10:00pm July 28, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: stripesweatersandwaterbottles: realsocialskills: aura218: nichtigen:...

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Social skills for autonomous…

I was in therapy of some kind for most of the time from the ages of seven to nineteen.

I’m not just talking about one asshole I ran into.

I believe my posts have gone into three different people, who were my primary therapists for six years.
One of them was probably actually sadistic.

Another was actually the best shrink I ever had. He was also woefully unaware of the way he used power.

The other was somewhere in between. He was a jerk, but he may have thought he was helping me. But still a jerk.

All of my other therapists were in the in between zone.

None of them understood power or boundaries.

All of them rewrote my life to match their own ideas and agendas.

I have not even gotten into what some of them did to my family members.

I’m trying to think. There was the therapist I saw in elementary school. And a school counselor in elementary school. And a counselor at an academic summer camp. And the counselor in high school. And the psychologist from ages thirteen to nineteen. And the psychiatrist from ages fourteen too he retired in my twenties. And the psychiatrist for a week, age thirteen. Assorted psychiatrists and counselors that were purely impatient. The team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors at the residential facility when I was fifteen and sixteen. The woman I saw when my brother molested me. The school counselor in special ed. The counselor from the county mental health. The ones from that weird day program thing. The one who told me my problem was a snake in my spine.

I can’t even count the number I’ve seen.

Boundary violations were the norm, not the exception. They were built into the culture of what therapy was about for them. It was their JOB to violate my boundaries.

I’m not making shit up to scare people. I’m not picking out the exceptions. For every therapist I’ve seen for any length of time at all, there are plenty of stories.

If you think the existence of professional ethics boards and stuff prevents this, you don’t know what’s actually happening to lots of people.

And honestly I don’t care who I “scare away from getting help”. People can make their own decisions. I’m not going to shut up about abuse just because it makes people uncomfortable.

And “getting help” doesn’t == “seeing a therapist” anyway. I mean that’s how some people get help. Other people can’t do it that way.

These things that happened to me are not some kind of coincidence. People who want power over people are attracted to that job. People who genuinely want to help people are systematically taught that abusing their power in certain ways is how to help people. Every person who notices these patterns is told they ran into a few bad apples. That’s inaccurate.

Many people have these experiences with therapists and don’t even know there’s anything wrong with them. So they don’t report bad experiences even if they’re having them.

Anyway I won’t be quiet about what happened to me. I won’t submit to the idea that regulations will prevent this. I won’t tell people is the exception or that I ran into some bad apples.

If people are going to choose to enter therapy to begin with, they damn well better know how to identify abuse.

My stories about therapy saved a very close friend of mine, before she was my friend. She was in therapy and my stories helped her recognize a bad situation before it got any worse.

So don’t tell me I’m just needlessly scaring people. I’m telling people useful information. They can use it to avoid therapy. They can use it to go into therapy, eyes open. They can ignore me altogether.

But I will not be quiet. I will not temper my descriptions with disclaimers about how regulations make things all better and not all of them are like this. I will describe what I’ve seen and experienced. Take it or leave it.

And I haven’t told a tenth of the stories I could tell about s tenth of these people, because that would fill a book.

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