Upholding Your Therapeutic Standards

The question of “whose fault is it” is a big one for people who have had negative experiences in therapy. It must be some sort of human need, to find someone to blame when things don’t end up how we want them to – because this is a question that nags at us and seems to demand an answer, even when there is no answer.

It is entirely possible, even likely, that we might at one time or another end up with a therapist who is just terrible. They aren’t helpful, they don’t have the first clue how to be helpful, they think they know everything even though they’re wrong about almost all of it, they say things that are actually hurtful or damaging, they don’t believe in DID, they think we’re all malingering liars… basically, they don’t do a single thing that’s therapeutically beneficial to us.

Whose fault is this?

The problem is, it really isn’t anyone’s fault, because fault implies intention. Most terrible therapists don’t intend to be so terrible. But sometimes even good intentions can’t compensate for utter lack of knowledge, or an inflexible mind, or an inability to listen as well as we wish they would. Sometimes, even though they want to help, even though they insist that they know how to help, or that they are helping, or that they can help, even though they might go so far as to say that any failure in their helping ability is our fault and not theirs – sometimes they still can’t help.

This is not a matter of fault. However egregious the differences are, this is still just a case of therapeutic mismatch. However hard it might be to believe, there are other people in the world for whom this terrible therapist will actually be a good match. They just aren’t a good match for us.

So this is where the subject of last week’s post comes into play – the best and most certain way of protecting ourselves from wasting time or money on unhelpful therapy, or feeling hurt or damaged in any way by therapists who aren’t half as helpful as they think they are, is to listen to our own selves and nobody else when it comes to evaluating our therapy.

The one commonality I’ve heard when people discuss previous negative therapy situations is that they knew (felt, sensed) that things weren’t going right. They were hurt by the therapist, they felt like the therapy was stagnant, they felt like the approach wasn’t suited to them – people know when their therapy is not going well – but they don’t listen to themselves. And that’s the mistake that can leave us trapped in a negative situation.

It is not our fault if a therapist sucks. We didn’t make them bad at therapy, and it’s not our fault that their approach doesn’t work for us.

Fortunately for us, there are plenty of other therapists and other approaches we can try.

BUT – if we don’t listen to our own sense of what is or is not working for us, and we stay with a therapist even though it doesn’t feel right – or if our therapy is going well, but we allow some other person to argue us into believing negative things about our therapy contrary to our own experiences – then this is our problem, because we are ignoring what our own feelings and intuition are telling us in favor of what someone outside our self is telling us.

This is a tricky issue for most survivors, particularly for those of us with mind control backgrounds. After all, weren’t we specifically taught not to trust ourselves and not to listen to ourselves, and to accept wholeheartedly the words of someone outside our selves to dictate our every thought and action? Isn’t that what mind-control programming is? And isn’t that what we need to go to therapy to fix??

Yes, that is what mind-control programming is – but therapy can’t fix it for us. Therapy can help to fix it, but this is one of the many many things where our own effort is really the only thing that will or will not change the problem.

Nobody can teach us to think for ourselves. Not even therapy can teach us to think for ourselves. There’s no magic in the process, and nothing that can come to us from outside ourselves in making it happen.

Learning to think for ourselves is not something that we can learn by doing what someone else tells us to do. Even if that someone else is a therapist.

It’s something we learn on our own, through our own experimentation, taking the risk of listening to ourselves and doing what we think is right, or what we hope is right even when we’re abysmally unsure, and then seeing what happens.

And one of the ways that therapy can help you learn to think for yourself is for you to evaluate the progress of therapy and decide for yourself if it’s working or not.

Every single person who has gotten out of a genuinely negative therapy experience has obviously figured out at some point that the experience was negative – or else they would have nothing to talk about. And however that therapeutic relationship ended, they usually don’t need someone to explain to them how or why the experience was negative for them. They know it was bad, because they were there, and they experienced it for themselves.

If people “need” explanations before they can recognize how bad their therapy is, that is actually a red flag. If someone is providing you with information about your therapy or your therapist that resonates with your fears but does not resonate with your actual experience, this is a huge red flag. In these cases, it is much more likely that they are attempting to influence you for their own reasons than because they are trying to “open your eyes” for your benefit.

People in a genuinely bad situation know it’s bad – but again, the commonality between all the stories I’ve heard in this vein is that these people didn’t trust their own awareness that it was a bad situation for them.

They doubted themselves, they listened to other people with conflicting opinions, they were indecisive, they didn’t know what to do – so they just stayed, and stayed, and stayed.

And whose fault is this?

Well again, it’s not really anyone’s fault. We probably don’t intend to cause ourselves the kind of damage we’re causing ourselves by being indecisive. But it’s not the therapist’s fault either, if our indecision causes us to stay in a therapeutic relationship long past when we know it’s not doing us any good – and it’s certainly not the therapist’s fault if we stay even though we feel that it’s doing us harm.

I have heard a lot of opinions expressed about the therapists in these situations – and I’m not disagreeing with them entirely. I agree that it would be nice if all therapists could see and admit when they were in over their head, or if all therapists were good at their job, or if all therapists were good matches with all clients so that we didn’t have to make the effort of trying to find a good match and we could just settle in mindlessly with the first therapist we tried.

But therapists are only human – and holding them to a higher standard just because they’re therapists is not going to change the fact that we have to do the work of assessing their skills and capabilities and personalities to see how they match with what we need and what we want.

Having high standards is very noble, but human beings will invariably and inevitably disappoint them. That’s a fact of the human condition, and therapists are no exception to it.

It is idealistic and frankly naïve to imagine that therapists are or will ever be “better human beings” just because of their career choice. I mean seriously… therapists are just the same cross-section of humanity that can be found in any other profession, or any other group, or any other population. Good, bad, smart, stupid, good at what they do, bad at what they do, nice, grumpy, brusque, friendly, extroverted, introverted, and on and on and on… it’s all in there. So get real in your expectations!

You can have high standards – of course you can – but don’t assume that therapists (or anyone else) have the same high standards until they prove that they do. There is no protection in just believing or wishing or hoping that everyone will act the way you think they should.

Real protection, reliable and solid and effective protection, will only come when you enforce your own standards – by assessing how each individual meets or does not meet those standards, and then acting based on that.

Imagining that all therapists will or should meet your standards just because they’re therapists is an abdication of your own responsibility to keep yourself safe by doing the work required to ensure that the people in your world meet the standards you have. Your responsibility to yourself is to listen to yourself, to respect your own feelings and opinions, and to act in ways that are in keeping with who you want to be and where you want to go and who you want in your life along the way.

It is not a therapist’s job to meet your standards, uphold your standards, or enforce your standards. Finding a therapist who comes up to standard for you is your job.

So asking who is at fault in these situations is asking the wrong question.
If we get a bad therapist, it’s not our fault.
And if we stay with a bad therapist, it’s not our fault or their fault.
Having high standards is great, but to assume that having them is enough, and if therapists fail to live up to them then that makes it all their fault, is wrong.
Fault is a completely inappropriate concept to apply to this situation, and getting stuck on assigning blame is just not helpful.

The real question is, how long did it take us to listen to ourselves and act on what we knew was right for us? And if it took too long, why did it take so long? And how can we do better next time?

A bad therapist might not be able to do one other positive thing for us, but at the very least, they are the perfect opportunity to practice thinking for ourselves.