Falling in love with one's therapist... the crash report.
With trepidation...
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Not sure where I'm going with this, so I will just write and see..
Someone pointed me in the direction of Kendra, a woman who posted a succession of films about falling in love with her psychiatrist.
I've only watched two YouTubes about her story so far - one from an expert in AI who was commenting mostly on how the 'magic mirror' quality of LLMs can reinforce error, as Kendra took to talking to two AIs about what happened. And the other YouTube is from a Dr in Seattle.
Briefly, Kendra's story begins this way:
Kendra believes that her psychiatrist had feelings for her, and 'bread crumbed' her into staying in therapy with him for four years. But what if all the usual questions about boundaries and ethical conduct fail to address the real issue that underlies the problem? What If the psychiatrist acted in the best and most ethical way and despite all good intentions the outcome was a problem?
What if everything was right?
So, what went wrong?
Could there be a problem with the interpretation of what constitutes ethical behaviour in therapy?
The assessments made by the people in the videos, focused on only two questions:
Was Kendra deluded or not - Blame the client.
Was the psychiatrist's behaviour ethical or not - Blame the therapist.
They are reasonable questions and yet, as I try to understand this story I keep hearing this phrase in my mind, the operation was a success but the patient died.
The only things I am sure of is that:
Kendra believes she experienced "weaponized neutrality"..
The Dr in Seattle didn't accept Kendra's term: weaponized neutrality. Because neutrality is seen as neither good nor bad. The only thing the Dr was concerned about was physical contact. My argument is that deprivation of information, the neutrality much favoured by those of a psychodynamic modality in particular , but it isn't confined to them, can be harmful.
Epistemic injustice: neutrality can be a withholding of information purposefully and intentionally, to maintain an unequal power dynamic.
Epistemic injustice destroys informed consent. Hence Kendra's view that her psychiatrist was withholding information to keep her hooked and paying him.
People associate the term catfishing with complex narratives designed to create an alternative reality. And catfishing fits Kendra's narrative. Withholding critical information keeps the client swimming, trying, trying harder to get to the truth, trying, trying harder to prove what a good match they are, trying, trying so hard to make something meaningful out of some gesture or word that could be interpreted as significant if the ambiguous hoped for context is true.
Then when it is all over, having been so powerless it feels safer to tell ourselves that uncomfortable details don't matter. Self blaming, self attack often follow.
In my case, Kit's refusal to talk about his feelings, and indeed blushing when I asked him directly to be more open with me, certainly didn't do me any good! As much as I understand the constraints of the profession, at some point there needs to be more openness about the fact that therapy techniques such as neutrality, certainly act in the same way as a prejudicial denying of information.
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