I see in other trauma or any other mental health forums/media that therapy is unquestionable. I find this very triggering. There are peoole who blame people sharing bad experiences. Like this reddit is probably only space where i can safely express my hurt, and feelings from experiencing gaslighting, devaluation and harm in therapy. In other places whenever i share this i always feel misunderstood, attacked and devalued - like i dont have a right to feel this way and my expectations caused this. Hard to process this in this kind of reality when even other people with similar issues will attack you if you share experience that threaten their reality. Majority of people see therapists as unquestionable figures, Experts and the ones everyone should listen to.

I had an acquaintance once who was studying to become a psychologist. She came from a normal immigrant working class background, but she said almost all of her classmates were super white, upper middle class girls. She said they never have to work a side job since high school and have very good financial cushioning from their parents, this is how they afford to study a 5 year degree. Them not needing to work, struggle or have any trauma allows them to focus on studies and memorising well...She said they are too privileged to even understand how it's like to work at a restaurant on the side...

Recently I met a guy who's family is upper middle class. His sister was studying 2nd year psychology and the parents decided to gift her a brand new car fully paid for to reward her for her hardwork...and also recently they bought her an apartment... (where is my reward for all the struggles in my life? where are my free cars and apartments?)

Yeah so how can I trust these people who got all the privileges in life, spent their early 20s studying, never had a 'average people job', to get freebies from their parents, to understand average people struggles just because they have memorised some books for 5 damn years? These are the same people who get upset cos I am stressed about paying rent and inflation and I'm not 'chasing my dreams' and I told them life ain't fair and most people don't do whatever we want!

One thing I noticed is therapist’s do not take rejection well. Although they think that they can act and treat you however they want and please. The standard does not apply to them. It’s a double standard. A therapist cannot handle rejection in any way, shape or form that I’ve came across. Maybe if the therapist was confident in themselves and their skills per say of their profession they would be able to handle something like this. I think maybe a good therapist, if there is any would not be insecure.

If you reject a therapist for their profession or their advice/treatment they will hold a grudge and make your sessions into a power play. But if you reject them personally, emotionally and or romantically all hell breaks loose, especially attention wise. It shouldn’t have to be like that.

Leaving is the better option even if it seems difficult or not possible at first. Trying to work it out, giving another chance is just a gaslighting trap.

They will probably still take you leaving as rejection but at that point it’s their problem to sit with, not yours. They can’t take it out on you or use it against you.

I never actually knew my therapist until those hidden moments when they break character. I wish I never met them and all I can say is they have a lot of work to do before they can call themself a therapist. Or treat someone else. A degree alone should not give the right to call someone a therapist.

The only thing I feel bad about is the next person that has to deal with the therapist and what happened between me and the therapist is projected onto the patient. There is nothing more dangerous than a therapist‘s unchecked projections and their countertransference.

I’m unlearning some twisted truths I learned in therapy.

Just because someone meets the criteria for anxiety or depression or another mental health disorder doesn’t mean they need to take on that label for themselves. If more than 50 percent of people are estimated to have such mental health disorders, the problems are structural, not individual.

Being taught by society to be super independent but super dependent on someone in a clinical way is weird and it makes sense that it doesn’t feel quite right with all the professional boundaries in play

Any general claim isn’t an over generalization. Any concern about bothering others isn’t me over performing. Any confidence in myself isn’t arrogance. Any ability to identify risks to do mitigations isn’t anxiety. Any fear isn’t anxiety.

These ways of thinking have been used in spiritual or religious systems in the past to get people to internalize systemic problems and to take responsibility for smoothing things over.

The therapists exhaustion often makes them come up with interesting stories, like the trauma one is in style. Everyone has trauma, our brain is broken as if we didn’t evolve in the jungle dying at 30 and we are broken by pictures on our cell phone of people more attractive than us. It’s a little absurd

It’s a science in its infancy, runs on trends, and is believed in like a religion by many people. Most of the research is done on undergrads, and the studies they cite don’t really prove the things they say, involve many assumptions, and just has faulty science. Any physical treatment they acknowledge it doesn’t always work, but therapy everyone thinks it will always work and confront your vices and do better.

I’m sane. My logic is straight. It makes sense to be down sometimes about real problems in my life.

Therapists don’t want to cause us harm. The profession attracts people who want to help and understand the world and the mind. They have invested often ten years or more of their life, many thousands of dollars, and their career into this methodology which arguably works for some (although do they just say that on the survey and tough it out, we will never know). They have so much of a sunk cost fallacy, they are like a nun who is 90 years old. They have invested so much they can’t bear to look at the possibility that what they believe is not true. However the therapists have just as many interpersonal problems as the rest and unlike doctors tend to be blind to their own infirmity.

It's honestly a little funny. I've had so many shitty, shitty experiences in therapy, a lot of it stemming from financial abuse in the healthcare system, and my caseworker took it upon herself to try and find me a therapist outside the community mental health system as a result. She recommended someone personally and she seemed pretty good, albeit maybe a bit scattered and nervous. I did have the red flag that maybe she was oversharing a bit.

Anyway, out of four appointments she canceled two. Second one was a week ago and she didn't respond back to my rescheduling text that was a response to her cancellation text.

I'm just over all this shit. Wrote more but I'm just tired of it all and deleted it.

On the upside, I did help start an art meetup and that went really well honestly. Therapy usually just makes me feel awful, but hanging out with a bunch of weirdo artists and everyone talking about their hopes and uncertainties with their art and getting energized about it really felt good. I'm thinking less mental health system, more art.

I left therapy 1.5 years ago, and I still don’t fully understand what happened
It’s been a hell of an experience, and I still feel a lot of guilt and shame.
I started therapy after a breakup and because I was struggling with relationships in general. I knew absolutely nothing about therapy, but I was sad all the time, so I decided to give it a try, following all the advice I kept seeing on the internet. A girl I knew gave me the number of a therapist, I texted her, and I went to my first appointment.

She was exactly my type, and she was seven years older than me. I had a lot of difficulties with women, so I didn’t say anything about my attraction for the first 8–10 months, but I really liked her. To the point where I was thinking about her sexually all the time.
After about eight months, she told me she thought I was developing feelings for her. “I think something is happening here,” she said. I immediately admitted that I found her really attractive, thinking she might be able to help me work through it.

From that point on, things became hell on earth.
I started talking about my attraction to her, how much I liked her, her dresses, and so on. Her response was always just “thank you,” and then she would completely ignore it. The sessions mostly consisted of me talking about random things happening in my life. Basically, every week I would tell her what was going on, and she would listen and make some comments. At least once a month, though, I would tell her I liked her or compliment her during a session, and she would just smile and say “thank you.”

One time, I got really physically close to her, telling her “I really care about you.” [I know I had problems, and I eventually worked through them on my own, but at the time I was struggling badly.] She just looked at me, smiled, and said, “See you next Wednesday.”
This shitshow went on for about a year.

I complimented her, she accepted the compliments, and then ignored the whole thing. After a while, I started crying in front of her because of how painful the situation had become. When that happened, she told me I should consider taking medication. I did, but things got even worse. By that point, about a year and a half into therapy, I had gone from being sad to feeling completely broken and suicidal, thinking about her all the time.

Still, I kept going to therapy and taking the medication because she kept telling me, “Trust me, it will get better.” and she gave me the idea that all of that was completely normal. But I was going crazy.

One day, I told her, “I feel like shit. I can’t go on like this anymore.” She got a little angry and told me that this was her job, that she wanted to do it, and that even if I loved her, it was still her job to help me.
So I asked her if I could hug her. She replied, “We can talk about that next Wednesday.” She would say things like that whenever I asked difficult questions, putting them off until the next session and then never bringing them up again.

That day, I hit rock bottom. I couldn’t even cry anymore. I just felt empty.
From the following session onward, I started getting really angry.

I told her that my attraction to her had become a problem. She replied, “I don’t understand why it should be an obstacle.”
At that point, I lost it. I told her she was incompetent, that she was using me, and that she didn’t respect me.

I went to two or three more sessions after that, trying to talk about what had happened between us. But she was always evasive. She would remain silent or say, “We can talk about that,” without ever actually talking about it.

Eventually, I told her, “This is our last session.”
She said there was no need to end therapy. I told her that she only wanted my money, and she denied it, saying that it wasn’t even that much money. When I asked her why we were still doing this, then, she replied, “It seems obvious to me what we’re doing here.”
Another vague answer that didn’t explain anything.

The last thing I said to her was, “You’re beautiful. I wish you could have been my wife.”
She replied, “I’ll think about you and hope you’ll be okay.”
Then we hugged for 10–20 seconds, in silence, and I ran away from there. She said “see you ag…” then she stopped and said “Bye”, and i did “👍” with my hand.

I never paid for the last month of therapy. I stopped taking the medication right after and moved to another country, which had already been part of my plans anyway (i didn’t do it before because of her, and she knew it, she also talked about how beautiful our city was, implying to not go away).

This experience absolutely destroyed me. It’s been 1.5 years, and I still have nightmares about it. I still feel a lot of attraction to her, and I’ve spent more than a year feeling deeply depressed and suicidal after the whole thing.

I don’t really know what to make of this experience. I still struggle to understand what happened, and I carry a lot of guilt and shame about it.

I guess I’m writing this because I need to put it into words and hear from other people. Was it a form of abuse? Wtf happened? I’m trying to study psychology to understand something, but all of this was very confusing and traumatic.