Continuing bonds, part 1.

I've been keeping an eye on the incoming complaints about therapists, to keep track and to learn what it is that most clients complain about. And the answer isn't predatory sex fiend therapists - a complaint male therapists most fear receiving! No, the most common reason for clients feeling traumatized by therapists is, sudden, inexplicable endings. Especially a sudden ending after a reassurance that therapy wont end without agreement!

I'm guilty of doing this - twice - ending therapy without giving a transparent reason. Both situations were complicated by the rules of the agency I was working for/and/or my status as a student/and/or advice from a supervisor.

I see therapy culture as the problem here. And I wonder how much of my therapist's catastrophic mishandling of 'my erotic transfer' was a direct effect of his training and his 'developmental issues'. He believed in 'developmental issues' so it is fair and reasonable to assume that they were present.

In his email response to my request for my notes, he told me to 'just let it go, because it was obviously hurting me '. I'd asked for my notes! Anyway, that response made me incandescent with anger. and that anger led to me deciding to post the transcripts of our sessions.

Acting as if one is entitled is one thing, and he certainly believed that he knew better than I, he certainly had the qualifications. But spouting cliché Disney lyrics - 'let it go' - undermines any authority...

Going deeper.

Choosing to 'let it go ' isn't the cause of peace and resolution. It is the outcome. 

Otherwise the letting go - especially when someone tells you to do it - comes from powerlessness and a feeling of defeat. This letting go is a rationalisation of the withdrawal demonstrated in disorganised attachment. The people with the capacity to keep trying to make amends are not struggling to have an easier life, nor are they empty shells who need to learn how to love themselves. No, they understand the value of others, and know that life is short. How we have been sold a poisoned agenda of distancing and ghosting, is beyond me. 

The therapist told me too many times that my desire to create a better ending for my husband and I "wasn't worth it". This is a very normal and inadvertently cruel version of reality as constructed by therapists. But it was his version of my reality. He had no right at all to speak as if he knew what was good for me.

The cruellest version I sometimes see is the effect on parents after an adult child has cut them out of his life - because the parents weren't good enough, they were instead annoying and didn't understand, and they made mistakes that are turned into reasons why the adult child now feels wrecked. 

Even if the child - who is now married, in a good job...but just believing now that it is easier to blame the past rather than seeking to understand the whole of it. 

Too many therapists in their desire to support their client fail to see the bigger picture and those elderly parents will never know what they could do to rectify the shattering harm now visited on them. 

This has happened to me. After therapy my sister 'felt that I reminded her of our childhood'. And for sure, my dad's drinking, my mom's anger and despair - it was much harder for her, six years younger than I. But the pain I felt because of her decision, the impossibility of any dialogue after she had told me (or rather after her partner had told me), and the effect it had on my children who lost an aunt and uncle and cousins. I see this as a consequence of her therapy. As a therapist I'm saying that therapists should know better than to sustain neo liberal agendas as introjects! 

It was devastating, truly awful. 

Anyway, just saying.