a huge margin), and that’s actually part of what is frustrating to me... if I decided not to go to grad school for this due to ethical concerns, I can’t see myself going into any other field. I would feel so lost because no other field comes close to psychology for me in terms of interest. Truly it is almost an obsession for me. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and have some learning difficulties, but once I switched my major to psychology in college, my GPA went up and I ended up graduating Magna Cum Laude. I got A’s in all but one my psychology courses (a high B in the one). I ENJOYED school when I was studying psychology, which was a new experience for me. So yes, I truly am interested in and fascinated by the study of psychology.

This here is ultra important! I think you really should go for it.

I agree that the use of "empirical measures" for subjective or emotional experience is. . .problematic. But there are ways that could assess harmful effects of therapy, I believe, without necessarily risking harming people more.

Like a lot of customer feedback surveys these days, for instance. Ask a bunch of random people from a bunch of clinics or something, "Were you harmed by your experience in therapy? " On a scale of 1 to 5 or 10, from "no harm" to "ruined my life". Then, if people were willing to participate in followup interviews, ask them how therapy harmed them. Get the subjective experience there. That could be a beginning on additional research, for instance, why the harm happened. There are research methods connected with interviewing -- I don't know them all, or what would likely be the best -- but there are established methods. And, if the researcher didn't think they were adequate, they could develop and document their own method.

There could be some risk in participating in the interview or even the survey, but a solid informed consent form would be included. First priority would be, do no (further) harm.

Point is, I don't think it's impossible to do, if people were interested in finding out about harm in therapy.

Kiwi, I personally think that you should look into a fully funded Ph.D clinical psychology program!

You have excellent grades and you work with patients in the mental health field; You are very passionate about the subject matter; Going by your posts, I know that you are going to be very cognizant about how you handle therapy clients because of what you went through: you have suffered from such a traumatic experience and gone through the hard work of therapy and recovered.

Also, I am also very sorry that you had such a devastating experience.

Dang. I have to have surgery soon, but the chance of something going wrong for this particular surgery is crazy high. But, without the surgery my condition will continue to decline and possibly be fatal.
What can I do? How on earth can I find an ethical surgeon so that I can be guaranteed that I won't suffer an inadvertent slip of the scalpel and be worse off than before?

The difference is that you have been warned and are going in with more informed consent than most therapists give to their clients.

Yes, I had no idea that my life could be largely ruined and I would end up useless and largely isolated. Sure, I had issues going into therapy but I largely followed the social rules and kinda got along somewhat -- rather than what I was told in therapy, to "work hard" and "get in touch with my feelings" and express them -- having no idea what effect that expressing them would be. At that point, and for many years afterward, I was just following the "new rules" the new professional psychology rules, which were more "right" than the old ones I learned in my "dysfunctional" family, right?

Yeah, OK, maybe therapists tell people different things now, but who is to say they don't have other, disastrous effects for what people are seeking therapy for? Therapists aren't asking for, and in my experience aren't amenable to hearing, about the adverse effects of what they are doing.

If a usually reliable surgeon has a slip of a scalpel, there are consequences. I know a surgeon who took out the wrong kidney, the healthy one, rather than the diseased one, I think it had cancer and had to be removed, too, once the mixup was found out -- more than just a slip of the scalpel, the whole procedure got mixed up somehow. He retired and doesn't do surgery any more. Maybe he is still generally competent -- everybody makes mistakes -- but the consequences to the patient were such. . .he doesn't "practice" any more.

My claim -- that the general practices and methods of therapy have ruined my life -- don't appear in any statistics anywhere. That claim is instead denied and ignored, without being seriously considered. The profession isn't interested in that possibility, how and why it happens for some people, how often, etc., and I don't know -- does anybody who has started therapy recently seen anything like that on an informed consent form?

I like these ideas. Thank you for sharing. They sound like a good place to start. My hope would be that when people DO respond to these surveys/interviews saying that they were harmed by therapy, that these experiences are not simply written off or as or assumed to be an overly dramatic or perhaps purely mood-dependent complaint that stems from that person’s mental illness (for example: “oh, this person has BPD and they’re only responding with these negative responses because they felt abandoned when their therapist had to leave their practice and thus pass along the client”). In my experience, some practitioners find it difficult to take a client’s feedback without somehow tying it to a diagnosis that person has, and thus they may not take the feedback seriously enough, or see it as genuine, valid, and valuable. But, I don’t think all practitioners are that way, and perhaps this issue could be solved by having the person who collects the responses or conducts the interview be an outsider who is not aware of the person’s diagnoses and/or what problems they presented to the therapist with.

I'm very skeptical of this.

People got by for all of human history without therapists. Now suddenly some people can't live without them?

Trauma, grief, depression, etc have historically been addressed within the context of real relationships, tribe, family, community.

Now the sufferer is taken out of this context and isolated in a room with a stranger who uses pseudo-medical and clinical concepts and pretends to be some sort of relationship scientist who administers "treatment" and charges by the hour.

Frankly I found it to be like religious or cult indoctrination. The message is... your life difficulties are beyond the reach of your own resources and capacities and real life relationships, and you need to sign up with a guru to be saved.

I get that some people are out of options and might benefit from trying therapy. But seems it should be seen as last resort and a terrible model. Approach with extreme caution.

And in this case you have to ask what is wrong with the way we are living and how can that be addressed. Therapy does not address root causes, it exploits the downstream effects.

People have always healed via organic social systems and thru living close to nature, as our biology expects and demands. Not thru psych cults, artificial relationships, e-relationships, pill bottles, stigmatizing labels.

The last therapist I saw (earlier this year) did have a brief “warning” about potential risks of therapy. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it stood out to me because of how I had previously been harmed by therapy. I remember it being short and pretty vague (something about how working through trauma can be painful...) but it was better than nothing. It was a start. We need more though, like about potential lasting effects of psychotherapy, whether that therapy is related to working through trauma or not.

Thank you so much for these words! I’m not sure I want to go the Ph.D route and spend THAT long (and that much money) in school, haha, but I think I could at least start with a Masters and leave open the possibility of going back for a Ph.D later.

You are very welcome! You know if you found a fully funded program, the education would be free. But, I see what you are saying about starting with a Masters program. I believe certain universities have fully funded programs for those wanting to get a Masters degree. It may be the top research universities that do. But with your excellent grades and work experience, you should have no problem at all getting into one. I really do think that you would do well in this field!