bad therapy experiences
Aug. 9th, 2009 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrienmundiI've had four therapists in my life. In retrospect, I don't think any of them were very good (or at least not good for me), and that's fucking with my motivation to seek out new therapy. Well, that and the difficulties and needless complexities of dealing with my insurance program. Oh, Canada, please invade soon and subject us all to your socialized healthcare!
My first therapist was when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had some pretty intense social anxiety, and asked my mom and stepfather for therapy. They found me a counselor who's office was in the building that is now Charis Books in L5P (yeah, I'm old and shit). He talked down to me, prematurely thought he found the angle to approach me, and either didn't notice or listen to signs that he might have been wrong. I assessed the likelihood of any use for him as approaching zero, then gamed the system such that he thought I was "cured" in four visits.
My second therapist was when I was nineteen. I was in college, and thought I'd get "free" therapy at school, but the idea of having to have screening interviews before I could be assigned to someone scared me off. Stupidly, I went back to my mom, who found a counselor from her insurance. He was both a counselor and a hypnotherapist, but I made a game try of it. I opened with depression, then went to gender, and that went swimmingly bad. As soon as I mentioned gender issues, he tried to shift me to a "specialist", but I'd already put in time with him, and didn't want to start all over. At one point, he put me under hypnosis and tried to convince me through clumsy metaphor that it was OK to be a guy. I'd like to say that was the end of that, but I went a few more times before calling it quits.
I was in my early thirties before hitting therapist number three (number two left a very bad taste in my mouth). He was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, who sold him as someone who'd call me on my shit, but compassionately. It sounded like just what I needed, but I think the FoaF had very different needs and experiences than did I, and it did not go down like that. Number three was big into alternative metaphysics, energy work, etc, and jumped on my passing mentions of that. He wasn't much use to me in terms of either depression or gender issues, which is why I started going. He was very taken with his own intelligence (he wasn't dumb), but he underestimated me, and didn't even notice when I started making a structure that would appear to come to a kind of closure so I could get out. To my credit, I was the one that said, "I think I'm done here for a while". He took it as a sign of his success, not me giving up on the "process", but I can't really fault him for that, since I led him to believe it.
Number four was mid-late thirties, a transsexual woman, presbyterian minister, and very smart and widely educated. I met her through a gender support group (that came to be a standard mtf transsexual group, but that's another story). Despite her own history, she was open to my experience of myself, and very protective of it and me. The most important thing I got out of my time with her was the feeling that I could play "full out"; I didn't have to hold back intellectually, and could leap back and forth between my own metaphors, book and culture references, and she got my (admittedly dark) sense of humour more often than not. She was smart, but that turned into the problem, not the solution. I drag everything to the level of intellect, abstraction, theory and the very high level view; it's what I know, it's where I'm a viking, it's what most of my training (school and after) has been about. Number four knew these things from the inside, knew she was smart, and saw some affinity between us. Unfortunately, that was her big gun, her intellect, and when I started overpowering her there, she had no fall back position. She kept telling me that I'd have to come to terms with the world that wouldn't change for me, at the same time as she seemed to have an awed sort of respect for my (failing) response of resisting the weight of the uncaring world singlehandedly. We coasted on her affection for me and my desire to be the subject of attention for a while, but it stopped helping me long before I stopped going back. (Number four also has my intensely annotated copy of Serrano's "Whipping Girl", which I miss the most; there's no way I can give Serrano money for another copy, and I don't know that I can read it again to recreate my notes.)
And now I find myself needing more than I can do on my own, more than my friends can and should do for me. All signs point to more therapy, but my therapy history and trust issues make that something I'm really, really not looking forward to. I don't need someone smarter than me, but I need someone that can withstand my angry, frustrated, full on intellectual assault. It's a hell of a defense, and I've become really good at it; I need someone who can call bullshit, or just sidestep it, but still get enough of what's going on to trace what triggered it, and why, and help me figure out how to deal with it. Gender will invariably come up (though I'm clearly fucked up in more ways than that), and I don't want to have to educate the person I'm paying to help me. I need an open, flexible mind, compassion, and someone secure enough to not freak out when I go ballistically crazy. I also do not want chemical solutions to nonchemical problems. And, I need to find the faith that such things are possible, enough faith to make it through the messed up system and quite probably several failed attempts. I'm not terribly hopeful, but I'm not fatalistic. I'm trying really hard to see that as an opening.
My first therapist was when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had some pretty intense social anxiety, and asked my mom and stepfather for therapy. They found me a counselor who's office was in the building that is now Charis Books in L5P (yeah, I'm old and shit). He talked down to me, prematurely thought he found the angle to approach me, and either didn't notice or listen to signs that he might have been wrong. I assessed the likelihood of any use for him as approaching zero, then gamed the system such that he thought I was "cured" in four visits.
My second therapist was when I was nineteen. I was in college, and thought I'd get "free" therapy at school, but the idea of having to have screening interviews before I could be assigned to someone scared me off. Stupidly, I went back to my mom, who found a counselor from her insurance. He was both a counselor and a hypnotherapist, but I made a game try of it. I opened with depression, then went to gender, and that went swimmingly bad. As soon as I mentioned gender issues, he tried to shift me to a "specialist", but I'd already put in time with him, and didn't want to start all over. At one point, he put me under hypnosis and tried to convince me through clumsy metaphor that it was OK to be a guy. I'd like to say that was the end of that, but I went a few more times before calling it quits.
I was in my early thirties before hitting therapist number three (number two left a very bad taste in my mouth). He was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, who sold him as someone who'd call me on my shit, but compassionately. It sounded like just what I needed, but I think the FoaF had very different needs and experiences than did I, and it did not go down like that. Number three was big into alternative metaphysics, energy work, etc, and jumped on my passing mentions of that. He wasn't much use to me in terms of either depression or gender issues, which is why I started going. He was very taken with his own intelligence (he wasn't dumb), but he underestimated me, and didn't even notice when I started making a structure that would appear to come to a kind of closure so I could get out. To my credit, I was the one that said, "I think I'm done here for a while". He took it as a sign of his success, not me giving up on the "process", but I can't really fault him for that, since I led him to believe it.
Number four was mid-late thirties, a transsexual woman, presbyterian minister, and very smart and widely educated. I met her through a gender support group (that came to be a standard mtf transsexual group, but that's another story). Despite her own history, she was open to my experience of myself, and very protective of it and me. The most important thing I got out of my time with her was the feeling that I could play "full out"; I didn't have to hold back intellectually, and could leap back and forth between my own metaphors, book and culture references, and she got my (admittedly dark) sense of humour more often than not. She was smart, but that turned into the problem, not the solution. I drag everything to the level of intellect, abstraction, theory and the very high level view; it's what I know, it's where I'm a viking, it's what most of my training (school and after) has been about. Number four knew these things from the inside, knew she was smart, and saw some affinity between us. Unfortunately, that was her big gun, her intellect, and when I started overpowering her there, she had no fall back position. She kept telling me that I'd have to come to terms with the world that wouldn't change for me, at the same time as she seemed to have an awed sort of respect for my (failing) response of resisting the weight of the uncaring world singlehandedly. We coasted on her affection for me and my desire to be the subject of attention for a while, but it stopped helping me long before I stopped going back. (Number four also has my intensely annotated copy of Serrano's "Whipping Girl", which I miss the most; there's no way I can give Serrano money for another copy, and I don't know that I can read it again to recreate my notes.)
And now I find myself needing more than I can do on my own, more than my friends can and should do for me. All signs point to more therapy, but my therapy history and trust issues make that something I'm really, really not looking forward to. I don't need someone smarter than me, but I need someone that can withstand my angry, frustrated, full on intellectual assault. It's a hell of a defense, and I've become really good at it; I need someone who can call bullshit, or just sidestep it, but still get enough of what's going on to trace what triggered it, and why, and help me figure out how to deal with it. Gender will invariably come up (though I'm clearly fucked up in more ways than that), and I don't want to have to educate the person I'm paying to help me. I need an open, flexible mind, compassion, and someone secure enough to not freak out when I go ballistically crazy. I also do not want chemical solutions to nonchemical problems. And, I need to find the faith that such things are possible, enough faith to make it through the messed up system and quite probably several failed attempts. I'm not terribly hopeful, but I'm not fatalistic. I'm trying really hard to see that as an opening.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 08:49 am (UTC)I hope that day will come, anyway. The alternative is that, 1000 years from now, we'll be building interstellar starships and intelligent computers, and we won't even know what to do when the computers develop depression.
(* - not entirely fairly, incidentally, it wasn't always as bad as portrayed)