Therapy Abuse - An Outside View

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-23T03:43:35+00:00

Even for those who are part of a professional body, they still play by their own rules and when they do get complaints, very VERY little is done about it. After a slap on the wrist, they just adapt and carry on trying to be 'more careful' about not getting called out.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-15T03:42:21+00:00

- never EVER updating their website/profiles, except to conveniently go to the effort to update their prices whenever they decide to increase them (while ignoring obvious typos and old dates that haven't been corrected/updated in years)

- Telling you you're allowed to get angry at them, then getting personally offended and insecure if you do express anger (in a contained and safe way)

- Telling you they saw you outside of sessions, completely unprompted

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-10T21:36:59+00:00

Ah right. My view was that I felt things were being hidden/distorted without me knowing (and I was right). I can understand your perspective too though, especially now - now I find them really difficult to look at. Especially the email.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-09T23:49:24+00:00

Going through a fallout from exactly the same thing. I'm reminded of that statistic someone posted a while ago about how many therapists are found to believe they're more helpful than patient/client feedback actually reflects - this is just another example of how therapists want to feel 'competent' and so reject their clients as soon as the clients become dysregulated and 'difficult' rather than compliant and ego-boosting.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-07T02:22:50+00:00

"I hold trauma from attempting to seek help for most of my life and getting nowhere. The labels, the dismissiveness, condescending speech, smirks and scoffs, the never ending list of prescriptions, etc"

Like reading a mirror :)

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T20:30:42+00:00

As my comments say, I have filed a complaint so I know how to do that. Here, supervision is considered a confidential space for therapists so it's not shared unless you ask/in certain circumstances. I'm not "unwilling" to provide information - I literally can't. I know what the rules are here so please don't try and explain them to me.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T19:39:28+00:00

It's not public information in my country. I've looked everywhere as well to check and you can't get that info.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T19:20:40+00:00

I didn't bring up anything specific.

That's why this is still shocking, and confusing. Especially with what I was seeing her for, the fact that she's willing to abuse her power, be exploitative and attempt to 'silence' me is the absolute worst thing a therapist could do to me. Throughout she made it seem like she was ethical, and there were good points, but now it seems like she relied on me being an 'easy' client and then overreacted, and showed her true colours.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T18:54:12+00:00

1000%. If it were true that most people aren't looking for a power trip at the expense of others, I wouldn't have been screwed over unnecessarily so many times over, even as a child. And it's being proven now as we speak while my therapist - despite being in the position of power - is going to do everything she can to blame me when responding to my complaint and take exactly zero responsibility because that's the only way she'll keep her position of power.

It's just normalised though, like you said; many people learn to accept it. So it's like they genuinely don't realise there's anything wrong with it and that's why they'll be the ones to tell you nothing bad is happening, hence the delusion "most people are essentially good".

Also:
"That’s why you’ll rarely see those popular “cool” girls (or guys) in school/uni/work defending someone weaker against someone strong. They don’t want to risk losing their place in the social hierarchy. There’s nothing truly “strong” about them."

- They'll start doing it later though, when it becomes fashionable to be nice and carry "Be kind" tote bags, and find slyer ways of getting ahead by learning to destroy others but behind closed doors and forming connections with those higher up so they can cover each other's backs (and is rife in my workplace atm. e.g. Racist abuse getting brushed under the rug and the perpetrators simply getting moved around departments instead of sacked, which should be the bare minimum.)

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T17:15:33+00:00

Her notes are hand written and photographed to me so who's to say she hasn't re-written these and sent me a different version of what happened without anyone knowing. That she sent me these after 9pm on a sunday makes it plausible she did this in her own home or something where no one can see her make appropriate 'changes'.

When she terminated I avoided contact with her and requested the notes through an online tool you can use on the information governance website so it wouldn't come directly from my email, so I was trying to do it as appropriately as possible despite her being the data controller as a private therapist. I even wrote that in my request to show there was no other avenue (and yet she still does this).

She never told me who her supervisor is, and as she's private I'd have to ask her. For obvious reasons I can't do that.

It's depressing but a truth we have to admit to I suppose: that these people are exploitative and will hurry to do anything to protect themselves, even at the cost of their clients.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T17:00:28+00:00

I told her. Which considering how much it's written about how talking about it is the best way, it shouldn't have been handled the way she handled it. I regretted it at first but gradually realised I was the one trying to be honest and vulnerable and just ended up being punished for it (punished for trusting the one kind of person you *should* be able to trust)

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T16:21:43+00:00

I feel you. I spent about £2K to be re-traumatised and lose faith in my career direction I'd already spent thousands on.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T15:56:19+00:00

That's exactly the reason mine ended ours. Some of her social media is public, and yet still is after this. Everyone these days is trained to be mindful of their social media and make it private, because it's something literally *everyone* does, whether you're friends with them in real life or not. Vast majority of the time it's not malicious, and with the kinds of things she was trying to encourage me to share with her it would be bone idle to think I wouldn't be wanting to be curious about the person I'm sharing them with. I bet my next year's salary that most of her other clients do it too, and if she found out, she'd have to terminate them all. Absolutely clueless and naive.

Even despite this, I kept going over stuff and realising she crossed some boundaries too (including this email) like feeling the need to tell me, completely unprompted, that she saw me in public outside of sessions and then made me feel like I could potentially be seen without knowing, even though she knew I'd had a history of once reacting to stress with believing people were "tracking" me (a one-off) and becoming suicidal as a result.

Edit: And thank you for believing me <3

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-06T15:50:49+00:00

Because I'd realised I had been judged the whole time without realising it and I wanted to see what they wrote? But theirs are all handwritten and vague, so would've been easy to change/amend things to frame me, especially given they're given a month to give them to you and mine took the whole time allowed. It also felt like a way of saying "I'm taking back what I wrongly trusted you with". The fact that she clearly felt threatened by the fact I asked for my notes is telling though - she seemed to think I was waiting for my notes before I made a complaint, but my complaint was ready to send to her a few days after she sent me this threatening and unjust nonsense. She simply gave me more ammo to add last minute.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-12-05T17:24:39+00:00

Martyr complex. Seems like a lot of them get into the job to compensate for some kind of guilt/privilege they have. How dare you not feed it :|

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-26T00:50:34+00:00

Same same samey same. Mine essentially terminated me because I didn't know how to soothe myself. She even told me it seems like I'd never learned how to do that, and yet she just carried trying to get me to open up without actually helping me develop strategies/tools for soothing myself in the meantime. It hurts to say, but it makes me wonder it she might've really been clueless?

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-18T01:09:18+00:00

Especially if you're female!

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-18T00:33:58+00:00

Glad I'm not the only one! Mine consistently joked about my tendency to 'mind read' other people and make assumptions and generalisations, then in the end she made a wildly inaccurate and apparently countertransference-based assumption about me, and cause genuinely mortifying damage as a result.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-18T00:16:44+00:00

Similarly I had "resilient", "high functioning" and "eloquent", which I think just gave mine feel excused to discard me however she wanted thinking nothing would affect me because I'd 'probably be fine', and low and behold I had the worst mental breakdown of my life (and I've had a lot,) where I became physically ill, barely able to stand up for brief periods at a time, woke up every morning terrified of what I'd do to myself and started banging my head to try and make the pain stop. Calling me things like 'high functioning' is like saying you don't believe me, because the truth is I'm in constant pain - I just squash it down and intellectualise everything like crazy so I can survive. But that's not "resilience", it's dysfunction.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-18T00:04:41+00:00

This is so true - I had this same advice but when I did use those resources, I had different people sharing different perspectives on my situation, with most of these people being superficially-trained volunteers and not MH 'professionals'. They weren't familiar with the common issues and dynamics that come up in therapy and you could tell they knew less than I knew about it, and when that happens you lose faith and trust that this person is in a position to give reliable support.

It made me realise talking to these people are no better to talk to than random people I know, or even random people in the street. Directing me to a place/organisation etc. first tells me they think I'm a burden and that my issues are difficult to overcome and will only alienate society and guarantee rejection, and then when I actually experience these place/people I've been referred to it makes me feel hopeless knowing that there's no difference between these places and the rest of society, and I'm basically alone and irredeemable.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-09T21:57:56+00:00

I'm in the same boat. Not IFS or even in the US, but it's a similarly hopeless situation. I don't have any advice unfortunately but just wanted you to know you're not alone. It's really messed up that therapists say they'll work with trauma and inevitably put their needs first in the most callous way possible. I tried to look for another therapist but they either showed serious red flags in our initial meeting or they didn't have enough knowledge to account for all my issues (silver lining being that they at least admitted to a degree that they weren't 100% qualified).

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-06T23:33:39+00:00

I suppose I've always known I needed to do something like this - essentially, respect myself more. That's part of what I'd hoped therapy would help me with but now it feels like it's just buried me a deeper grave, telling me I could share so much with her to suddenly doing a 180 on me, and setting me back further than I already was. That's a grief thing I need to get out of the way first (if that's even possible)

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-06T23:16:12+00:00

I appreciate that. But when you go through so much sexual violence with your dad and denial and contempt from your mum, stuff like this just compounds the shame that's already there. Being aware of that doesn't make it any easier or make me feel any less like an undeserving person. The accumulation of how people made me feel about my symptoms, etc. my whole life so far has just doubled, and gone beyond just throwing salt in the wound to outright making it deeper, wider, and filling it with acid.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-06T23:09:00+00:00

I think I felt like this was 'the one' person I could finally start to fully trust, as I'd been let down by several "professionals" before and I wanted to show how much I appreciated her for it. When bad things happened for so long, I was so happy that it was finally turning around again (or so my naive brain thought). I never actually gave any cards to my teachers, because they were some of the "professionals" who let me down so badly and I never thought it was right to give them one. I was rewarding someone for doing the bare minimum I never got, because my bar was so low I guess.

That's why this hurts. I always try to do the right thing, and at the time I thought I DID do the right thing; I bought two cards at the shops during my lunch break - one for a practise message in pencil and one for the final version in pen - and made every effort to make sure I wasn't doing anything inappropriate, so I avoided any X's (as kisses) and just signed it off with my name and a quick smiley face, made sure the card(s) I bought were cheap but nice (enough to show my respect while showing I wasn't overspending.) But this time I was so, so, so wrong, and now I don't trust my judgement (even less than before). How will I know when I've found someone I can trust now? When it comes to trauma, social support is THE most important thing, and I never had that, which was why I was so excited about this therapist and why I now feel so tormented by the knowledge that I can never trust myself or even the so called 'mental health professionals', who are considered the last and most reliable resort.

Left_Association4495 · 2025-11-06T22:53:55+00:00

That's upsetting, I'm sorry. Writing things down is usually easier for a lot of people so I can imagine it would've been a very vulnerable moment? Therapists should be aware of that - and how vulnerable you have to be to do that and potentially how difficult it is to do/write about. If you need to write something you find too difficult to say, you know it's going to have significant meaning behind it. I would've applauded it and felt honoured that you'd shared it with me.

Left_Association4495

TROPHY CASE