No offense to present company, but talk therapists disgust me profoundly. I've never had a good one, and my best-managed state of emotional health evolved from me getting my Krazy Pillz straight from my primary care physician.
In childhood, when in therapy for pretty disturbing sexual trauma, my first therapist rebuked me for not wanting to reenact the thing with dolls, then suggested if I couldn't show it to her, it didn't happen. Twenty-five years later, I have the scars to prove it did, but I was too mortified to "reenact" the incidents, and moreover already perceptive enough to grasp that dolls aren't real and nothing can hurt them, so what's the point?
My second, court-appointed, vaguely qualified therapist (I was eight) was a postfeminist, Steiner-doll, herbal-obsessed loony who needed more therapy than she gave -- but did introduce me to Indian food and gazpacho, as she believed in taking sessions out of the office, and what can you do with a pathologically fearful child but go and eat somewhere? The problem with that particular therapist is that she instilled a feeling that it was Time For Me to Be Okay, and that Hoo Boy Had I Failed because I wasn't okay yet. I was just about walking without pain yet, and she said it was time to mooooove on and put it aaaaalll awaaaay.
In high school and college, therapy was mandated as a condition of pharmacological assistance, which I thought I might need considering my grandmother is on lithium, my uncle on Wellbutrin, and a couple of my aunts spent the seventies on Thorazine. I seemingly broke the bipolar mold in favor of unipolar depression with thwacking PTSD, but my therapist and pill psychologist bounced me from medicine to medicine without listening to me at all (and the therapist, in this case, had a reset button for each session -- it was as if nothing had happened at all last session, and she sat in silence while I squirmed and made awkward conversation and ate through half the session that way). At one point, the psychiatrist -- and I do wish I could remember his name, so as better to decry him on the Internets -- put me on a daring, new, powerful antipsychotic. It was like reducing my brain to a silent, cool, black, blank puddle and then dropping in a rock, where rock = ordinary everyday stimuli. It was the closest I had ever come to killing myself, and he kept me on it for a month, just to see.
So yeah. Um. You've entered a useless profession, and should rather had joined the Peace Corps.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-17 05:27 pm (UTC)In childhood, when in therapy for pretty disturbing sexual trauma, my first therapist rebuked me for not wanting to reenact the thing with dolls, then suggested if I couldn't show it to her, it didn't happen. Twenty-five years later, I have the scars to prove it did, but I was too mortified to "reenact" the incidents, and moreover already perceptive enough to grasp that dolls aren't real and nothing can hurt them, so what's the point?
My second, court-appointed, vaguely qualified therapist (I was eight) was a postfeminist, Steiner-doll, herbal-obsessed loony who needed more therapy than she gave -- but did introduce me to Indian food and gazpacho, as she believed in taking sessions out of the office, and what can you do with a pathologically fearful child but go and eat somewhere? The problem with that particular therapist is that she instilled a feeling that it was Time For Me to Be Okay, and that Hoo Boy Had I Failed because I wasn't okay yet. I was just about walking without pain yet, and she said it was time to mooooove on and put it aaaaalll awaaaay.
In high school and college, therapy was mandated as a condition of pharmacological assistance, which I thought I might need considering my grandmother is on lithium, my uncle on Wellbutrin, and a couple of my aunts spent the seventies on Thorazine. I seemingly broke the bipolar mold in favor of unipolar depression with thwacking PTSD, but my therapist and pill psychologist bounced me from medicine to medicine without listening to me at all (and the therapist, in this case, had a reset button for each session -- it was as if nothing had happened at all last session, and she sat in silence while I squirmed and made awkward conversation and ate through half the session that way). At one point, the psychiatrist -- and I do wish I could remember his name, so as better to decry him on the Internets -- put me on a daring, new, powerful antipsychotic. It was like reducing my brain to a silent, cool, black, blank puddle and then dropping in a rock, where rock = ordinary everyday stimuli. It was the closest I had ever come to killing myself, and he kept me on it for a month, just to see.
So yeah. Um. You've entered a useless profession, and should rather had joined the Peace Corps.