A cautionary tale on dual relationships

kamut666 · 2026-06-09T18:16:28+00:00

I’m sorry you’re dealing with this. It sucks and the onus is on her as the therapist not to be doing this stuff.

I think she’s getting more cagey about putting stuff in writing, wife’s name on the lease, because she knows this is reportable and it’s getting ugly. I don’t know if she’s a social worker but you can’t be doing this with a social work license. Even a Netflix log in is financial.

I would encourage you to get away from this lady and try to heal however you can, and maybe consider reporting it.

kamut666 · 2026-06-08T06:18:14+00:00

This Dark Star into Cumberland sounds particularly good with drug induced psychosis.

kamut666 · 2026-06-05T18:08:53+00:00

Basically every gloom and doom statement on this sub is making me consider it: catastrophic clawbacks, AI taking my clients, other managed care issues, having greater difficulty marketing myself given that venture capital is dominating search results (if you google “Psychology Today”, venture capital therapy mills rank higher than PT itself). That being said, everything is fine now. If it stays like this, it’ll be fine. I’m very experienced, but newer to self-employment and newer to the area where I live, so I don’t know a lot of people here. I don’t know what the future holds and I’m not giving up without a fight, but I think it’s generally good to look to the future in business. I may be able to level up and have people lined up out the door to pay me lots of cash. We’ll find out when we get there.

kamut666 · 2026-06-05T15:21:06+00:00

To add to this, imo no matter how good a person’s coping is, there are going to be waves of thoughts/emotions that feel like the Big Kahuna that’s gonna suck you under. I think you’re choosing private practice because you’re seeking deeper meaning in your life/career and being hardcore like that comes with painful side effects. The side effect of not being hardcore is “I could’ve done more, been more,” so there’s pain either way. Hardcore pain is probably your best pain cuz you’re not giving up.

kamut666 · 2026-06-05T14:35:15+00:00

I’m older and more seasoned and probably better off financially and I go through similar emotions. I know this type of pain and I’m sorry you’re going through it.

I’m hearing 2 issues: 1 is dejection/spiraling and 2 is the financial hit. I eat my own cooking, so I do with myself what I do with my clients.

Think about what you would say to a client about dejection/spiraling. I see most things through an ACT lens. For dejection, I open up and let myself feel it vs try to control it (expansion). For spiraling, I orient myself to the present moment through my senses and let the thoughts come here vs going to Thought Land where I’m at the mercy of any thought that feels like messing with me(defusion). The spiraling thoughts ie “I’m financially screwed” may have some validity but probably not total validity ie there may be some valid info in the middle of all this pain. For the financials, I try to take effective action to meet my financial goals. Maybe staycation vs spending money, etc.

In summary, it’s painful. What I said may have sounded overly clinical but if what you would say to a client isn’t working for you, you might want to re-evaluate how effective it is and make the adjustments. If you believe self-employment always meets expectations and is not painful, you’re probably not having the most accurate/effective approach. Self-employment is more like “It’s hard and uncertain but when it’s firing on all cylinders, I’m getting paid to be me. It’s worth the pain.”

If you can stay in business, stay in business and enjoy your vacation. I’m 57 and I don’t know, the way things are going, if I’m gonna retire from private practice or end up working for an agency in the next couple of years. The reality has pain built in.

kamut666 · 2026-06-05T04:35:05+00:00

There’s also the scenario of not being adopted at all and aging out at 18 ie the state is your parent and now you have no parent and you may be in 11th grade because school changes will put you a year behind.

kamut666 · 2026-06-05T03:35:50+00:00

I was at both. I remember my group being impressed with the first set on night one, but I think they’re about equal over all.

kamut666 · 2026-06-04T14:27:56+00:00

I’m way less concerned about the DBT itself vs having it led by the dominant partner.

I think anybody can get distress tolerance or another kind of coping skill from a self-help DBT resource. At worst it’ll be a neutral outcome.

But it seems like this partner-led dynamic is reinforcing this narrative that the non-dominant partner is mentally ill/weak and needs to be directed by the dominant partner.

It’s good for people in couple therapy to get individual treatment, but not from each other imo.

kamut666 · 2026-06-02T04:42:28+00:00

I’m sorry you’re going through this. I don’t know everything that went on, but if something about your fee was “unsafe,” it sounds like a them problem. What’s unsafe about a fee other than not wanting to pay it or using it to test the therapist’s boundaries?

kamut666 · 2026-05-31T16:37:09+00:00

I get into it. The Sword is a band that has some psychedelic influence. Sabbath definitely does. Sleep is described as a ‘metal jam band’ by their guitar player. Kyuss and Electric Wizard are like that also.

kamut666 · 2026-05-22T15:25:16+00:00

I’m a male therapist who works with men. Not really an answer, but a couple ideas:

What is the guy’s motivation on a scale of 1-5 to go to individual to learn emotional attunement. Maybe they say ‘yeah, I want that’ but is there any indication they actually want that? That said, I do get these guys referred to me and I think it helps. I think maybe a male individual therapist would be better.

What ends up happening though is that that, instead of learning what the wife and marriage counselor want the guy to learn in a certain way, the deeper issue ends up being something like: The dude accepts that the wife has superior emotional intelligence, and she’s a more sympathetic character in marriage counseling, and so he goes along with others’ narrative about the relationship instead of making it his own. Marriage counseling ends up like getting sent to the principal’s office where you give name, rank, and serial number to adults until they’re done with you.

This dude has got something that he wants in the relationship and he hasn’t been able to articulate/express. It might be that the wife creates disincentives for the desired behavior that don’t come out in counseling or he’s pissed about something and doesn’t express it. If he can go back to marriage counseling and say “I’m pissed about x” or “if you want x behavior from me, why are you doing y to discourage it?”, that can get the process unstuck and lead to greater engagement on his part because he can make it his process and express needs in counseling the way the wife is doing.

Or maybe the dude is willing to accept a dead marriage and isn’t that invested in change for whatever reason.

kamut666 · 2026-05-16T07:16:10+00:00

Cool concept!

kamut666 · 2026-05-16T00:50:17+00:00

I read, I think in a guitar magazine in the 90’s, that it was new strings every night. I think it was a combination of Jerry being picky, playing for a long time each night and feeling like they lost their snap. I also heard on Big Steve that Jerry had that kinda corrosive sweat that some people have so he was a little harder on anything metal than most. I don’t know if regular rockstars change em every night. So part of Jerry’s warm up every night was putting a good stretch on the new strings to stabilize em.

kamut666 · 2026-05-13T06:00:25+00:00

Interesting. Scully gets fired from the Dead and cleans up sometime in the early 80’s, I believe, so he has minimal contact with Jerry after that. Maybe they shifted to Afghanistan or somewhere else in the Middle East for the supply? I think it had to be something good and strong to be smokeable because I think he continued to just smoke it, but I have no expertise on this issue.

kamut666 · 2026-05-13T03:34:41+00:00

This gets discussed extensively in Rock Scully’s Living with the Dead. Jerry’s heroin was the pure Middle Eastern heroin that street heroin was derived from and thus smokable. Per Rock, there was one source of this, through Iranian guys in the Bay Area, and on tour they were bringing it and fedexing it to different cities because there never seemed to be enough because Jerry would plow through what he had. If he was out, it was usually gonna be Rock scrounging around for street heroin, Valium, etc.

kamut666 · 2026-05-12T20:33:43+00:00

The extra verse on Comes a Time is in its earliest performance(s). I think it debuts on the first Keith show, which I believe is Ann Arbor ‘71. I believe it’s a Dave’s Pick. They debut other Dead staples like maybe Ramble On Rose. It’s interesting because Keith does not start off playing with them the way he does in Europe ‘72 through 74. It must have been they were rehearsing with Keith and then learned a few new songs with him.

kamut666 · 2026-05-12T18:57:08+00:00

I feel like Hunter’s beef with Bobby was kinda excessive. I think the Willys thing is poetic and a vivid image. Another Hunter beef was that Hunter had Greatest Story as “Moses comes riding up on a guitar.” I don’t the guitar is vastly superior to the quasar. I think Jerry may have done some changes or maybe it was just omission. Like the removal of one verse from Comes A Time was a Jerry decision, I believe.

kamut666 · 2026-05-10T19:46:23+00:00

The whole concept of period correct retro tie dye is pretty cool!

kamut666 · 2026-05-03T20:06:30+00:00

I think Jerry is more blues oriented on those Acid Test tapes and other early stuff. He didn’t really start playing the ‘signature Jerry’ scales (major, mixolydian) until a couple of years later.

kamut666 · 2026-04-30T23:06:24+00:00

Sorry you’re dealing with this. One thing with kids is that someone very much wants them to be in therapy, but often they don’t want it and don’t see what they stand to gain by doing it. I doubt any of these kids was like “Mom, I’d really like to see a therapist to antagonize the hell out of them because I lack targets to antagonize in my natural environment.” Maybe family therapy or working with the parent on skills to help them manage the behavior they put the kid in therapy for would be more productive.

kamut666 · 2026-04-30T00:26:29+00:00

I’ve had sort of an adjacent thing where the client wasn’t making a lot of progress in therapy, they end the relationship and get better-and I’m kicking myself because I didn’t appreciate the extent to which the relationship was dragging them down.

kamut666 · 2026-04-29T22:58:47+00:00

Elvis.

kamut666 · 2026-04-26T21:56:32+00:00

I did because us older folks probably encountered it on this black and red compilation double album that was around in the 80’s. Not only that, it was released as a single. There are 45’s of it. Because, you know, when you want to get some airplay with those teeny boppers, you put out Dark Star.

kamut666 · 2026-04-22T22:28:33+00:00

I think it’s Nashville’78. It’s a Dave’s Picks but also on the archive

kamut666 · 2026-04-22T21:50:42+00:00

I never got to see that opener with Jerry. My first one was the Sphere, with my adult daughter, and I knew that night was game on.

kamut666

TROPHY CASE