Note: This post is about a couple of aspects of the Jian Ghomeshi scandal that broke about two and a half weeks ago. If you don’t know about it, do some basic online research (there is no shortage of info) and then come back to the post. It will make more sense then.
1) “Why not just trust?”
If you’ve read the rest of this blog, you’ll know that my therapist was REALLY stuck on this idea that I should trust the guy I was (barely) dating, despite all the red flags I saw and my own considerable misgivings about him. This was also despite the therapist’s total lack of information about my relationship history or the guy, or anything really. It was just a kneejerk assumption on her part that because I didn’t trust one man, I must have trust issues across the board and that the correct way to deal with them was just to press on with this one guy. She had other options like, say, considering the possibility that I didn’t trust him for good reasons because, just maybe, he wasn’t actually a good guy.
As I’ve posted before, he did end up assaulting me.
When the Jian Ghomeshi story broke, especially the accounts of his vicious assaults against the women he dated, one of my first reactions was: HELLO YOU STUPID BITCH, HERE’S WHY YOU DON’T “JUST TRUST”. What the hell kind of social worker doesn’t know about date rape, intimate partner violence and so on? A really bad one! A really stupid one! What would she have told one of these women if they’d mentioned they had a date scheduled with a guy who was rumoured to be “weird about women”? Maybe it’s just rumours, maybe it’s an all-singing all-dancing chorus of red flags. They decided to “just trust”, like she advised me, and they got punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, forced into fellatio. Jesus Christ!
And as we’ve been hearing from many other women in the last fortnight, this shit happens ALL. THE. TIME. If we had the real numbers on it, I expect it would look like an epidemic. As it is, nearly EVERY woman has a story to tell about being sexually harassed or assaulted. Shit is fucked up and bullshit and women have truly excellent reasons not to “just trust” men.
2) Jian Ghomeshi has been seeing a psychologist weekly for years – why didn’t the psychologist notice something was amiss?
Before the scandal, Ghomeshi had talked openly about seeing a psychologist weekly for an anxiety disorder. Fair enough. Except that the therapy industry (and this includes psychologists) absolutely claims to have and prides itself on having special insight into people’s psyches, issues, problems, and yadda. Sure, you might start therapy wanting to talk about your divorce or whatever but the therapist knows that the real problem is really something else, something you may not even be aware of, but the therapist will dig it out regardless. So shouldn’t a therapist be able to detect when a client harbours big-time violent attitudes towards a group of people AND acts violently against them? Over a period of decades, apparently? There must have been times when Ghomeshi’s psychology appointments took place within mere days, mere hours even, of his having assaulted a woman. And yet the therapist didn’t pick up on it? Did they never talk about Ghomeshi’s dating life?
Ghomeshi probably lied about his dating life anyway, but isn’t a therapist supposed to be able to see through such lies? And since the physical safety of other human beings was at stake, maybe the therapist should have followed up somehow, done something?
My guess is there are at least two factors in play:
1) The therapist was a fucking moron and had no insight into anything.
2) The therapist certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize the income a steady client provides by probing in any way that makes the client uncomfortable. Ghomeshi’s attitudes towards women were probably discussed in a very superficial way, if they came up at all.
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In conclusion: Therapy is as bullshit as ever.
Thank you for having the courage and the gumption to blog about your experiences in therapy; although our experiences were disparate in the details and traumas experienced, I too found therapy, in the end, to be bullshit. And that’s putting it mildly.
Your articulate descriptions in all of their detail (and at times humorous) of the sham therapy you received, have no doubt made many of us therapy veterans sleep better at night…knowing that we are not alone and that out therapy “failures” were not of our own doing. At least not entirely.
I also found much solace in the book “In Session” by Denorah Lott. There should be a sequel!
We all have our stories, thank you for telling yours.
Thank you so much for this website. I too had a bad experience with therapy-the therapist went behind my back and lied about me. I can never trust any of those “psych” people again. Also, I know that they do not keep confidences like they are supposed to. A friend of mine is friends with a therapist who treated (this happened a few years ago) the wife of a major politician in my state. She was telling my friend everything the wife told her-including how cruel the politician was to her in private. Yes, that is awful-but it is not her right to tell other people. My friend told me spontaneously-but it was none of my business. Therapists are generally stupid, naïve people who give bad advice and are mostly nutty to boot.
Hello again: I remembered an article I saw in the newspaper once. It was about a research study done by psych doctors themselves, and it found that almost 25% of all people who do psychotherapy are damaged by it. At least they were honest in publishing their findings. There was a British psychiatrist (died a while ago) who thinks like we do, that most therapy is junk, there are only a few real mental disorders, he was very insightful and critical of the mental health field, and he caught hell for it. His name was Garth Woods. His book was “the myth of neurosis.” I don’t know if you have covered him here on your site, but thought I would mention it just in case you didn’t.
I haven’t heard of Garth Woods, so thank you for that contribution!
Psychopaths are adept at portraying themselves as nice, harmless people who have no ill intentions and at hiding their double lives. If they are found out, they have a tendency to pull a DARVO (Deny Accusations, Reverse Victim-Offender Order) and win pity and sympathy from others, including therapists.
Therapists, in turn, are usually so arrogant that they fool themselves into believing that they have near-clairvoyant powers of insight into every single human being they meet. They also believe in absurdly outdated speculative concepts such as Freud’s idea that all criminals secretly feel guilty about their actions and have a subconscious need to confess, so they will betray themselves in some way, or give off subtle cues that can be read.
When working with someone like Jian Ghomeshi, this is a toxic cocktail. It also leads to victim-blaming when a victim of the offender turns up in therapy and insists that s/he could not see the abuse coming. The victim gets told “You MUST have known…you MUST have known…either you were willfully blind because you are a needy, inferior person and wanted the abuser around or you are just really, really, really stupid.” Completely ignored is the offender’s extraordinary talent for deceit, because to admit that is to admit that anyone can deceive the therapist as well, perhaps lots of people, and that is too much for their egos to take.
Which leads to another scary thought: if you have been abused, and your abuser is/was seeing a therapist, how can you be sure that your therapist and the abuser’s therapist might not be *the same person*?
I still think Ghomeshi’s therapist fucked up.
Thank you for your blog. I left a scary session with my (now former) therapist that left me reeling. I felt totally gaslighted and confused by the whole thing. I’ve been frantically googling “my therapist keeps interrupting me” and “do I need therapy” since then. Its been validating to know that I am not crazy.
I just have to process this. Sorry for the rant.
I went in yesterday with the goal of telling my therapist for once since I started a year ago that I didn’t like the way she handled something in our last session. I told her I was disappointed in her response at two different times and realized I wanted her to tell me that I am perfectly normal instead of trying to re-route my anger or disappointment about a conflict into a new conversation about who this person reminds me of (the questioning technique). To my shock, she immediately deflected me and refused to accept that I had valid reasons for not liking this specific methodology. In fact, she made several statements that “we therapists ask questions to uncover…blah blah blah” and pulled rank over me – basically implying that every therapist does this and it is a good methodology and its up to me to accept it.
Things went down hill from there. She interrupted me to ask for examples of her questioning me this way, and I reminded her that I just gave her two examples from the last session. Then, she actually asked me why I did not raise the issue during the session instead of waiting two weeks. And I said “Because I was processing it at the time it happened! and for all I know you may have been right. You’re an authority figure, you ask me a question and I’m going to answer. But I processed it afterwards and I’m raising the issue now in the session immediately after, having realized I don’t like being interrupted that way” This segued into her “disappointment” that I didn’t have a session last week and waited for two weeks to bring it up. I had to remind her that she moved office last week, and I had told her 2 months ago that once she moved I would be coming every two weeks because the commute is longer for me during the work day. I was dumbfounded at the whole thing. She even told me that I should have tried to see her if I was upset by it so we could talk about it.
She actually tried to convince me that I was having trouble dealing with “the change” of her office move and that was why I raised the issue from last week now. It was so condescending I began to cry and I saw her smile. It felt like I was being confused with some other patient. This therapist was on maternity leave for 3 months and I worked with her schedule, did not worry and survived her reduced availability. Yet because she moved office four blocks away and I made the rational calculation that the extra minutes to walk there will tip me over the time I have for lunch at work, and if I were caught would make me look bad, I must have a problem dealing with “the change”?
I’m done with therapy. I’ve seen so many of them I lost count. I am tired of pathologizing myself and letting another person (whose life and values are closed off to me) speak into my life. I am tired of the dependency and the power struggles for submission. There was a moment when she was smiling with this condescending look, like she was saying “I know what you’re doing. I know all about you.” It scared the crap out of me, and I decided I should not trust someone who sees me that way. That’s how cults begin.
What happened to the above poster is very upsetting, and has happened to me countless times. The therapist essentially blames you for normal problems. Yes, you had ‘problems’ with the change: pragmatic, legitimate problems that anyone else would have. They are unable to recognize you as a full person. Your upset at this and at how satisfied they seem by your misery is just further proof, in their mind, of their initial thesis. You fall further and further into despair and they get more and more business and validation.
I consulted with many therapists over the years, and in retrospect, the most helpful think I could ever have heard would have been “there’s nothing wrong with you, you don’t need to worry about that”. Of course its not in their personal or financial interests to say anything of the kind.
In terms of the general point of this blog… it’s possible to both have trust issues and to run into someone whom you ought not to trust. The therapist should have taught you to be able to tell the difference between a good and bad person, not to trust blindly. It would be nice if it were possible to sue a therapist who tells you to “just trust”someone who winds up assaulting you.
One of my main conclusions about therapy is that if you have bad relationships you’ll just pick a therapist with the same issues, so, like, don’t bother. Happy and mature people don’t go into that profession as far as I can see.
Therapists, gurus, ministers, counselors, priests, lamas, yogis — you know more about yourself than all of ’em put together.
At least the poster of this blog is honest enough to admit to the fact that psychologists and other people involved in the therapy industry are completely full of shit, and cannot be trusted. Based on my personal experience, most people who see these quacks aka psychotherapists are people who committed a criminal offense, aka did something illegal, and they are forced by the corrupt criminal justice system to go seek consueling for “help”. The truth is nobody needs the help of these useless parasites in the mental health industry, and these people , unfortunate enough to break one of the countless bullshit laws that exist , become unfortunate victims aka customers of the mental health industry.