What started as a Substack 'note,' yet yearned to be more.
Do YOU feel implicit trust in your psychotherapist??
Ahem… if a therapist licensing process is not designed to identify and weed out future clinicians who have personality disorder features, what the fuck good is it?
Ya can’t sit in someone’s office who’s emotionally underdeveloped, and expect to get solid, rational, voice of reason guidance from that individual, because their life and love perspectives are skewed.
A former client years back, revealed that a woman she’d paid for help over the course of 13 years, often made their therapy sessions about herself. A minor amount of self-disclosure may at times be useful/helpful to a client in context of helping to ‘normalize’ past or present reactions or experiences they might harshly judge themselves for, but it generally does not belong in the therapy room.
My client’s former clinician made her feel bad and wrong about not wanting to seek a relationship at that time, and feeling unready to be coupled. The “therapist” (the-rapist) spoke often about her own marriage, and how blissfully wonderful it was. She consistently made this woman feel odd and defective for her choice to be single at the time. How much more fucked-up can a ‘treatment plan’ BE? Therapist narcissism apparently has no bounds.
When this clinician died, my client attended her funeral. Turns out, the therapist’s husband had engaged in extra-marital affairs for many years, was there with his current lover, and (adding insult to injury) hit on my client during the course of that somber event!
Ya can’t make this stuff up. I have heard the most atrocious “therapy” stories from people I’ve helped over the past 30 years, to the point where nothing shocks me anymore. Even colleagues whom I have loved, have crossed serious ethical boundaries when revealing names of people they’re treating, who have celebrity status.
Only one with acute insecurities would be even remotely inclined to break confidentiality for the self-aggrandisement they can squeeze out of it… and these former “friends” are licensed psychologists! Many years ago during my MFT intern years, this revolting type of ethical breach felt so deeply disturbing to me, I was compelled to write an article about it.
If you wish, you may read that piece here: sharischreiber.com/when… It is NEVER a therapist’s prerogative to reveal the identity of client they’re treating to anyone, neither during nor after their their care has terminated. This information is NOT to be shared with a spouse, nor their closest friends and/or colleagues. PERIOD!