Personal Woes and Advice 6

[WarKitty]

I mean, not explicitly more than anyone else is an arrogant jerk. But those that are definitely are in the position to empower their arrogant jerk-ness.



Damn, that's awful! But also lends some additional context to what you experienced, so it makes a lot of sense. The guy was simply an outright jerk!

I'm sure I've said it before, but I'm so sorry you had to go through that with someone who clearly didn't care. Obviously there are practitioners out there who do care and are good at what they do, but they take effort to find and an experience like this can understandably sour you on the process.

All the best in any further steps you take! And props for what you've been able to achieve thus far!

I definitely think part of what made it so bad is that - not just that he was an outright jerk, but that because of his credentials he was able to position things so that he was supported in it. Basically making it out so anyone who complained about his behavior just was too sick to recognize what they needed. So he could continue to be a jerk in a system that would quite literally feed him victims and praise him for hurting them.

This is a true, genuine traumatic memory. I mean that in the quite technical sense, regarding mental health. Some of my problem is I have found many practitioners either are skeptical when someone accuses another professional, or want to downplay it or brush it off as someone I didn't get along with.

A lot of the problem though has to do with how traumatic memories work. Basically your brain sort of shuts down when the memory is triggered (there's a lot more to it than that, but it'll do). The normal procedure in therapy is to get someone to a point where they feel safe in therapy, then approach the memory slowly and in measured doses. That procedure does not work when the therapeutic environment is inherently and unavoidably triggering. Which means I'm essentially getting into a situation where the treatments that are supposed to be used don't work, and no one really has another idea.

From my perspective it's often come across as "you need therapy in order to be able to benefit from therapy." I find that I'm often being told I'm being difficult or not trying or am not ready to get better. Or that I'm "not ready for therapy." My impression has been that there's very little understanding and acceptance within the mental health community of the idea that someone might be genuinely traumatized by the behavior of a treating practitioner. So reactions that in another situation might be recognized as a fairly standard trauma reaction get labelled as resistance. Not even necessarily because the person I'm seeing doesn't believe it, but because it changes how things go in ways that don't fit with the models recommended.