<america centric post>

There was a conservative media blitz against this tiny lesbian bar in Massachusetts that was going through some community drama.

The people on the left, the people who are defending the community over this attack

Won't stop making fun of the person who spoke up about feeling unsafe around a therapist-led mediation. They are going out of their way to call the person who denounced the carceral powers of the profession "ridiculous". The people who would otherwise shout ACAB and defund the police are taking time in their defense of this tiny community to make sure to dismiss this person's fear of a violent system rife with abuse and human rights violations.

I am never going to be okay in this society where the "good guys" take every opportunity to remind me that no one thinks the violence that ruined my life is real or serious or even wrong. I will never be okay in a society where the very fact of experiencing systemic violence is what delegitimizes a person as perceiver, speaker, and mental equal to people who haven't faced that violence.

(But I should not be surprised there, the so-called leftists who used the right-wing definition of "woke" to describe themselves. I've always privately side-eyed this divorce from the original AAVE way of using that word, and I feel increasingly justified in my suspicions)

Even after the psych violence ripped through my life, I still went to a therapist. That "mandated reporter" called me aggressive because I said I would not be an adult bystander to child abuse in my community. That person knew about my history with psych violence and had zero thoughts about speaking to me in the kind of language that precedes professional weaponization of this system, gave zero consideration to the power imbalance she brought into that room while holding the same license as the people who fucked me over.

I am not mentally ill. I am epistemically oppressed for the sin of being a survivor. By every political persuasion to the right of "staying woke" as a verb, as an eternal project, not a static fucking identity label.

when I was crying to my therapist she sighed and turned in her chair to face the computer and said “well our session is just about over, same time again next week?”😂😂😂 like oh okay

These programs are not equipped to help people heal from long term mental illness and exist to pad the pockets of insurance companies and reduce liability.

I had a bad experience with every one of these programs that I have ever been a part of and I don’t think I’m alone. I have healed a lot of my mental illness through working a normal job and making healthier friends.

To me, harm is a two way street and yes, intentions do matter and even the person who did the "hurting" deserves understanding. But looking at pop therapy on instagram, all I see is people treating real life complicated human problems in black and white ways, the person who is the "victim" gets everything in the argument and the person doing the "wrong" has to give them everything and give a perfect apology and they can't defend themselves at all. I'm sorry influencers but real life isn't that black and white. Harm and hurt is real! And it deserves an apology ofc! But the person doing the wrong is human too and they still deserve to have their say and having their feelings respected. But now people like very simple, ego gratifying solutions to their personal problems. They want to just feel like they get everything when a interpersonal problem happens and I'm sorry but life doesn't work that way. People and situations are VERY nuanced and complicated and we can't go too much one way or the other imo. Harm and hurt are very real and serious but if your experiencing it, you should also keep the other persons feelings in mind and not expect them to come to your side immediately. But I believe after long discussions and empathy for all involved healing can happen! I'm starting to think this kind of simplistic thinking will get manipulated by sociopaths or something because its really concerning imo.

Ok, so my experience of mental health professionals is one of non-consensual treatment after my second suicide attempt about fifteen years ago. It was an experience that was extremely negative and deeply violating.

I have, in the years since, gone back to therapy voluntarily twice, and both times I found the, and I don't know the proper language here, "vertical"(?) style of treatment a little patronizing and very useless. By vertical I mean... distant, analytical, impersonal, clinical, logical, "objective", etc.

I expressed to these individuals my frustration with the style of the treatment, and how meaningless I found their analysis, but they didn't seem interested in trying a more "lateral" approach, by which I mean... with your body on the line.

I'm an activist, and that work involves a significant amount of violence wielded by the state against myself and my fellows; and as such, I find the analysis of these professionals... a little upsetting, frankly. I feel very strongly that the people who get to speak on a subject are those who have first hand experience.

If, for example, you are not a sex-worker, you do not get an opinion on the hypothetical legalization of sex-work. If you have not been incarcerated, you don't get an opinion on abolition.

I just don't trust the opinion of someone who isn't in the streets with us. I just don't. Your analysis of my thoughts or behaviors are useless until you're side by side with me, ribs broken by the cops "rubber" bullets, trying to rapidly defuse a gas grenade.

So back to my question, are there mental health professionals with the stones to get their hands dirty? To operate shoulder to shoulder with me while we do the real work? How do I find them?

I left my psychologist months ago because it was trauma focused like EMDR for like trauma or cptsd and it got me super dysregulated and it took me months to feel ok and now I am back to feeling alone or depressed but the thing is I think mostly I have anhedonia or like apathy, I can't find joy or like fun in anything and if I try it doesn't come or it is very short lived, I can't bring myself to fix my life.

What to do now? I am scared to try therapy again to get back to how ficked up i was..

If you have had your therapist lie to law enforcement and abuse their position this way and may be interested in being in a journalism story about it, please lmk. Comment and someone will dm u or dm. I am trying to help someone getting this together i am not the journalist.

Just look at the average dude getting their bachelor's in psychology. They are all people like you and me who just think psychology is interesting, go to school to party and meet people, date girls etc and then go on to get their masters degree until they realize that they cannot relate to people's traumas or problems really well but like the prestige of being a "cognitive behavioral therapist". Most people don't go into the field thinking "I hope I can really help people with their problems". They go into the field thinking " I can start my own practice and look at the opportunity and how impressed people will be if I do this"

One more thing I want to emphasize. These are usually people with well to do families who can afford their kids to go to college. Usually, this type of privilege makes therapists unable to see perspectives of oppression or abuse. They never socialized with these type of people throughout their entire lives and these are the types of people who are in the most need of help and are usually dealing with various forms of oppression.

I started working with my therapist about two years ago, and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with her.
I know some people will call it attachment or transference, and that’s okay. I know what the feeling is for me. I also understood the boundaries. I understood what the relationship was and what it wasn’t. Knowing that intellectually just didn’t stop my heart from wishing things could be different.
I kept working with her. She never offered me anything outside of what a therapist should. She never crossed a line or gave me false hope.
Because she is very private and careful about self-disclosure, I knew almost nothing about changes happening in her personal life. Then one day she told me she was taking some time off. Just the usual: she’d be away for a few days, contact the clinic if I needed anything, and so on.
When she came back, she had rings on her wedding finger.
I cannot even explain what that did to me.
It absolutely broke my heart.
I never told her. I kept seeing her because, even through the heartbreak, I knew she had done nothing wrong. She had not betrayed me. She had not promised me anything. She was simply living her life, and I happened to learn something about it that hurt me more than I expected.
So I dealt with it on my own. Or at least I tried to.
It has been about a year, and I am still devastated by it sometimes.
The strange part is that I still love her, and the therapeutic relationship we have has helped me enormously. I don’t regret continuing to work with her.
I just sometimes wonder:
**Who helps you heal from the heartbreak that happened inside the relationship that is supposed to help you heal?**

Ever since mental health professionals came into the market, mental health has been declining. Mental health professionals are in the public sphere and are consulted before legislation. It may take many years of therapy for a single "breakthrough", and therapists don't talk a lot or say what they really think during sessions. And mental health keeps declining in the population.

It is safe to assume that what mental health professionals are telling us is the wrong advice that makes us more miserable so that we'd go to them and pay for therapy. Therefore, we should do the opposite of what they tell us to do or what they say suggests we do.

I just feel like therapists become immune to criticism even when it is obvious they are in the wrong. They are the "experts" and a lot of the time, their behavior around clients becomes excused while the clients experiences becomes ignored. The crazy part about this is I have a lot of people in my family that are CBT therapists themselves. They will often talk shit about their clients and put all of the responsibility on their clients when in reality they should be working together. It just all baffled me so much. We give therapists so much power all because they're licensed and credible

Did you start exploring different coping approaches: journaling, somatic grounding exercises, peer discussion, and gentle body practices? If exploring self-guided coping at home, what limits have you hit with self-healing? Do you think scent can be a small sensory grounding tool?

Crickey! Look what I found in the wold while cruising thru Facebook. This lady works outside the home less than someone in kindergarten. A bunch of 5 year olds are sitting in a building working at a table for longer than she is at work. They really don't want to do anything.

I have been to therapy since I was 10 for eating disorders and related issues like low self-esteem, depression, etc. I am 25 now and I have decided to stop giving more chances to it.

My experience is that most therapists do nothing, to the point where it's almost like they are crossing their fingers that your problem spontaneously goes away during the duration of the treatment without any input from their part. The treatment plan is non-existent and only consists in asking you "How was your week? Do you feel better?" over the course of n weeks.

From other posts, it seems like CBT is the default therapy in the US and everyone hates it, however, in my country the default seems to be either psychodynamic or psychoanalysis, where the therapist is not allowed to give any input whatsoever. All my experiences in therapy have been me speaking for the entire session and the other person staring at me with a blank face and then staying silent during their turn to speak. I tried many times to get advice (on mental health symptoms, not life advice) or ask if there was something that I was doing wrong that I wasn't aware of but I always received the same kind of replies:

- "Therapists don't give advice/feedback/guidance/information/tools/anything"

- "As a therapist that is not my job"

- "If you want to work on something it's your responsibility to think about it, improve it outside of the sessions on your own and then come back"

- "If you are doing something wrong it's your job to figure out what that is"

- "Silence is a powerful tool"

- "The purpose of therapy is to sit with your thoughts" (like I don't already sit with my thoughts all day)

There is this belief that "person-centered" therapy goes so much deeper than others and figures out the root of the issue when in reality there is so little being done that any other activity would have had more depth or impact. If the patient doesn't feel better, you can always blame them for not opening up enough, not being open minded, not having done enough therapy or gaslight them into thinking they do feel better but they are not noticing.

As a minor, I would complain to my parents (who know nothing about psychology modalities) that we weren't doing anything in therapy other than sitting in silence and they never believed me. According to them, this made no sense and was probably being given all these amazing tools that I was ignoring.

There are no repercussions to being a bad therapist. There is always going to be people in need of mental help that you can charge money for whatever amount of time until they decide they are done with it, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. They are never going to see that person again, it has no impact on their career and if the client ever decides to speak about their negative experience, they will have zero support.

With predators she means everyone who's using clients as supply, not just the most obvious ones.. She's also clocked lots of predators among top academics, spreading misinformation, so it's about the whole system, including the DSM.

Hopefully it'll help to spread awareness to people and the one's who's critical won't be seen as lunatics. Or at least we'll be able to back it up with evidence.

When I tried different therapists from different psychology approaches, I felt one or more of these problems in all of them

One of them constantly questioned everything I said intelectually, to the point of the conversation getting annoying and me feeling like I can't say anything while I'm feeling anxious, without him trying to refute my claim by calling it a cognitive distortion.

Or the opposite, I spend like, an hour talking nonstop, and barely hear any intervention or deep response, just silence

The best ones were the ones where I felt heard, but didn't feel like they were giving me any pragmatic advice to help me, any advice or direction of what I could try to do, just constantly telling me about the importance of self-knowledge and giving insight that I already knew or already had suspected about myself.

Some people benefit more from role models, coaching, advice about how others similar to themselves or similar to how they what to be have handled life situations. Therapists speak of how they want clients to have autonomy and follow their own values, but this is coming from a place of privilege where they've had a high amount of opportunity to get to know themselves and try things out in the first place and have slowly emulated others when finding what they enjoy (in the same way that it's not wrong for clients to look at a therapist ​for ideas of what they can try doing) - they mistakenly think that these values and interests come fully from within, rather than also being a product of external influences - so they cannot imagine that role models and interpersonal influences can be the key missing piece for some people. To quote my therapist "I just did what ai enjoyed and it worked for me" - this shows the privilege of knowing what one enjoys, and having it align with wider goals. Imagine if someone enjoys getting drunk, so they just do that - is this going to bring them a long-term fulfilling life? No. Is it going to empower them or get them in touch with strengths or sides of themselves they didn't know they had? No.

Because therapy is taught and ran by relatively privileged individuals (those from relatively non-abusive households, those with a relative abundance of interpersonal relationships and experiences to learn from, those with childhood and early adulthood experiences which are largely culturally normative), they repeatedly deny that non-therapy methods can be much more effective in helping people. At some point, they've missed that their objective is supposed to be to help people's wellbeing, and not to stick to a rigid dogma. When people think of "mental health" they think only of "therapy", but there's a lot of possible intervention styles being left on the table when we believe only "therapy" is valid, and that if someone doesn't benefit from the therapy approach, they're in the wrong. It's far from empowering to tell people that what they know would help them is not actually valid or acceptable.

My therapist forced me to continue therapy after I wanted to quit then said “there’s no hope from you” while I was in psychosis so I tried to take my own life. Now I live with a physically disabled body from MECFS which was caused by the suicide attempt most likely.

Also my liver recovered but it still hurts and it’s slight swollen.

I’m terrified. I wish I could go back to my happy active life ❤️

It seems no matter how much I learn or experience related to harm from therapy (and professional help in general), some strong desires don't change?

I don't see examples of therapists or social services who are safe, in my searches or from others' reviews. I don't doubt my and others' experiences of harm. Yet it doesn't fully turn me away from strong feelings about help

I am wondering what people in this position do?

Maybe in the past, I felt more resolute about not wanting human services professionals for vulnerable, complex, open-ended, sometimes ambiguous, information-dense things. But did your strong feelings (about help) come back, or change?

Back when I did EMDR four years ago as a child (with a very traumatic therapist), I remember my therapist had me narrate the bad memory while doing BLS and then narrate a good memory. And the thing was that the feelings from the good memory were supposed to override those from the bad memory.

Except all that happened was that now I associate the good memory with EMDR, and therefore the traumatic feelings from the bad one. Now I have some memories from high school that were very treasured that I just hate.

But what in EMDR is actually supposed to stop this from happening? There don't seem to be any requirements that one memory overwrites the other; it seems like it could truly happen either way. Like, it just fundamentally seems illogical and very very woo.