#bad therapy

[furiousgoldfish]

Did anyone else confess to a therapist that you're sometimes scared of losing everything and dying on the street, only for them to try to play it off a symptom of 'you not knowing what is real' and 'being psychotic?'

I'm really mad about that one, isn't everyone scared of homelessness these days? Specifically someone who lived in abuse, was told they were going to die if they leave regularly, and was not allowed to learn survival skills, that would be a very logical fear to have.

#pissed about attempt at therapy going bad #survival fears #bad therapy #trauma

[dayangaytransman]

Warnings: Transphobia, sexism, misandry, bad therapist and Bear dudes ( jokingly)

In my country, there are no gender therapists, and the psychologists not only refuse to help with transitioning, but also, due to the laws and other issues, often persuade individuals against transitioning.

It was two years ago, and my mother was worried about me. She thought I was mentally ill because I wanted to be a boy. So, she decided to take me to a therapist/psychologist. I’m not sure which one that person was. Anyway.

It was my first time visiting any kind of therapist. I was very nervous. However, because my mom had told me that the therapist, an old cis woman, had experience working with transgender individuals, I wasn’t worried about it. I was mistaken.

So we went to her office and sat down. She asked my mother to leave, and then we were alone.

She was trying to be kind at first. This is a little bit of our conversation:

- Hi, what should I call you? What gender are you?

Me, living in a binary society, dressing as a boy, acting like a boy, and my mother just told her that I want to be a boy : Just call me Dayan, and I am a boy.

Then she asked questions because she was not sure what that meant.

I told her: But they said you have worked with trans people before

She said: No, not really. It was just one person and not even like you. (That was a trans woman.)

Yeah, she told people she is trans-friendly to make money. Anyway, we talked more, and then, suddenly, she got angry.

She said: Why do you want to be a man?! Men are ugly! They are as hairy as gorillas! They smell bad! They are always horny! They are rapists! They are garbage!

I was in shock. I had never heard that shit before, and she was a fucking therapist! I thought therapists were smart! What the hell was that?! She hates all men?!

I am gay, and at the time, I had a crush on a bear dude (he is my BF now), and the things she said made me so angry and upset.

Also, don’t worry, ma’am, I am not going to transition into your husband!

Do you think she was a queen herself? No! She was an ugly old lady who doesn’t know how to dress!

After she said that, I became the therapist! That woman certainly needs one. I told her not to hate all men and that hairy, horny dudes are okay. But if they smell bad and rape people, that’s not okay. I taught her to be respectful and also educated her about trans and non-binary individuals. I was talking for about 3 hours!

Seriously, I was the therapist. Then the lady told my mother that I am okay and not mentally ill. Yes, that’s obvious, bitch. And she took an amount of money equivalent to three days of my mother’s work from us for just three hours. Sure, she did help a little, but it was me acting as a therapist for her the entire time!

I am worried about her male clients and the men in her life. Also, what are you going to tell your transfeminine clients? To not be like you,bitch?

#lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtq community #transgender #transmasc #trans man #trans #transguy #therapist #bad therapy #misandry #sexism #gay bear #this is my real life #she was a bitch

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson and Geoff Laughton

Published: Mar 23, 2024

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells the story of a jet fighter pilot who was practicing high-speed maneuvers. As Willard puts it, “She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.”

What if we were flying upside down? But let’s go further. What if an entire generation was flying upside down–flying through fog and danger, unable to see either ground or sky, and the well-intended adjustments pushed on them by “experts” were just bringing them closer to catastrophe?

That’s the lens through which we interpret Abigail Shrier’s New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.

There’s no denying that the youngest generation is in crisis. As the Addiction Center notes, members of Generation Z “run a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups.” A 2015 report found that 23.6 percent of 12th graders use illicit drugs. The American Psychological Association reports that just 45 percent of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51 percent of Gen Xers and 70 percent of Boomers. A concerning 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60 percent take medication to manage their mental health.

It gets worse. The rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300 percent from 2001 to 2019 (before the pandemic). According to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.

Well-meaning therapists, teachers, and school counselors are trying to help the next generation to rise up. But what if everyone involved is upside down? What if, like the fighter pilot that Willard describes, what they think is rising up is actually bringing them into deeper danger? Shrier makes a strong case that that’s exactly what’s happening.

Lots of educators encourage kids to spend more time checking in with their feelings. In the 2021-2022 school year, 76 percent of principals said that their school had adopted a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Common SEL practices include: asking students how they’re feeling at the start of each day, teaching that students should be more aware of how they’re feeling in any given moment, and encouraging students to use activities like writing and art to express their feelings.

The problem is that all of this obsession with feelings can actually make students feel worse. As Yulia Chentsova Dutton, head of the the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, says, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them.” “Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions,” she explains, “can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” Or to put it another way: when we ask kids over and over again how they’re feeling, we’re subtly and accidentally encouraging them to feel bad.

The reason is that, as psychiatry professor Michael Linden explains, most of us don’t feel happy all the time. Dealing with life involves ignoring a certain amount of moment-by-moment discomfort: I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m sore from sitting down all day, I’m a little worried about my mom. When we encourage kids to check in many times per day on how they’re feeling, we’re tacitly encouraging them to bring to the surface–and then dwell on–all the things going on in their minds that are not “happiness.” That’s why, as Linden puts it, “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”

But it gets worse.

Obsessing over our emotions can actually prevent us from doing the things that might make us feel better. Anyone who’s spent too long wallowing after a bad break-up knows this; at a certain point, you have to shelve your unpleasant emotions so that you can get on with your life. Psychologists describe two mental states that we can occupy at any given time: “action orientation” and “state orientation.” “State orientation” is where you focus primarily on yourself (e.g., how you feel about doing the task at hand, whether your wrist hurts or you’re starting to get sick, etc.). “Action orientation” is where you primarily focus on the task at hand. As a study published by Cambridge University Press notes, only the latter is actually conducive to pursuing and accomplishing goals. “State orientation is a personality that has difficulty in taking action toward goal fulfillment,” the authors warn. By encouraging young people to focus so much on their feelings, we might be hurting their ability to adopt the mindset necessary to accomplish goals in life. If so, that would make them even more unhappy. 

But the dangers posed by well-meaning “experts” telling students to fly in the wrong direction–towards the ground instead of towards the sky–go well beyond encouraging unhappiness and depression. Rates of suicide and self-harm for young people are skyrocketing. But in their attempts to cope with the spike, well-meaning administrators might be making the problem worse. Here are questions from the 2021 Florida High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to students age 14 and up:

During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing your usual activities?  During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?  During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?  During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?  If you attempted suicide during the past 12 months, did any attempt result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?

A survey authored by the CDC asked students “During the past year, did you do something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” Another survey offered this question to Delaware middle schoolers: “Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?”

Administrators may be asking these questions with the best of intentions, but the end result is to normalize suicide in young peoples’ minds. If you were 12 years old and taking a survey like this along with all of your classmates, you might reasonably conclude that suicide, or at least suicidal ideation and/or self harm, were pretty common at your school. Otherwise, why would everyone your age have to take such an exhaustive assessment about it?

One reason this is so dangerous is that, as Shrier writes, “The virality of suicide and self-harm among adolescents is extremely well-established.” Following the release of Netflix’s TV show 13 Reasons Why, which some said valorized a fictional girl who killed herself, several studies found a spike in teen suicide rates. The CDC agrees. In a post warning about the dangers of “suicide contagion,” the CDC said that journalists should avoid things like:

“Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.”

“Reporting ‘how-to’ descriptions of suicide.”

“Presenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” (i.e., as a “means of coping with personal problems”).

But this is most of what the surveys described above are doing. They are deluging students with repetitive and excessive discussion of suicide. They are describing different methods for killing yourself (e.g., cutting or burning yourself). One survey, which asks students who have considered killing themselves why they did so (possible answers include “demands of schoolwork,” “problems with peers or friends,” and “being bullied”) is a textbook example of presenting suicide as a “means of coping with personal problems.”

The authors of these surveys seem to at least recognize the risk that students are flying upside down, and that these surveys might take them closer to the ground. One survey concludes by telling students, “If any survey questions or your responses have caused you to feel uncomfortable or concerned and you would like to talk to someone about your feelings, talk to your school’s counselor, to a teacher, or to another adult you trust.” The survey also includes links to different hotlines.

Communicating to kids that suicide is normal and a possible solution to their problems might be the worst way that some schools are failing kids, but it’s also far from the only way.

Schools are increasingly lax about standards, willing to let almost anyone get away with almost anything. Some accommodations do make sense: for example, it makes sense to give a kid with dyslexia more time to complete the verbal component of the SAT. But Shrier argues that standards are falling for perfectly healthy students too. “School counselors—students’ in-school ‘advocates,’” Shrier writes, now “lobby teachers to excuse lateness or absence, forgive missed classwork, allow a student to take walks around the school in the middle of class, ratchet grades upward, reduce or eliminate homework requirements, offer oral exams in place of written ones, and provide preferential seating to students who lack even an official diagnosis.”

Shrier documents stories of students who have been allowed to turn in work late because they were having a “tough Mental Health Day” or because “I was having a rough day and dealing with my gender identity.”

The problem with this is that one of the primary things that children and teenagers do is try to figure out the boundaries of the world. When a child throws a tantrum, it’s not malicious–they’re trying to understand this new world and figure out what they can get away with. As Jordan Peterson writes in Twelve Rules for Life, young children are “like blind people, searching for a wall.” “They have to push forward, and test,” he writes, “to see where the actual boundaries lie.” What’s true of young children is also true of older children and even (to a lesser extent) adults. All of us are trying to figure out the rules of life–that is, what we can get away with. If well-meaning teachers and counselors tell students that one of the rules is that you don’t have to do your homework on time if you say that you’re having a rough day, then we shouldn’t be surprised when more young people seem to manifest rough days.

But this is the opposite of what students need–especially the truly disadvantaged students who so many of these efforts seem to be aimed at helping. In his memoir Troubled, clinical psychologist Rob Henderson writes that, “People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards.” But, he warns, “this is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.”

So kids are depressed, anxious, and poorly behaved. Educators are trying to help them by encouraging them to tap in more to their feelings, by asking them more questions about suicide, and by trying to accommodate their difficulties even more. But all of this is backwards. Educators are encouraging students to do what they think will take them higher–away from the ground and back to the safety of the sky. But both kids and educators are upside down. And every adjustment that the “experts” are telling kids to make just brings them closer to the ground–and a catastrophic collision.

Now’s a good time to emphasize that this isn’t all schools, all teachers, or all administrators–not by a long shot. There are heroic educators working every day to help students to rein in their problems, stop taking advantage of accommodations that they don’t need, and develop the emotional resilience to deal with the problems of adolescence. But the problems documented above do represent a trend. And while it’s not every school, the trend is too big to ignore.

What will happen if this trend continues–if an entire generation keeps going “up” until they crash into the ground? Most severe and most damaging is the harm to the generation itself. Shrier tells the story of Nora, a 16-year-old girl who helps put a human face on all of the brutal statistics described in the introduction to this piece. Nora describes her friends as going through a litany of serious mental health problems: “anxiety,” “depression”; “self-harm” (as Shrier notes, “lots of self-harm”) including “Scratching, cutting, anorexia,” “Trichotillomania” (pulling your hair out by the roots); and more. As Shrier writes, “Dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette’s belong on her list of once-rare disorders that are, among this rising generation, suddenly not so rare at all.”

But the dangers can also ripple out beyond just one generation. The full danger may be nothing less than an imperiling of our democracy.

As Shrier notes, many kids in school are almost constantly monitored. Her own kids have “recess monitors” at their school–“teachers who involve themselves in every disagreement at playtime and warn kids whenever the monkey bars might be slick with rain.” On the bus home, they have “bus monitors.” Better that kids know they’re being observed by an adult at all times than that one kid push another to give him his lunch money.

One of the most pervasive forms of monitoring is what are called “shadows”—ed techs or paraeducators whose job is to cling closely to one particular student so that they don’t have any issues. The original intention certainly made sense. If a child had autism, a shadow could help the kid to integrate into the main classroom rather than being sent to Special Ed. But, as Shrier notes, scope creep has been substantial. “Today,” she writes, “public schools assign shadows to follow kids with problems ranging from mild learning disabilities to violent tendencies.” Nor is the problem restricted to public schools: “private schools advise affluent parents to hire shadows to trail neurotypical kids for almost any reason.” Shadows monitor and guide almost every interaction with their chosen student, from when to raise her hand to how long to hug a fellow student.

As Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College and an expert on child development, puts it, “Kids today are always under the situation of an observer. At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”

But when kids spend their entire waking lives being monitored by an adult, they start to think that kind of monitoring is normal. Worse, they start to think that they need it. If a child gets constant guidance from an adult, what are the odds that she’s going to cultivate her own independence? If she expects authoritarian adults to monitor and run every aspect of her life already, what is she going to think of a liberal democracy that more-or-less leaves people free to handle their own affairs?

No wonder just 27 percent of Americans age 18-25 strongly agree with the statement that “Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government” (compared to 48 percent of Americans as a whole). 

So what’s the solution? If our kids are upside down and getting lower to the ground, then the only thing that makes sense is to help them reverse course. Is there something that’s the opposite of always asking them about their feelings, telling them that life is too much for them or their peers to cope with, and constantly telling them that they’re too fragile to do their homework if they’re having a rough day? Yes. That something is called antifragility.

Antifragility is the idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Greg Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, kids are naturally antifragile. That doesn’t just mean that they’re tough. It means that “they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” Not letting a kid hand in homework late doesn’t just teach them to do their homework on time; it also teaches them that they can deal with a 0 in class and not die. They can pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and even earn an A in the class overall if they bust a sweat for the rest of the semester. Telling a kid who’s having a “tough mental health day” that you’re sorry to hear it but they still need to take today’s test doesn’t just teach the kid that low-level excuses don’t fly; it also teaches them that a hard day isn’t enough to stop them. It teaches them that they’re stronger than whatever negative emotions they’re currently experiencing.

It’s time to remind kids that they are strong–before it’s too late.

All quotes not otherwise attributed come from Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy.

-

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a Contributing Writer to FAIR’s Substack and the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneer Performance Partners and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has more than 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies. He blogs at The Undaunted Man’s Substack.

Geoff Laughton is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the founder of The Undaunted Man. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.

#Julian Adorney #Mark Johnson #Geoff Laughton #Abigail Shrier #Bad Therapy #human psychology #psychology #emotions #emotional distress #feelings #antifragility #coddling #emotional fragility #religion is a mental illness

[emojeesus]

So yeah I get that being a psychologist/psychoterapist means having a really stable income and maybe you never were poor student because your parents were wealthy, or maybe you were and plain forgot over the years. Also you were born in a generation that not only succeeded more than their parents in standard of living, you generally outperform all your ecpectations! Well done!

I also get that makes it easy to buy the right wing rhetoric about lazy workers and "illegal strikes against the democratically elected government" (which they factually as per my countrys actual LAW are not). I get it and as far as the relationship between a client and a therapist goes I do not care.

BUT as a psychotherapist it is NEVER OK to start an umptompted political discussion where you just keep telling your client why they are WRONG. While that client REPEATEDLY asks to change the subject. Even if said client is a good-for-nothing neurodivergent, chronically depressed and comparably uneducated 30-something leftist hippie gay communist like myself.

Nevertheless this just happened. For the second time this year(same therapist at least.) I will never get proper help, will I?

#bad therapist #bad therapy #unprofessional #mental health #depression #angry #fucking furious actually

[and-stir-the-stars]

Revamped that Saffron Pawn fic I published yesterday!

Summary:

Evan's feelings about his brother after everything that happened between them are complicated. In spite of that, Evan is sure that he cares about his brother.

According to his therapist, that isn't enough.

#saffron pawn au #Kats scribbles #Fnaf #Fnaf au #Fnaf fic #Evan afton #Michael afton #Bad therapy #Lovelessness #Loveless aro

[tozettastone]

Actually, there should be a fic where therapy is all the rage for players of the Game in Orlais. On the theme of TV therapists, you know?

The worldbuilding checks out, to me: the idea of a secret-keeper to whom you can say anything at all feels very Orlesian. This profession would never last somewhere like Tevinter—too much mind control available—but Orlais has just the right amount of drama and cloak and dagger bullshit and paper thin respectability.

It's an old profession. The very rich can afford to employ someone to sit, and listen, and not tell. And now in this new age those professionals are also attempting to develop their skills with therapeutic frameworks (with mixed efficacy, a lot of bias, and dubious science, as is traditional). They have a guild now, with its own politics and professional standards, like renaissance wool-workers or something. This means they're no longer tied to individual houses, which means their loyalties are a lot more suspect.

They're not called therapists though. Too pedestrian. Too mundane. Since the chantry, despite seeming based on the catholic church, doesn't appear to have them, we can call them Confessors. Madame Confesseur? Is that the term?

Anyway they don't treat people who actually need therapy unless they happen to also need somewhere to put 10 royals for every hour of service. It's a mostly ineffectual profession, except when you get a confessor who is also in the fortunate position to be employed by someone with an actual problem that cannot, you know, be mistaken for demons. But the socially shy cousin of your local aristocrat is well taken-care of, I guess.

It just tickles me to have an entire profession dedicated to helping rich tits talk through things they cannot share with others, charging a lot for it, and then... selectively sharing it with others, because this is Orlais. Maybe there's an extra layer of convolution here: what the confessor tells the increasingly powerful guild as dues vs what the confessor keeps to themself vs what the confessor shares openly. You'd have to be very good at picking and choosing the secrets you shared—don't want to end up dead, but want to be able to profit from the fall out. A popular profession for wayward younger children, I think: people familiar with the Game but without means of their own.

But tozette, you say, why would someone actually use one of these professionals if they're so obviously corrupt?

It's fashionable. It's very tempting to rich and romantic Orlesians to act like they're carrying burdens so heavy that they must set them down at the feet of someone who can never tell. The air of mystery. The shroud of secrecy. (Often, I imagine, it really is just wine and a conversation about the opera; there aren't that many earthshaking secrets in Orlais.)

Leliana loves them, and she has also never told one a single real secret. She likes to lie to them and see where, exactly, in high society her carefully-confessed lies crop up later. It helps her keep track of the far-reaching endless tapestry that is the Great Game.

#orlais #dragon age #bad therapy #lol

[jasmine-angel]

it’s always too late that i realise people are actually bad. my (now ex) therapist joked maybe 2x about punching me. second time she was dropping her full legal name as a name she would hate to be called and then said ‘if you ever called me that id punch you! lol!’ and i just had to sit there.

i have explained to this therapist the physical abuse I have experienced AND that my stalker threatened to physical assault me. like…

this is something I can’t even tell people face to face bc I’m SO ashamed that i let it slide AGAIN.

I hate this.

#jaz rambles #tw therapy #bad therapist #bad therapy #ughhhhhh #tw physical abuse #yada yada

[writerhue]

Is it okay to be happy, when the one you love is crying in pain.

Maybe it's their nature, maybe it's their hobby, but I wonder how they can smile in someone's sorrow.

#quotes #spilled ink #sad thoughts #bad thoughts #bad things bingo #bad therapy #bad things happen bingo #bad thinking diary #spilled words #writting #original

[totallyveryallosexual]

TW: mention of sh, suicidal ideation

When I went to therapy, my therapist wouldn't diagnose me with ADHD because I'm a really good student with good grades, and she said that even if I had the symptoms of ADHD it needed to have an impact on your life to qualify for a diagnosis and clearly it didn't if I was getting straight As. I was a lot younger than I am now and didn't know how to stand up for myself in a medical setting.

I wish all the time I could go back and yell in her face that if ADHD didn't have an impact on my life, I wouldn't have been sitting in her office in the first place dealing with depression. I wouldn't have thought about different ways of killing myself every time I stayed up until two am finishing the projects I couldn't get myself to start on until the day before they were due. I would show her the scars my body kept as reminders of how much I hated myself for being unable to stick to or finish anything and ask her if they had an impact on my life.

I would go back and tell her about every time I couldn't focus on a lesson in class, how I would desperately try to keep my attention on the teacher and in doing so only become more distracted, how I mastered the art of making it seem like I knew what was going on at all times, of quickly catching up whenever I zoned back in.

I would point out how the classes I did well in were the ones where I would hyper fixate on the subject for days, spending all my free time one week consumed by advanced math, or all my free time another week writing an elaborate analysis of the book we were reading in English while neglecting to do the actual assignment the teacher had given us.

Every day I am mad at the system that told me external measures of success outweigh my own suffering and struggles simply because my depression is less noticeable to those around me than a c on a report card would be.

#undiagnosed adhd #adhd #adhd problems #therapy #bad therapy

[callmemanatee]

Hot take: Although it's great that mental illness has become way less stigmatized than it was a decade or two ago, we've swung so far toward "therapy is great! everyone should go to therapy!" that we are harming a lot of people.

Talk therapy doesn't work well for everyone. For many, it can feel just like gaslighting or talking in circles. You can't CBT yourself out of poverty, or abuse, or discrimination.

Some of us have been hurt badly by ableist therapists.

And if you're in a rural or conservative area, good luck finding a therapist who affirms queer people and has a more than rudimentary (and not pathologizing or ABA-based) understanding of autism.

I am not saying therapy is inherently bad, or that it never helps. But we need to stop putting it on a pedestal, and using "go to therapy" as a stock response for any friend in distress. And we need to acknowledge that sometimes therapy might do more harm than good.

#therapy #bad therapy #mental health #therapy isn't for everyone

[abysscouncil]

Shout out (not really) to our old therapist who started off our first session by talking about “how many teenagers come into sessions claiming they have DID because they saw it on TikTok”. Really set up a line of healthy communication and me feeling like I wouldn’t be ridiculed if I talked about my problems.

She then proceeded to spend every sessions trying to shove CBT treatments down my throat and every time I tried mentioning that it wasn’t working and never has for me, along with reasons I think it wasn’t, she just… Told me to keep working on it. I had a whole LIST of reasons why I thought I had whatever mental disability I wanted to bring up to her and I never once was listened to enough to even speak my case.

I stopped seeing her pretty quickly, obvious. But some therapists needs to do better and actually listen to their clients instead of just dismissing everything or at least stop continuing to try to force something that isn’t working.

#blurry abyss co #bad therapy #tw fakeclaiming #vent #abyss council rambles #endos dni #actually did #actually traumagenic #system

[eclecticbutterfly44]

We just told our therapist that our abusive ex tried to rape us.

And she fucking LAUGHED.

She fucking laughed that a victim of numerous s#xual assaults almost got FUCKING RAPED.

She fucking laughed that a victim of numerous s#xual assaults was being s#xually harassed for over 2 HOURS after the attempted rape.

She fucking laughed at attempted rape.

- Demonia

#vent #tw sa #sa victim #tw attempted assault #tw s/a #bad therapy

[cobora2009]

I don’t know why but I love the fantasy of being someone a woman confides in and taking advantage of it in a way she likes. Like a therapist who listens to his “patient’s” trauma while teasing them or using them while he listens, helping them relive it in a way they enjoy until they’re addicted to revealing their darkest trauma and having it sexualized. DM’s are always open.

#r@pe kink #bad therapy #hard k1nk #r@pe play

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Abigail Shrier's book, "Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up," shows us -- and I have it here -- shows us a new way forward for parenting, where we don't have to lean in to the child's emotions. Where we become a little bit wary about leaning into the child's emotion. Where asking the child if they're happy isn't really favoured. It may be better ask, "Have you got something good to do? Are you busy? Have you got something kind of thoughtful to get at?"

I'm guilty of it myself. I'm always asking my kids are they happy. Happy isn't a human condition that is -- it's not the end goal you know, because if you make happiness your end goal, you'll end up thinking your way into CrazyLand.

What you'd need, what you would benefit better from, and what I would benefit better from and what your kids would benefit better from, and mine, would be having something purposeful to do. Something to sink your teeth in. Do you have something good to do today? Something interesting? Have you found yourself a good activity to get into today? Rather than, "are you experiencing joy?"

The brain is a problem-solving organ. The human brain, when it's left just at kind of ease it looks for a problem. It looks for a problem to get their teeth into. So, you'd be better off challenging your brain to play chess or learn an instrument or pass their driving test, anything. Give them small helpful achievements, small helpful goals. That would be much more helpful than ask them to talk about their feelings.

Because they live in this world, this generation of children, there's been too much emphasis on their feelings and there's this kind of concept that has grown which Abigail Shrier calls therapeutic parenting, and it's not working. The parents are leading the children into emotional dysregulation because they're asking the children about big emotions. And the child is leaning into their big emotions, when they'd be better off saying, you know what, that's an awful lot of heightened emotion. Let's move it on. Let's have a hot chocolate and think about something, Let's do something tonight. Why don't we do the jigsaw? Why don't we kind of listen to one of those podcasts and see what we think about it? Why don't we learn a little bit about, you know, Nietzsche's kind of understanding of life, or what Karl Marx thought?

The more you could lean into kind of cerebral challenges, and you might find them good kind of thoughtful podcast or YouTube just to kind of expand their mind and get into other concepts rather than thinking, am I happy? I'm not happy because of this. I'm anxious because of that. I'm worried because that's not helping these kids. We've gone too far into their emotions and they're feeling emotionally dysregulated and kind of rudderless, because they haven't got a purpose. They don't know what to do with themselves. And help them if you can at all, to find meaning and purpose each day by looking for something to keep them busy.

==

Your kids are not your patients, and you're not their therapist.

They need a parent, not a shrink.

#Stella O'Malley #therapeutic parenting #emotional dysregulation #parenting #Abigail Shrier #Bad Therapy #psychology #human psychology #emotional incontinence #religion is a mental illness

[bread-tab]

I'm going through some old downloaded medical records (trying to get my shit organized) and it's a little harrowing because my previous therapist's "progress notes" are in there, and reading them a year after the fact has not dissuaded me of the notion that she Did Not Like Me™. So that's ...uncomfy. IDK, I'm reading them, but at the same time, I'm trying to avoid dwelling on the "what went wrongs" today. (Somewhat failing.)

Anyway, the saving grace for my good humor this evening is that the record system apparently did not account for transgender patients very well and so I get to see gems of improvisation such as this:

#medical cw #medical abuse cw #bad therapy #transphobia cw #lets keep it on the safe side with this one #trauma all over the place and i haven't processed it well enough to even know how to tag it #and yeah idk why i have access to detailed progress notes #i don't think it's the full record but it's a lot

[baka-ero]

I should stop expressing my feelings.

#someone stop me #feelings #overthinking #bad thoughts #bad things happen to good people #bad thinking diary #bad therapy #thoughts from the shower