I feel like when I speak to therapists, I get a blank look.
The best experiences I've had with therapists, have been from those trained in forensic psychology. My therapist used to provide treatment to pedophiles and told me point blank that anything I could tell her as a victim? Was immediately overshadowed by the shit she had to put up with listening to unrepentant pedophiles while still holding compassion for them, and
withholding judgment, and providing them the best treatment she could per her obligation.
I've had only one experience where the therapists around me were correctly trained to handle this specific type of history (which is not my own personal history but which was that of the other children in the program - I was there for other, related but different reasons) and they had their shit
on lock, but I've never encountered it again outside of that program.
So it depends where you live, and how many of these guys you actually have access to. For me, I could only access that therapy as a child - as an adult, I was shit out of luck -
until I started looking at forensic psychologists. Everyone else that I encountered really had no idea what to say to me, and often agreed with my own assessments of the situation, which was very harmful to my overall health, since I have since learned that my self-perspectives were not accurate.
I should have been offered more compassion than I received. My personal opinion is that people who hear this stuff without having experience usually experience some type of trauma response in the moment, and that results in them spouting harmful, irrational stuff because they can't correctly modulate their emotional reactions in the moment.
For me, I was indoctrinated into armed violence as a child, thus I was seen as a perpetrator and not a victim - while both things are undoubtedly true, I had difficulty accessing treatment from Western-trained therapists
without a forensic background, because they immediately became outraged and emotional and confused when I spoke honestly about my experiences.
I try to forgive therapists for this (and especially friends, colleagues, acquaintances and others - who really have no expectation to hold an understanding for this type of atrocity), but at the same time, you need to be accessing resources that are properly trained - I refused to go into detail with a therapist until I knew that they were capable of handling it without losing emotional composure.
It took me 16 years after childhood to find a therapist capable of doing so. But it is absolutely possible.
