Posters who speak ill of them offer as examples: Many.
This makes sense to me. For a couple of reasons.
People who get a good T? Tend to stick with them. Often for over a decade. If not, shop around.
Second, IME, some people tend to have unrealistic expectations of their T. Examples that commonly seem to come up in this bracket: my T is deliberately messing with me head (yup, that's their job!), my T is deliberately distressing/upsetting me for ??? reasons (yup, trauma therapy usually includes a lot of distresing work), and one that seems to be recurrent in this thread, my T is mentally unstable.
That last one is particularly odd to me. Examples such as "My T has to take meds for Bipolar", or "my T has previously been hospitalised for a suicide attempt", I'm not sure where that train of thought is going. T's come from a wide range of social backgrounds, and suffer mental illness like the rest of the population. When you consider that 1 in 5 people will suffer from Depression alone at some point, it makes sense that there are quite a few T's out there with their own history of mental illness. Fortunately, for a lot of people, mental illness is kind of like getting pneumonia: you get it, you treat it, it goes away. And if they're managing their illness with medication? That seems pretty sane to me personally, and is evidence that mich of the stigma around mental illness (Argh! Mentally ill! Couldn't possibly hold down a job responsibly!) is simply unwarranted and oftentimes misinformed. Fortunately in many places we now have Disabilty Discrimination laws to allow people with disabilities to work in a broad range of occupations. People with disabilities bring a lot to the table, and it would be a loss to the rest of the population to exclude them solely because of a history of mental illness.
T's are human, and they have their own experiences of life - good and bad. T's who can use this experience to inform their treatment of clients? Good thing perhaps, instead of relying solely on textbooks they're applying that knowledge to what they know of the real world.
Unfortunately, there also seems to be a large number of people aho have a bad experience of therapy and interpret this is their T's fault (anything from incompetence to maliciousness). But the reality is that many people find they aren't a good fit with their T for a broad range of reasons, and the tendency to "blame" the T for a bad outcome sometimes speaks more about the person receiving the therapy (their relationships, personality traits, expectations, etc) than the therapist themself.
Statements like "I knew a T personally and they told me that all T's are monsters!" Weeeeell, I've said that about my own profession more than once:rolleyes:
Of course their are bad T's out there. But one does wonder about the person receiving the therapy, rather than the therapist themself, when one person has a string of bad outcomes. That's not a dig at any particular poster: I can reflect that it's worked out really badly for me and some of the T's I've tried in the past. And it's painful to admit it, but a very big part of the reason for the bad outcome was...me.
