Tips On Making Therapy A Safe Experience

[Bragado Jansing]

No, not for everyone. For some people (myself included), I can do better when given permission to s...

I'm not really listings things here... in this one "exercise" I'm doing, listing negative thoughts about job postings, I had to confront being sexually harassed at my first job, my history of sexual abuse, and the fact that I was thrown to the wolves growing up, making me feel absolutely god awful.Dude sent me into hell here. I don't think he has a clue what he's doing, despite advertising otherwise, and this conclusion also includes me doing more research on him.

No, I wasn't given a copy of the intake forms. It's not just the fact that he didn't give me his email address, he's seemed pretty careless and unprofessional about other things, too, and it's only been one session so far!

Inpatient of any kind = homeless for me, I don't have a family. There aren't any specialized PTSD programs where I live like the ones you're describing, so they're not really viable, either.

The life and world you're describing is not one available to me, I'm afraid. I have lived and made it this far on my own. I'm a pretty tough person, I really, quite truly have to do this without a therapist.

 

[joeylittle]

I'm just saying - I have no family, live alone as well. I don't get why you can't apply for residential treatment. And you are the one deciding to stay where you are at regionally.

It's fine to make the choice that you just aren't into doing therapy - but don't allow yourself to believe that you do not have the ability to change your circumstance. It is a very, very easy thing to think - I bet there's not a person on this forum who hasn't done it at some point. Recovery from PTSD requires that you begin to be willing to change the circumstances of your life, in order to support your recovery.

 

[Bragado Jansing]

I'm just saying - I have no family, live alone as well. I don't get why you can't apply for residen...

I would absolutely love to change my circumstances, this has been my life's work. It'd just be nice if there were some decently qualified therapists out there.

I wanted a therapist who could help so badly I was doing that thing where I overlook bullcrap again, which is how I get abused. Once I notice myself doing that, it's a red flag for me. I'm not resisting therapy whatsoever, I would absolutely love to find a cool therapist, but right now it just doesn't seem like it's in the cards, unfortunately.

Psychotherapy has a well-publicized problem right now with quality control and having actually well-trained trauma therapists available. So it's not like some outlandish thing that I'm having trouble with this, lots of people are.

 

[joeylittle]

I understand. In my opinion, reading your posts, you find it easier to believe that you are stuck and can't get help. That's just what I see.

What will your plan be, instead of therapy?

 

[Bragado Jansing]

I understand. In my opinion, reading your posts, you find it easier to believe that you are stuck a...

My plan? Enjoy my life as much as possible. I've been working on this for years now on my own. I don't do well with crap help; if there's a therapist who works as well and as thoroughly as I do, I'll hire 'em.

But there are a lot of lazy, incompetent, corrupt people in this world (not saying all qualities, but combinations of the three qualities), and people are the ones working as therapists. Til the day I meet someone who meets my standards, I will continue to do this on my own. If I can cheat death and make it this far in my life alone, then I'll be just fine. And I haven't even gotten started yet.

Our culture isn't in the right place for good trauma therapy anyway, IMO. Trauma therapy requires a practitioner willing do slow, heavy, difficult, painful work, and if it's done right, then it's not really fun for the therapist, nor is it profitable. It's slow, long-term, emotionally heavy work for both ends. But the climate we live in makes this an utterly pointless thing for professionals to do. It would take an absolute saint, even more saintly than Mother Theresa, and an intelligent, skillful one at that, to provide real trauma therapy. We just aren't living in a culture that values that kind-of thing, so it's not going to produce people like that.

There aren't any monetary incentives for it, either, since trauma therapy pays just as much as any other therapy offered. It's the type of service that would have to be subsidized by the public since it's an area where the profit motive fails. That scheme isn't in place now, and that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

I'm looking for a needle in a haystack here. The clock's ticking, and I'm not going to wait around to live my life anymore.

 

[Bragado Jansing]

I've been reflecting on my experience with this therapist, and I realized a few things that may or may not be helpful to people here:

* One big mistake I made is that I took this therapist's resume at face value. I did not verify the details of his personal statements and his work experience. He portrayed himself to be this caring, progressive humanitarian, both in his professional work and through articles he wrote in the media. Taking it all together he seemed like a downright caring and decent person. Looked great to me! I was pretty taken with this, but the truth is that I've met plenty of so-called humanitarians and progressives who were, in reality, the furthest thing from the truth. In some cases they use these outward displays of high personal ethics and morals to cover up a truly wretched personality underneath, or had personal agendas that motivated their actions that couldn't be sussed out easily. Say, a power-to-the-people leftist who's really an authoritarian underneath who wants grand power for themselves that they failed to achieve in the status quo, or a right-wing Christian whose "love of man" is really an interest in controlling the lives of others according to their own beliefs and desires. So on and so forth.

This therapist really didn't seem to give a rat's ass about my situation or condition, and was highly unprofessional. Not only that but he had this kind-of arrogant and condescending attitude when I was describing my history in intake, which really put me for a spin ... I kept trying to win his approval or something, which made me feel really gross and powerless. Not the best type of therapist for me to have considering my background. In fact, my family pulls this trick, of presenting themselves to be these grand humanitarians, but it's just part of their con game.

* I got taken in by false hope, by this great desire and need to get better as quickly as possible, and panic that I "needed" help ASAP or I would die or go insane. Which gave me an incentive to hope for the best while avoiding the work of gathering actual facts. Say, asking the therapist what they actually did hands-on throughout his life to demonstrate his purported compassionate work.

* Fear of asserting my interests in the first session. This is a quality I definitely need to work on.

And more. I found a good article that covers some of this stuff, but I can't post links right now. Oh well!

 

[Suzetig]

Trauma therapy requires a practitioner willing do slow, heavy, difficult, painful work, and if it's done right, then it's not really fun for the therapist, nor is it profitable. It's slow, long-term, emotionally heavy work for both ends.

I don't know about being "fun" for the therapist, but I have a T who is very prepared to do the heavy lifting and has done so for 2.5 years with me so far. I know she enjoys working with me, she's told me that she does but I also see it in the way she gives herself to our work. I know she wishes I hadn't had the experiences I did, and that some of what I bring is very hard for her to hear, but she likes me and enjoys working with me. And no, I'm not paying a fortune either, so it's not about the money for her. I know I'm not the only person here who has a superstar T who is happy to engage in the very hard work of trauma therapy.

I do think you set impossible standards for your T, possibly because it means you can keep on avoiding doing the heavy work too? Not said in judgement - who would volunteer to look at this stuff - but what you want your T to be and to evidence goes far beyond their professional remit.

 

[Bragado Jansing]

I do think you set impossible standards for your T, possibly because it means you can keep on avoiding doing the heavy work too? Not said in judgement - who would volunteer to look at this stuff - but what you want your T to be and to evidence goes far beyond their professional remit.

I've been doing the heavy work on my own for years now. I have hundreds of pages of journal entries, I've read books galore, and I've grown and changed a lot as a person during that period. So no, it has nothing to do with my unwillingness to "do the work". That's one of those stock phrases in therapy that lets therapists off the hook for poor behavior.

Maybe I just work harder than most other people at their jobs, I've experienced that before. I didn't make it this far in life for nothing, I guess. But this current therapist failed to act in a professional manner within the first meeting, multiple times, and simply did not do his job properly. It has nothing to do with my "unwillingness to work". I have a professional education and training, so I know what I'm looking for here. I'm not going to trust some random person with this stuff, because that would be a huge mistake.

So what do you suggest, go and see a potentially abusive or incompetent therapist, because you think I'm "unwilling to do the work" which is based on nothing, and that this therapist was doing his job properly, which is also based on nothing?

Your answer is a whole bunch of nothing based on nothing, and shifting blame to me, and empowering the therapist, all based on nothing! No thanks. Been there, done that, and it cost me a lot of money for a whole lotta nothing.

 

[Suzetig]

I have no interest in blaming you at all. You seemed to start talking about your therapist from a place of "this seems ok, there are bits here that seem to fit" (eg the way he dealt with your initial consultation and talking about supporting you to find employment) to him being utterly unprofessional and not giving a rats ass about you. I wasn't there, so I don't know how competent or otherwise he is - but that seems to be a fairly wide swing following one intake session, if I remember rightly?

What I hear in between it all is you questioning whether anyone will be strong enough to handle your shit, whether anyone will care enough to stick with you and help carry the load and I hear how scared you are of being abused, exploited or groomed into something that is ultimately damaging. All of those feelings are natural and belong in therapy, but that means making yourself vulnerable to another person and trusting them to care for you in a way other people have not. And that is very very hard work. And you might not be ready for that. Which is fine, as I said before I have no judgement about that because I know how that goes.

I do know that working on trauma by myself was hard going, I too have journals full of me working things out, while being too terrified to open Pandora's box in therapy. Doing that work literally kept me functioning. Working on it with someone else has been the hardest thing ever, but has enabled me heal. At no point did I say your therapist was doing his job properly, I said mine was.

 

[Bragado Jansing]

I have no interest in blaming you at all. You seemed to start talking about your therapist from a place...

You're listening to me trying to convince myself that the situation was better than it was. The therapist gave this exercise to write out my "negative thinking" in applying for jobs, but he gave me no guidelines or preparation for it, and based on our intake, he should've known it would inevitably lead to some really emotionally heavy stuff, which it did! And it knocked me on my a**. I told him it was related to some really messed up stuff I lived through, but he made no acknowledgement or accounting of that whatsoever in the session or in his assignment. Not only that, but he didn't even give me a deadline or his email address to send him the work.

Which made me see a pattern of carelessness in his professional demeanor. Forgetting appointment times, setting phone call appointments he missed, giving me the wrong address for his office. Why on earth would I trust sensitive material with this dude? On top of the fact that the exercise he gave me doesn't even fit with my situation, and he should've known that based on what I told him in the intake. Also he did not explain his reasoning for anything, explain his methodology, or offer any input on my situation whatsoever. It was like, what the heck am I doing here?

Also I was clearly doing this crazy transference stuff with him, because I shared some of the abuse stuff, and I guess I bugged out. Instead of calling attention to it, he took it with a smile! That is so dangerous for me to have in a relationship with anyone, but especially a therapist. Of course I don't want to go back to this person.

It has nothing to do with any of the things you listed, I'd love to find a therapist I could trust, I just want to get this crap out of the way. But I'm not going to convince myself with self-blaming reasoning to get involved in a bad situation.

 

[joeylittle]

But this current therapist failed to act in a professional manner within the first meeting, multiple times, and simply did not do his job properly. It has nothing to do with my "unwillingness to work". I have a professional education and training, so I know what I'm looking for here.

if you could figure out why you are avoiding recovery, it would probably help you take the next step.

I'm not even saying that one-on-one therapy has to be the next step...but either you are desirous of change and you work hard to find the right environment for yourself, or you are invested in maintaining an identity as a victim/someone who has been victimized.

Making sweeping generalizations about the lack of available trauma therapy or good therapists doesn't line up with your identity of being hard working and capable of self-examination. There's a disconnect there.

 

[Bragado Jansing]

if you could figure out why you are avoiding recovery, it would probably help you take the next step...

This has to do with my experience of calling up a lot of therapists. Most of them said they couldn't help. That's them.