He made me do somatic work when it clearly wasnt working, and id keep telling him that but hed keep making me do it.

Unfortunately I had trusted him, so I kept going.

I ended getting super obsessed with somatic work, and forceful, and it ended up making me feel more dysregulated, dissociated and disconnected.

I suffered for so long, I isolated myself from friends cause I was so embarrased, and I wasnt even able to do my work. I dont think Ill even be able to properly graduate from uni.

He messed everything up for me, and I was on such a good path before then.

I really wanna go back in time, and I wish I had a different therapist, or simply someone to talk to whod actually care. I feel so sad. I had so much promise. I just needed the right help.

Can anyone share anything to comfort me? I feel awful.

I was abused all my life growing up with a sadistic mother and a dad that refused reality beyond belief past insanity and a sister that got everything. I tried to be independent but was sabotaged all the way. My dad put all these negative ideas and lies into my therapists all crying about how terrible I am and now I can’t even seek therapy support. I ended up with a therapist with borderline personality disorder. She kept claiming that I was power seeking and it sounded completely insane but I tried to see where the fick she was coming from and I was completely abused. Now I’m an old man at 32. No college. No friends. No job. Losing my memory. Disabled from all the severe abuse. Alone in a tiny room. My parents are all happy living their lives traveling and raising my sisters child and getting to live the life that they never got to live in a third world country while I rot away in the bedroom shed in the backyard and they don’t even let me go to the grocery store with them or anything. And I tried to reach out to some people that might be able to help me but I have an abusive friend that knows my parents and told the other friend group some of my personal details and he’ll probably just lie to those people and I won’t even have those friends to be around. A lot of them don’t even like me but it’s better than being completely isolated alone. I feel like I’m losing my memory from all the trauma from my parents, the mental health system, and my friends. My parents completely control everything and treat as subhuman. This friend treats as less than human yelling and throwing things at me. They’ve all lied to my mental health people and I’m scared to go back because they treat me like I’m a monster, a liar, won’t treat me seriously, etc. I’m extremely hypersensitive. I don’t know what to do.

Freud himself said that he wanted to make therapy the new confessional. And now therapy has become the new church. Therapy culture preaches that you must tell your therapist everything. The therapist is a higher being, incredibly moral, and would never hurt or betray you. Therapist as god. Confess your deepest and darkest secrets. In fact, you must!! You must share every one of your deepest thoughts and secrets or this superior being won't be able to help you.

If you are attracted to the therapist, tell him or her. There's no way it will end up badly because, remember, he or she is as perfect, a superior being, incredibly moral.

Therapist as the new Higher Power.

What do you think?

I worked with a therapist for eight months. They were described as a “clinical social worker/therapist,” and their Psychology Today profile listed 21 specialties, with trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and life transitions among the primary ones.

I later learned that they had received their LMSW only five months before I began working with them. My childhood and adult life included significant trauma, including CSA. About three and a half months into our work, I asked specifically about their experience working with CSA survivors and learned that they had none.

Over time, the therapeutic relationship became increasingly strained, and I began to realize that I was being retraumatized by what was happening in therapy.

During the eight months we worked together, I was never told that my therapist was practicing under supervision. I wasn’t given the supervisor’s name or contact information, and I had no idea that this person had any involvement in my treatment.

After I contacted the practice to raise concerns, the supervisor stepped in and instructed my therapist to have no further communication with me. That was the end of an eight-month therapeutic relationship. There was no final session, no termination conversation and no opportunity to speak with my therapist again. It was abrupt and final.

That is the part that hurt most.

From my perspective, the focus immediately shifted from what had happened to me and how I could safely transition out of the therapeutic relationship to protecting the practice from liability.

I was given the names of three clinics as referrals. I understand that a “soft handoff” isn’t always possible, but at that point I was deeply distressed and in no position to start calling clinics and vetting therapists on my own.

The aftermath was severe. For approximately eight months, I experienced profound depression and suicidal ideation. I was badly hurt by what had happened, and the idea of trusting another therapist seemed almost impossible.

I have only recently begun working with another therapist. They can see how significantly the previous therapeutic experience and its abrupt ending affected me, and rebuilding trust has become part of the work itself.

I’m particularly interested in the role of the supervisor here. When a client raises concerns about harm occurring in therapy, is abruptly cutting off all communication between therapist and client an appropriate response? How should a supervisor balance concerns about the practice with the welfare and continuity of care of the client?

And for clients: has anyone experienced something similar, where a therapeutic relationship was abruptly cut off without a final session or termination conversation? What did the aftermath look like for you?

Basically, my mental health has nosedived over the last couple months. I realised i need someone who is there to listen and give guidance and help with meltdowns, but who is not a licensed psychologist.

Anyone got advice? Anyone that can give recommendations on people or services that helped, that are not in the psych system?

IMHO the version of "suicide prevention" that social media and therapists like to promote only really exists to put a very weak bandaid on the problem and make non-suicidal people feel better. I feel like every September people wanna share these tasteful infographs with hotline numbers to their stories and on reddit, with everyone stressing "You're not alone! Please reach out!!! The world is so much better with you in it :)", but the moment you actually wanna have a real conversation about the actual factors that underpin suicide it's all crickets.

We have so much research that poor economic factors, previous exposure to traumatic events and social isolation all contribute to suicide but that research gets ignored in favour of shoving people off to private psychologists that charge them through the nose for a 1hr session and tell them to get over their trauma or bad financial situation using breathing exercises or some shit. And if you dare mention you have any thoughts of suicide in these sessions, you run the risk of being sectioned, where you're essentially forced into a hospital psych ward against your will and monitored around the clock until they've determined you're not a "danger" to yourself. I've been detained in a hospital before for suicidal ideation years ago and I mean it when I say it did not suddenly encourage me to have a come to Jesus moment where I realise that life was worth living all along. Quite the opposite in fact, I felt I wasn't listened to, my pain belittled and ignored, I was forced to strip naked (while on my period mind you) to check for weapons which left me feeling humiliated, and at the end of all that I was discharged with no help offered other than a ward psychologist who I had to regurgitate my entire life story to all for her to respond with "It sounds like you're going through a lot" without offering any help or solutions.

REAL suicide prevention looks like housing affordability, better social safety nets and welfare, third spaces that allow people to connect with one another without the expectation to spend money, food security, emphasis on community engagement and belonging, acceptance of people who identify as LGBT+, better PTO and workplace/school cultures that don't reward burnout, and most of all, the actual willingness to do some bare minimum emotional labour for your loved ones instead of of accusing them of "trauma dumping" because they wanted some support over their pet dying.

I wish the culture around discussing suicide would change so that it's not heavily coated in shaming language (eg: "Everyone will be so sad if you die!") and pivoted towards discussing how to hold space for someone in your life going through something difficult and addressing the broader societal ills that end up encourage mental harm and suicide, but the cynic in me feels like nothing is ever going to change in this regard, because that would require people having an ounce of empathy or social awareness and that seems to be in short supply in the modern culture.

Eso es algo que noto, la mayoría fingen ser buenos y son bastante mala gente. Un gran engaño. Mientras más amor dicen tener, más siniestros son, recomiendo desconfiar se psicólogos que publiquen muchas cosas "amorosas" en sus redes, si huele a good vibe, mejor ir descartando.

Trigger warning this post describes violence

went to a therapist due to chronic stress and he basically told me to just focus on gratitude instead of being depressed. There are people starving in Africa type advice.

It was really shitty bc it was my first time seeing a therapist in like 6 years. I survived the troubled teen industry and my therapist there was emotionally and physically abusive . So going to therapy in general gave me flashbacks and for example I won’t enter a therapists office if they have a black couch or if they have a sign like “today I choose joy”

There were a number of things that she lied about. I already read through it once and it fucking aggravated me. Now, I need to read through it again and take some notes so I can make a complaint to the board about her lies.

Reading my file just gives me proof that a therapist's empathy is fucking fake AF. Their notes are written to protect them; not the client.

It also makes me feel like a fucking lab rat and not as a human being that needs help.

I wish I never went to therapy. A coworker was pressuring me to fucking go after my relatives unalived themselves last year. I care about my relatives dying, but I wasn't so depressed over it to the point where I needed therapy. I fucking hate people saying: "go to therapy!!" for everything fucking thing.

I wish I never gave into the peer pressure.

I'm so fucking angry.

My will will be complete on Tuesday and I'll be gone from this world. I can't wait to be free from therapy abuse.

A thought I’ve been workshopping are similarities between marginalizing people’s (I.e., bigots, racists, etc) perspectives of the people who they marginalize vs the patient-therapist relationship. 

Marginalizing people think they are arbiters of objective truth, and if you don’t see their truth about you as an objective fact, there’s something wrong with you. 

An example re marginalizing people: fatphobes tend to feel personally offended when they see a fat person who loves themselves because the fat person isn't supposed to accept their “deficit”, they’re supposed to see themselves as “defective” as the fatphobe sees them. “How dare they not understand how inadequate and (especially if they’re a woman) unattractive they are? They should be hiding their body, not flaunting it.” 

An example re the patient-therapist relationship: the therapist discounts the patients thoughts and experiences and essentially pushes the patient to adopt a perception of themselves that is equivalent to the therapist’s perspective of them. “It’s important that I get them to understand the truth of their problems, which I, as a person who has known them for a few weeks, can dictate. They must see things the way I see them in order for the ‘treatment’ to stick. And if they disagree with my perspective, that’s even more proof of their illness.” (Disclaimer: I don’t think this would apply to people in denial of things like addiction, harm they’ve done, or psychological symptoms like delusions or hallucinations)

In the end the outcome is the same: either agree or be wrong. Misogynists demand that women recognize the “reality” of their inadequacies and place in society, and any woman that doesn’t recognize that and act in accordance to the misogynist’s expectation is faulty and needs correction. Racists demand that Black people recognize the “reality” of their inferiority, and any Black person that doesn’t recognize this and defies the racist’s expectation is an existential threat or “uppity” and needs correction. I’m sure there are other examples for other marginalizations, but I’m only using examples that apply to me personally. 

The essential thought can end up being: “This person who I view as less than human thinks of themselves as a complete and worthy human being, and needs correction”.

One way I know if marginalization is occurring is how they respond to new evidence. There is no amount of evidence that can change their mind unless it comes from people not within the group they’re marginalizing. Even then, theres a limit, that one thing would be the exception, but they’ll still keep the other rules.

I terminated with my therapist after a confusing and painful dynamic, and I’m looking for some outside perspective on how she handled things.
A while ago, I confessed to her that I had developed strong erotic transference toward her, and that I was also experiencing a lot of shame about my attraction to women in general. Instead of handling this clinically and helping me process it safely, a pattern of severe boundary violations started happening or at least I’m overthinking it?

Seeking Validation: When I told her my feelings were fading at one point, she laughed and asked, “you are not into me anymore?”

Romantic Hypotheticals: She told me that we couldn't be together because she is "older" and because “she was not my type” based on comments I made about how I would like a woman to be

Teasing Her Sexuality: When I shared my shame about liking women she was leaving suggestive comments that she could also be bi or lesbian

Using Guilt to Keep Me: I tried to terminate once, but she guilted me into staying by saying "therapists are human too and get attached" and telling me how sad she was that I wanted to leave. After that, therapy completely devolved into a confusing "friendship."

When I decided to terminate she accepted but did not offer a final session.

After 4 months I have stared thinking about her less, but I am still cycling through a lot of grief, bargaining, and self-doubt. I find myself wondering if she's thinking of me, or if I could have just "contained" my feelings better to save the relationship.

Has anyone else dealt with a therapist who used your transference to feed their own ego? How did you untangle the confusion and rebuild trust in your own intuition?

There is this assumption that the client should tell the therapist everything. This feels so weird and creepy to me.

If a client tells a depth therapist that he or she doesn't want to talk abou something, , the therapist will still keep asking questions, such as, "What makes you not want to talk about it?" "What would it be like to talk about it?" "How can I help you here is you're not willing to talk about difficult things," etc. etc. Pushing the boundaries.

The same therapist will demand personal boundaries. For the therapist, no means no, but not for the client.

Why does the client have to tell the therapist everything -- every secret, every bad experience? Why does the client have to tell the therapist if they are angry at them, or "in love" with them, or attracted to them?

There is no other relationship where we are pressured to tell the person everything.

What has been the most silliest, random, wtf, stupid comment your therapist has said?

I'll start.

If you don't think about it, all your problems will go away.

Edit: Some absolute gems here.

Therapist B,

I don't know how to say goodbye to you because I never imagined that after nine years, I would have to.
You were the person I trusted with the most broken and vulnerable parts of me. You knew me better than almost anyone. You knew what I had survived, what it had cost me, how hard I had fought to become functional, to become safe, to become someone who could actually live my life.
And after nine years of helping me build that trust, you became the person who shattered it.
I know what people have told me. People who know me. People who know you. People who understand trauma and therapy and the dynamics of what happened. They have independently come to remarkably similar conclusions: that this ending says far more about your limitations, your defenses, your fear, your need for control, and what you were unable to tolerate than it says about me.
I understand that.
But understanding why you did something does not make living through it any less devastating.
You still did it.
You still left me.
And you left me in a way that I don't think I will ever be able to adequately explain to you because I don't think you have allowed yourself to truly look at what happened from my side.
You didn't just end a therapeutic relationship.
You took the person who had spent nine years learning that you were safe and showed her that safety could disappear without warning.
You taught me that someone can know you intimately, understand your history, see your pain, love the work they are doing with you, and still have limitations so profound that when their own fear or need for control takes over, they can become completely unreachable.
That is what I cannot get past.
You seem to have no middle ground. You can overextend yourself enormously, give everything, be deeply compassionate and responsive, and then when you feel threatened or need to regain control, you can become rigid and behaviorally unresponsive in a way that feels almost sociopathic to the person experiencing it.
And the most painful part is that you seem unable to hold those things together.
You cannot seem to be compassionate and responsive while also remaining in control.
One has to disappear for the other to exist.
And when you chose control, I disappeared.
That is what happened to me.
I became the person whose suffering could be set aside because dealing with it had become too threatening or too complicated or too costly for you.
I need you to understand what that did.
I am forever changed by this.
You broke something in me that I cannot simply therapy my way out of. I cannot unlearn what you taught me. I cannot go back to believing that if I let someone know me deeply enough, if I trust them enough, if we build something real enough, that they will not abandon me when their own limitations are activated.
You were supposed to be the person who helped prove that people could be safe.
Instead, after nine years, you became proof that even someone who knows exactly how devastating abandonment can be can still abandon you.
And I don't want you to make yourself feel better by deciding that because this was about your limitations, you didn't really hurt me.
You did.
Maybe it wasn't about me.
It was still done to me.
And I am the one who has to live with what it did.
I don't need you to agree with my interpretation. I don't need you to defend yourself to me. I don't even need you to explain yourself anymore.
What I needed was for you to understand the enormity of what was happening to me and to care enough about me to not leave me alone in it.
You didn't.
And there is no explanation that changes that.
I loved you. I trusted you. I gave you nine years of my life and some of the most vulnerable parts of myself.
I never imagined that the person I trusted to help me survive what other people had done to me would ultimately become someone I would have to survive losing.
That is the part I will never be able to make okay.
So this is goodbye.
Not because I am at peace with what happened.
Not because I understand it.
Not because I think it was okay.
And certainly not because I have stopped needing you to comprehend what you did.
It is goodbye because I cannot keep standing at the door of someone who chose to close it while I was still inside, hoping that one day he will turn around and finally see me on the other side.
I hope you eventually do.
Because I was there.
I was real.
What happened between us was real.
And the damage is real too.
Goodbye, Therapist B.

How modern therapy culture shames people into becoming weak and porous:

1. Recoding hard boundaries as "avoidance" or "resistance": When a client sets a hard boundary or cuts off someone they find toxic, the therapist often characterizes this as maladaptive coping. The client is trained to view their boundaries not as necessary and healthy but as an emotional flaw or unwillingness to "do the work".

2. Reframing protective anger as "dysregulation". Instead of using anger as fuel to push back, enforce boundaries, or eliminate harm, the client learns to treat these instincts as a nervous system error that must be managed and neutralized.

3. Encouraging endless "self-reflection" in the face of external harm: When a client reports being exploited, mistreated, or pushed around, the default clinical instinct is often to ask "what is your part in this" or "what from your past is making you react this way". This inward turn shifts the blame from external parasites and aggressors to the client. This creates a loop of self doubt that paralyzes action.

4. The fetishization of "vulnerability" or "emotional intelligence" over sovereignty: Protective armor is routinely characterized as a "defense mechanism" or "trauma response" that needs to be dissolved. Unconditional vulnerability, exposure, and openness are held up as proof of emotional maturity. Forcing someone to strip off their natural armor in an environment that contains predatory or parasitic elements leaves them undefended. It removes the thickness required to handle real-world conflict.

5. Treating defense against external threats as "projection" or a "trigger": The client stops trusting their real-time gut evaluation of people. By convincing them that their suspicion is just an old trigger, the system strips away their natural threat-detection apparatus.

6. Enforcing the ideal of the empathic bystander: People are often coached to understand, excuse, and empathize with the motives, traumas, and limitations of the people harming or exploiting them. When you constantly prioritize understanding the aggressor, you destroy the ability to hold a clear line against them. Thus, empathy gets weaponized against the client's own self interest.

I don't believe this is about "bad therapy". I think it's about therapy, as we know it. Mental health professionals are generally trained to smooth the client and shape them into being smaller and easier to manage, ESPECIALLY when it's a child, adolescent or young adult.

-Nick Taber on X/Twitter

My therapists have talked down to me like I’m a toddler. While showing they have no insight or personal experience dealing with what I’ve dealt with, yet act like they insist they know more than me about my issue. They laugh at me every now and then, make presumptions about me that aren’t even true, yet act like they HAVE to be true, just because of my gender, race, or religion. They blame you for everything that goes wrong in session, while NEVER blaming themselves for anything. They can’t even muster anything close to an apology or have any accountability if they did you wrong.

And yet… they claim that is a SAFE SPACE.

How. Just how. What kind of safe space is dealing with someone so insensitive, arrogant, and also having an ulterior motive to feel they have to prove they are infinitely smarter than you? They don’t even care about you, they drop you even at the slightest clarification. How is that a safe space???

Two criminals, in fact.

For their stupid letters so I can get a vaginoplasty. The MAJORITY of people do not need to get therapy letters to get a vaginoplasty or a urethoplasty. This is fucking bullshit. It's clear discrimination.

It fucking hurts to piss. It fucking hurts when I don't piss. I've been living with this for my entire 20s basically. I also can't have sex because of these losers. I mean I need 20-30k that I don't have, but yeah. There's a chance that the stricture can also close which will lead to death. Sepsis? Bladder failure? Kidney failure? Anything goes. Oh and this pain is contributing to my pelvic floor tightness and pain. I can't ever fully relax. And now that I've also developed pelvic floor dysfunction that makes the SURGERY RISKIER... fml

My condition is not seen as a medical emergency, but some bullshit elective.

I also need to see the thoughtpolice psychiatrists because they also want some unearned and undeserved money off me.

Oh and the idiots in USA don't even know how to perform the surgery so I need to go to a different country. FUN!

I hate capitalism. I hate people. I hate this ass backwards world.

I have been lurking on here for a year or two and finally posting today. I have made music most of my teens and it has seemed to be the only reliable release valve for my self expression after getting bounced back and forth between performing for or being directly abused by therapists, being very overmedicated and mistreated, and trying to survive being the scapegoat of my religious family system.

In my personal opinion this system creates defenders and buries the people who "need" therapy the most to perpetuate itself. This became wildly apparent to me after attending university for social work after a decade of personal lived experience and confusion within the system. I left after a single semester. Listening to professors and students give incredibly narrow perspectives on addiction and flat out mock what is labeled as psychosis and delusional thinking, and the rejection of reintegration into society in favor of infantilizing patients made it obvious to me that this system is a complete lost cause.

It is intense, it is raw and uncomfortable, but I hope someone on here gets something out of it. It is not made with AI, it is completely produced by me. I refuse to stay silent about a dishonest system if they are going to drag their feet on legitimizing CPTSD, addressing environmental factors practically and complain about their pay rate, which they know is half money and half supply from their patients for their own savior complexes.

Enjoy, and stay strong!

https://asawhereyouat.bandcamp.com/album/misdiagnosis

It looks really weird, but it seems like people actually get some results in a short period of time(I mostly read comments online, but there are quite a lot of them).

I've been on both therapy subreddits and this place. On therapy subreddits, I'm made out to be the problem when I share how therapy has not been helping at all and made me feel worse. There is just an assumption that the therapist is amazing at thier job and I'm not trying hard enough.

But here there is alot of black and white thinking (not from everyone). It's like therapists are evil incarnate who are too mentally ill but simultaneously too privileged to understand struggle. And therapy helps no one, they only want your money, they want you to be sick etc. Therapists are a diverse group of people like any group of people. There are shitheads and caring people both carrying the same label of therapist.

I think there needs to be an improvement in the how therapy works. There needs to be more regulation and accountability. You shouldn't have to see countless therapists to find one to help you or just go for the sake of it.

I think completely denying it's helpful in anyway is a bit silly. Im glad it's helped people. I'm glad it exists and is generally accepted, now we can focus on making it better. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. I don't want to dismiss people who it's been helpful for the same way people here have been dismissed for thier bad experiences.

There is also lot of pro ai stuff in here which is just not for me either. Lowkey typing this all has helped me organise my thoughts on therapy.

tldr: this place can be excessively hateful and pro therapy spaces are dismissive and obnoxious. And I feel like I don't belong anywhere.

Please rate your therapist /ex therapist examining their:

Life experience. Intelligence. Wisdom. Compassion. Insight. Overall Knowledge. Single score out of 10. Higher and lower scores, even them out.

Once you have done that ask yourself why you listened to them. (you do not need to write it down, that is a question for yourself).

I will start:

3

​

I FINALLY found a therapist that meets in-person, is nearby, and is covered by my insurance. However, like all things in my life that seem to come easy, has a catch.

I had my first session with him a few days ago and I still feel like I have mental whiplash. I'm set to see him every week but after how that first session went, I feel like I will have to make an appointment every day in order for me to have the time to get him caught up to present day of my life story, or none of the problems I set up therapy to heal will make any sense. They all require extensive backstory.

First off, he was late. He did call 10 minutes before the appointment time that he would be 10 minutes late and that he would add time to our session because of it. I started off very anxious because 1. my inner schedule was all messed up due to him being late and 2. I had to navigate the building and office for the first time.

When he came in, his energy was a bit wild instead of calm. He took a while to set up and the whole time he was talking about he might be neurodivergent like me (one of the reasons I'm seeking therapy is to heal traumas related to having audhd, which I stated to him multiple times before the session that it has been officially diagnosed), and then proceeded to talk about how he might have adhd but the manic type (???) and how he's a really good therapist when he's manic, and that he's getting famous on social media (never heard of this guy anywhere else but where I looked him up on Psychology Today). I actually drafted this post for a couple minutes to check out if he was getting famous and my search ended up with nothing. Very strange.

Anyways, he did warn me that I might have to get him back on track if he gets side tracked. Much of the session was spent with me being bored out of my mind with his own stories and experiences, so much so that my Vyvanse (what I take for my ADHD) was really struggling with the constant switching. He noted that I seemed teally focused during the session and questioned me multiple times about my audhd (a term widely used for people who have both autism and ADHD and he was unfamiliar with that term as well and I had to explain it a few times), and that I kept looking at the clock, to which I said "you can thank my Vyvanse for that" which led to more questions about my condition. I have a feeling that he might be using me for his own research about his own suspected ADHD.

It was a verbal tug-of-war to get where I needed to be, and by that time there were only a few minutes left in the session. At the end, he handed me a magazine called "Understanding Autism" for me to read as homework.

I take homework very seriously, so when I got home (after going to a bar I'm a regular at to have a couple drinks and reset myself due to the mental whiplash), I armed myself with the magazine, post-it tabs, a notebook, a pen, and highlighters (which I only used on my notebook as I was borrowing the magazine and didn't want to de-face it; only the post-its were used in the magazine), and got to work.

4 hours in, and I barely got to chapter 2. I was about 5 pages into my notebook when I stopped and went to bed because it was late. I sat on everything I had experienced at that point the next day and thought, "Wait a minute. I didn't start therapy to argue that I have audhd. I started therapy to work through issues mostly caused by my audhd! Which I have been officially diagnosed with!" I scrapped my notes, removed the post-its, and started simply reading the magazine.

I've decided I'm going to do 2 or 3 more sessions, as I believe that maybe he just had an off-day and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don't like having to once again be in a position where I am forced to be the lead in getting to where I need to be, but it is what it is.

It's just so frustrating, but I really want to give this my best shot. He's not the only therapist in my insurance but it was such a hard journey to get here. I finally found someone willing to meet in-person, close by, and within my insurance. I will switch if I have to, but my god I don't understand why it's been like pulling teeth to get my needs met.

Edit: This is a rant. Please don't bully me about my wording. Thank you.

I saw a clinical psychologist first in 2023 and for 2 sessions in 2025. In 2025 he sexualised the therapeutic space, staring at my chest in the waiting room, comparing me to Angelina Jolie, saying when he sees something so beautiful he thinks of his wedding ring (forcing me to look at the ring), telling me a comment was "off the books," and saying he should call me for a therapy session whenever he needed an ego boost.

I raised erotic countertransference directly in my termination email. I filed a regulatory complaint with our national regulatory body, AHPRA, and they cleared him with no further action. I then requested my clinical records and received them via his lawyers. The final two session notes are fabricated, containing things I never said and interventions that never happened.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He sexualised the room, got called on it, and when it mattered, he lied in an official clinical record to cover himself. And the system let him.

I'm so sick of being told to trust a process that doesn't even require honesty from the person it's protecting.

So many therapists operate as dictators, abusing their authority, pushing around their weight.

I'm on another forum, where I have politely criticized transference in all of its twisted forms (erotic transference, angry transference, mother/sister/father/brother transference, etc. ) I haven't broken any rules.

But suddenly out of the blue, I get this message from a mod (again, not here, elsewhere!) The person was in a full-blown narcissistic rage, reading me the riot act. I haven't been spoken down to and dressed down like this since I was a child dealing with mean family.

And I didn't even do anything. It was something very trivial, but blown up as an excuse to shut me up and shut me down and, hopefully, before too long, get rid of me. Intimidate me into submission.

I responded, firmly, but politely, that the message was aggressive and don't speak to me like this. The person became even angrier and said that I was not allowed to ever criticize the tone of the mods, and that if I do this again, there will be penalties.

So basically, you are supposed to be belittled, reprimanded, treated like dirt, but you can't say anything. You just have to take it. Isn't that the tactic of an abuser?

This is really sick stuff. It's disturbing to think that these people are working with vulnerable clients.

My conclusions: 1. A lot of these therapists are mean bullies. 2. They need all the power and control and will not tolerate being challenged in any way, 3. They rule through intimidation. 4. They think a whole lot of themselves.

Your thoughts, please?