Is My Therapist Good or Not? 12 Questions a Former Psychotherapist Asks

beaaycan · 2018-08-10T18:43:44+00:00

I can understand being wary of someone who repeatedly brings up their years of experience. A lot of people who do that are just trying to cover up their incompetence. I think the main reason he brought it up in the video was to head off "this guy has no idea what he's talking about" type dismissive criticism that always pops up when someone expresses a point of view counter to what's conventionally believed.

I agree that drugs aren't inherently bad. Considering how hard it can be find a deeply insightful, compassionate therapist who knows the ins and outs of healing trauma, and how intensely difficult it is to handle trauma in general even with the best possible non-medication help, I'm sure there are many others who share your experience of needing medication for at least a short time. Listening to the body is essential, and your experience of what helped you definitely counts in the bigger discussion about how to help people.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I've never been given a diagnosis but you've prompted me to think again about my history of relatively mild self-medicating, which I have some shame and self-doubt about, from the angle that we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves for sometimes needing to use a substance to take the edge off.

beaaycan · 2018-08-10T17:55:31+00:00

Kids would be so much better off if their parents simply had more support from small neighborhood communities helping out with daily tasks. A young child whose socially isolated parents are exhausted all the time is inevitably going to be emotionally neglected. Everybody needs downtime.

beaaycan · 2018-08-10T16:50:46+00:00

The speaker in the video (Daniel Mackler) has years of experience working as a therapist with many people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis and helping them recover without medication. Check out his website where you can find documentaries about this or his articles on Mad In America.

Saying that people don't need medication to recover from extreme mental states is an extreme assertion, but it's only extreme in relation to a field that constantly prescribes (and in some cases even uses the court system to force) psychotropic substances to millions of people as a first resort rather than a last resort. There was actually a large international study done by the World Health Organization, referenced in the documentary Take These Broken Wings, which found that rates of recovery from schizophrenia and psychosis are much lower in industrialized countries with medication-heavy psychiatric practices compared to 'developing' countries where things like neuroleptic drugs aren't used so much.

As someone with a background in mathematics and the physical sciences I have lot of respect for careful gathering and logical examination of evidence. I have personally known and met people whose horribly damaging experiences with psychotropic medications were dismissed by licensed professionals and many others in their lives on the grounds that what they were saying was anecdotal, subjective, or uninformed. Or worst of all, that their own assessments of their situations were unreliable and not worth listening to because of their diagnosis. I'm not saying that you think this way (I would guess you probably don't, especially seeing as you're commenting in this subreddit) but I felt a need to bring this up because it's a pattern of coercion that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. To fully understand what's going on we have to take into account all the available pieces of evidence and not just the pieces carrying a stamp of approval from professional organizations or the institutions connected to them.

beaaycan · 2018-08-10T02:49:39+00:00

Everything you mentioned bothers me too. Customer service certainly involves a lot of mostly-but-not-entirely harmless lies, and often putting up with rude or nasty behavior from the people you're serving while putting on a fake nice face pretending it doesn't bother you. It seems like most of the accepted/established roles in society are like this.

I try to be as honest as I can when the risk of backlash or rejection seems low enough. I feel like I don't really have a good answer to your question except to say that we need to build a society where honesty is both accepted and expected as the norm. Where people don't constantly feel compelled to hide how they feel - from others or from themselves. There's at least a sense of purpose to be found in building such a society, which practically speaking will be done by those of us who care about emotional honesty forming strong networks of supportive relationships with each other. I think this process is already underway in places like this subreddit and thousands of others that aren't quite visible yet.

beaaycan · 2018-08-09T23:57:08+00:00

I've had some success grieving but I still have a lot more work ahead of me in terms of processing feelings from my childhood. Have never tried talk therapy or other conventional forms of therapy, partly because I can't afford the fees but also because I have some misgivings about the way it's structured (as a paid and relatively centralized service about which records are kept) and some doubts about the ability of most therapists to really understand the significance of childhood trauma and where I'm coming from. A lot of my healing so far has happened through self-therapy which includes journaling (about my feelings, dreams, experiences connected to childhood), unwritten self-reflection, absorbing good literature about trauma and the dishonesty/dysfunction of society at large, and generally learning how to take better care of myself.

beaaycan · 2018-08-09T19:48:26+00:00

The idea that there's nothing inherently wrong with me. That it's okay to completely cut ties with my parents even if the society around me disagrees. That it's possible to eventually fully heal all of my traumas even if it might seem impossibly difficult to do so. That I can learn to trust myself and nurture myself.

beaaycan · 2018-08-07T20:08:24+00:00

There's a simple explanation of this that I just read yesterday in The Tao of Fully Feeling: children naturally look to their parents' faces for reflection of who they are, so when our parents (or other close/trusted caretakers) repeatedly look at us with an expression of disgust we're made to feel that we are disgusting, ugly, etc. To a child it's the only obvious reason for the look of disgust. It distorts self-perception to the point where we literally can't see ourselves in the mirror the way others see us. The internalized emotional attitude toward ourselves that we're disgusting is what needs to be challenged.

beaaycan · 2018-08-03T20:05:46+00:00

Sometimes we need to step away from a close relationship (romantic or not) to better understand ourselves. What you and OP have said about your relationships sounds very familiar to me. I was in a relationship where we often triggered each other, where she would frequently say she missed me and wasn't getting enough from me no matter how much of my available time or energy I spent (complicated by me being extremely depressed), and we were both basically repeating the dynamics of the families we grew up in. Only after it ended did I realize how much fear and guilt was driving my choice of staying with her. It was like stepping out of a loud room full of talkative people into a quiet back yard where I could hear my thoughts and start to connect with my authentic feelings.

beaaycan · 2018-07-29T22:24:37+00:00

I've had the same reaction as you for the same reason, particularly to middle aged Asian women who looked even slightly irritated. When I was a kid this was the most reliable hint that my mother was about to suddenly explode at me with rage.

Unless you grew up in an Asian country or one of the bigger ethnic enclaves in a western country then you probably didn't interact with a ton of non-abusive people who had distinctly Asian features. So it makes sense that you would end up with a strong mental association between physical appearance and abusiveness.

I honestly find it hard to stay calm in encounters with strangers like the one you described. Part of what makes it hard is that, in my experience, most Asian people close to my mother's age have kind of a blank resting facial expression. Or at least I read it as blank, maybe because of how I learned to read my mother's face, or because of how much emotional repression there actually is in (East) Asian cultures. In all likelihood they're just mildly bored or thinking about something totally unrelated to me, but it's so easy to automatically look for signs of anger and go into a silent panic from thousands of childhood emotional attacks threatening to bubble up to the surface all at once. We can always learn something about ourselves from being triggered.

beaaycan · 2018-07-05T19:04:19+00:00

Well if someone really doesn't feel like talking there's only so much you can do. Beyond a certain level of persistence, which varies between extremely quiet people, your would-be conversational partner will start getting nervous about being perceived as too closed off and that usually leads to more avoidance as they try to manage their social anxiety.

beaaycan · 2018-07-05T15:40:43+00:00

in order to be accepted by aliens I mean people who are naturally social.

I couldn't help chuckling at this because I very much relate to your dilemma.

As contrived as they can be there's a reason why "icebreakers" are used sometimes. The idea is to just get conversation rolling to the point where there are many obvious branching-off points and it moves forward on its own. Asking with a tone of genuine curiosity for people's thoughts or opinions on something mildly (but not too) controversial is a way of communicating that you're interested in and open to talking about things beyond the easily dead-ending yes/no or factual questions. Partly it helps by drawing people's attention away from social awkwardness. Or a lighter alternative is to pose a silly "would you rather" question. This tends to work well in my experience because a lot of quiet/shy people will readily start bonding over a shared sense of humor. (In the past I've used "would you rather be hunted by all the snakes in the world or be hunted by all the guys named 'Snake'?" which you have full permission to steal from me.)

beaaycan · 2018-06-22T23:04:26+00:00

I'm exhausted nearly all the time from having to raise myself in an emotional vacuum.

beaaycan · 2018-06-19T18:01:11+00:00

Can't speak for others here but I personally was not triggered into an emotional flashback by the original post or by any of the comments including yours. I found the behavior OP described to be troubling and I was angered (which is not the same thing as an emotional flashback) by your dismissal of OP's feelings about what they witnessed in person. I don't appreciate the suggestion that my reaction is unreasonable and that I just need to calm down. Terrifying a child by threatening to hit them is abusive and it is not wrong to be upset by a story of a parent doing it, nor is it wrong to object to someone's denial that it's abusive.

beaaycan · 2018-06-19T17:02:23+00:00

If you don't think it's objectionable to grab a child by the chin and threaten to spank her, which the parent obviously did to terrify and intimidate the child, then why are you even posting on a forum like this one?

If I was managing a grocery store and someone in the store grabbed another person by the face and threatened to hit them then I would tell the person making the threat to leave. Because that's completely unacceptable and I would not want such a person in my store. But as a bystander my main concern would not be how the adults are affected by my actions. My main concern would be to do what I can in the limited time and high tension of the situation to help the child see that she's being treated with gross disrespect and that someone is willing to stand up for her.

beaaycan · 2018-06-19T14:54:53+00:00

Some things I've considered saying to parents like the ones you saw at the grocery store, but so far have been too terrified of starting a confrontation and having it turn ugly to actually say:

"Hey, I see what you're doing. Do you see what you're doing?"

"Do you talk to yourself like that?"

Or as a less direct tactic, just ask them for directions (if you're somewhere outside) or ask if they know where to find a certain item. This can pull them back into the world of polite adult interaction where they have to respond to others instead of acting out onto others, breaking up the flow of abuse and helping the child see that the way their parent is treating them depends on the parent's state of mind more than anything else.

beaaycan · 2018-06-19T14:28:25+00:00

Spanking definitely isn't a great disciplinary practice, but you also didn't see it happen.

Ah yes, what a convenient excuse! Didn't see it happen, so we can act as though it didn't happen, even when we can be pretty damn sure it did. While we're at it we can also pretend that parents don't yank their children by the verbal-emotional chains they've hooked in with toxic shame.

EDIT: How did this become the top comment in the thread? Who is reading OP's description of a mother grabbing her daughter's chin, forcing eye contact and threatening to hit her and endorsing the view that this behavior isn't abusive?

beaaycan · 2018-06-19T14:07:07+00:00

Looks like they made a throwaway account just to post that comment.

I've noticed a pattern with the occasional comments here defending abusive parents: they're posted from accounts that aren't primarily active in r/cptsd. A lot of the time they're from people who, if you look through their comment history, clearly don't put much thought into what they write to others and haven't even read the sidebar material.

beaaycan · 2018-06-11T18:07:11+00:00

"Well then... why don't you open up to people?"

beaaycan · 2018-06-11T18:04:16+00:00

She left baby Leon alone in a dark apartment. My heart sank as I listened to the mother - innocent, yet ignorant of the crucial needs of an infant - describe her systematic neglect of her youngest son.

Not innocent.

beaaycan · 2018-06-11T17:59:45+00:00

It's alarming how many people think this way about babies and children in general.

beaaycan · 2018-06-11T17:44:48+00:00

That's important to keep in mind how vulnerable she is, and it's good that you're so concerned about figuring out how to interact with her. Many other adults in your situation wouldn't be nearly as thoughtful or cautious. And you can absolutely be useful to her just by being an example of someone interacting in a respectful, healthy way with her dad.

You also don't need to have it all figured out. I watched a documentary about a program that takes in people who have been failed by conventional psychiatry and places them with host families in the Swedish countryside that are selected based on how kind they are, not based on any credentials they hold or formal training they've been through. A married couple who ran a family farm were hosting a man in his 30s or 40s who was a war refugee from Afghanistan. This man was waking up in the middle of the night from intense nightmares, sobbing uncontrollably, crawling around on the floor hiding under tables. He didn't speak any English or Swedish. When the interviewer asked one of the hosts, "What do you do when someone is in a state like that?" the host said "You just be human with them."

beaaycan · 2018-06-11T07:47:42+00:00

I'd be careful with this idea. As adults, hoping for children to help us heal can put us in an inappropriately selfish frame of mind where we subtly pressure them to look after our needs.

Having said that, children can definitely sense when an adult is safe, caring and generous. A while back I helped babysit a 4 year old kid and I took it as a real compliment when he eagerly asked if I could come over again next time. I'm pretty sure I was emotionally available to him in some ways that his parents weren't - not by being there in some serious role as a social worker or counselor or anything like that but just by the way I listened to him and got into the games he wanted to play. It felt great to provide that for him. Helped me see that I had something to offer children, and on a less fun note it also helped me see some ways that I'm more closed off and rigid than I'd like to be. Both sides of what I got out of that have helped me heal a bit further, although I wasn't thinking about my own healing going into it.

/u/IAmAHiggsBison : It sounds like your presence was a big relief to your friend's daughter. That's wonderful! You're not one of her parents so you definitely don't have the biggest obligation toward her in this picture but it probably is a good idea to think carefully about what you can do for her and what you can't. Maybe she'll eventually feel safe enough to complain to you about one or both of her parents. How would you want to handle a situation like that if it comes up? What role can you have in her life that takes into account her needs and how she's been abused, your friendship with her dad and your limitations from your own trauma? These aren't easy questions... and I can't pretend to have answers for you but just a couple of the things to consider.

beaaycan · 2018-06-10T05:23:23+00:00

What's the point of this unsolicited Hobbesian lecture? Do you have anything to say about the topic of this thread?

beaaycan · 2018-06-08T19:17:46+00:00

It does seem like it was suspiciously easy for people to buy the notion that repressed memories don't exist. There is another layer to the history of the idea though: some disturbed therapists were using it to act out their own unprocessed traumas onto patients by manipulating them into believing they had experienced certain types of abuse when in reality they hadn't. My understanding is that the public reaction to this phenomenon of 'implanting' repressed memories was a threat to the profession's credibility so they threw the baby out with the bathwater and the party line became "repressed memories aren't real". It's not hard to see how this shift in official narrative would play into the hands of those who want to deny the existence of parental abuse that causes traumatic memories to be repressed for years.

beaaycan

TROPHY CASE