Therapist Call Out

 I reached out to the therapist I saw Wednesday June 3 and the two preceding Wednesdays to ask why she berated me so harshly about trying to process abuse perpetrated by my aunt. When I did so, her tone changed from pleasant to nasty, and she lectured me to “stop living in the past!”

It was a one hour long session. The last 20 minutes of this session, I had kind of shut down so she started what she called a “clinical assessment” where she asked me basic questions. When I reached out to her yesterday asking her to clarify why she had gotten so ugly with me, she responded that no such conversation ever happened and that the entire session consisted only of the clinical assessment. Then she told me not to contact her again, because she knew that the assessment was only the last 20 minutes and that her shit parade over me was before that.

She is lying, and only I know that. Because of this, I will never again agree to process my past with a therapist unless the session is being screen recorded. I want to encourage others to always screen record your therapy sessions that are done over zoom, even if you trust your therapist. If any sort of verbal or emotional abuse happens, and you do not have proof, you cannot report it. You “can”, but it’s your word against theirs. They have the power to manipulate your diagnosis, because psychiatric diagnoses aren’t based on any physical, provable markers. If I was to report this interaction, all she needs to do is take a pen, scratch out my PTSD diagnosis and write another one which has delusional thinking as a symptom. Then tell the board, “See, she’s making it up.”  

And I’m not making it up. I will not be ready for therapy again for a long time, and if/when I am, the therapist HAS to be ok with being screen recorded. I have a hunch that 0% of them are ok with it, and that’s fine. That means I never have to go through another one of them and they lose my business. There is a lot of pressure out there to go to therapy, and any time in the past that I’ve said I didn’t want to go, I was pressured even more. 

Being told, “Just don’t focus on the past” is extremely dismissive and a thing people say when trying to get you to go to therapy, ironically. You’ll hear things like, “Don’t listen to people who just say forget about the past, process it in therapy!”  So this is a huge smack in the face. Never again. 

I have a screen recording app called “record it”. There are about 6 or 7 more of them in the app store, mostly free. I highly recommend screen recording these people. I should have this past Wednesday, and I will not ever go again unless I have permission to.