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Sex: How Willing Should A Therapist Be To Talk About It?

  • Post starter Post starter Emov
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And when I told them she lied to me shamelessly, they kept telling me I was imagining it.
 
I'm guessing there's major transference going on here.

I'm guessing that some aspect of your trauma involved silencing, whether it be from someone telling you to shut up and not talk about it or merely from your own guilt and shame.

Now you have a therapist that doesn't want to talk about sexual subjects and instead of realizing it's about her and her preferences and boundaries, you're taking it personally, lashing out so as to make it seem like she's in the wrong.

I think that if you were to accept that she didn't want to talk about sex, you'd feel shamed and silenced all over again.

I hope that one day you learn to respect the boundaries of others. Therapists are humans, with their own limits. Just because you want to talk about something doesn't mean they must sit and listen if it's outside of their own comfort zone of tolerance.
 
"You could have continued to bring the conversation back to sex over and over until she was forced to come clean and admit she couldn't talk about it, if indeed that was the case."
Oh - that's a great way to go about transforming a relationship. Force the other person to 'own up' to your real or imagined perception of their faults/failings.

Now, what would be beneficial for you, going forward, would be to consider whether this kind of strategy is useful in a client-provider relationship, vs. giving observable examples that the provider can either agree to work on or can suggest termination.

I'm the one who posted earlier that your insurance company is placed in a different situation if you have tried your covered option and it has failed. Might not be true in your case, but it's pretty common.

But by firing her, you probably won't be able to access that mechanism easily. It might be in your better interests to try using open communication next time, as opposed to trying to force someone to do what you want through sheer repetition.
 
Just because you want to talk about something doesn't mean they must sit and listen if it's outside of their own comfort zone of tolerance.
And it doesn't mean they have to lie about it either. I asked, she lied. All I wanted her to do was tell the truth. She's a healthcare professional treating a sick person and she lied about things pertinent to my treatment. How do you excuse this?
 
So why didn't you beat her with a stick when she wouldn't give you the "truth" as you wanted it?

I really wish I knew who you are so I could put you on ignore.
 
I really wish I knew who you are so I could put you on ignore.
Why? So you can avoid entering any discussion you can't "win," because you get your jollies that way? Projection much?
 
It's possible she wasn't lying, it's possible you've misinterpreted her body language - you talk about her being triggered and then go on to describe what others here have noted as discomfort. I know when I'm triggered nothing will stop that showing, because the very nature of being triggered is that you don't have control over your response so if she was triggered, her sitting with a client wouldn't have changed her reaction much, I very much doubt she would have been able to dial it back to "mild discomfort".

I wonder if it's worth thinking about what makes it so important to you that people here agree with you, and that your sex life is something that triggers your T, that it's something she isn't able to hold. And I guess the final part of that, if there really was something in what you said that was triggering for her, it doesn't make her incompetent or shit at her job, it just means she has limits and you worked beyond them. It may be that this reaction is new for her and she is simply unaware of it, because it hasn't happened before, she could be bewildered by you saying she's avoiding because she's never been uncomfortable about sex before. There's a reason Ts should have regular supervision and their own therapy, because things come up that they aren't aware of in exactly the same way that clients have blindspots.

By leaving, you've deprived yourself of the opportunity to work through it with, that might have been enriching for you. I wonder if you can see a pattern that mirrors what's happening with your T. You say "you're uncomfortable", she says "no, I'm ok with this" you go on to argue that she is, and that you want her to get to where she admits that your view of her is correct. You say here that your T is incompetent, triggered etc, folk here say "maybe, but there are other possible explanations", you say no there aren't and continue to argue, folk here say "what your saying could be happening, but there are other possibilities", you say no there aren't and go on to tell us the kind of responses you would have engaged with, which start with the premise you're right about your T.

Exploring if that pattern creeps up in daily life would been therapy material.
 
if there really was something in what you said that was triggering for her, it doesn't make her incompetent or shit at her job
If I were a therapist, and I couldn't talk about sex, I would consider myself shit at my job. I suspect she felt the same, and that's why she couldn't admit it --she knew it spelled i-n-c-o-m-p-e-t-e-n-t.

All I can say is you had to be there. What this thread really needs are video recordings of five or six of our sessions. Whatever you're conjuring in your imagination is probably a world apart from the reality I experienced.
 
Is it just for you to vent then? I don't get the purpose of it.
 
I don't get the purpose of it.
No, I wanted to hear about other people's experiences, so I could get an idea of what percentage of therapists shut you down when you start talking about sex. Do you have any stories to share? I'd like to hear them.
 
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