Therapy has helped me in myriad ways over the course of 29 years, which is exactly the disclaimer you would expect to read with a title like this. However, this essay’s real point is that therapists have assisted in my healing sometimes by being the exact opposite of helpful. Without further ado, here are eight stories of clueless therapist behavior:

 

The Therapist Who Accused Me of Being a Rapist

Way back in the fall of 1991, when I became an undergraduate advisor (UGA) in my senior year of college, we had to perform morality plays for the new students. The one I decided to do was about date rape, because it was the 90s, and everyone was recovering repressed memories, including me. Which was kind of suggested by my then therapist, only he was not quite right. That is a longer story for another time about being led down the wrong path.

In our first meeting, the director of our morality play, the sexual harassment therapist at the school, said out of the blue that contrary to what people think of rapists, their personalities were more like yours truly. Which was extremely odd, considering I wasn’t doing anything but sitting in a circle with about four women and one man.

Because I was young, I didn’t tell her to go fuck herself, but instead I agreed to play the part of the date raper. The rapee and I came up with a scenario where we were going to go from talking about Depty Dawg to rape. I still do not see how to bridge that gap; anyone who likes watching Depty Dawg is not a rapist.

Instead, in the performance, we said things after the background rape. I got to say, “No means yes,” and listen to the audience gasp in horror. The other guy got to play the hero, who said he “would kick his fucking ass.” Yay for black and white characters. In the end, we all stepped out of character, and I said, “No means no,” to help hammer the audience over the head with the moral. At this point, I wish I had also said, “I’m not a rapist, even if the director/therapist has basically accused me of being one, but playing a villain is great fun.”

 

Inventory and Judgment by a Life Coach during a Time of Grief

In late 2001, I had a friend who had acted as a kind of spiritual guide for about three years; I’d stopped working with him that way after beginning to date my now wife in September 2000. To reconnect, I made a lunch date to eat with him on December 30, 2001. He didn’t answer my phone calls that day, and I found out soon that he had died. Which is shitty enough.

But the story gets worse: Next Thanksgiving, one of his other acolytes told me that actually he had died from erotic self-asphyxiation. Did I need to know this? No. I told my life coach in our next session, who said, “Of course you chose someone like that.” She did not say: How horrible to learn this about your friend, how are you with this? It was so confusing, as if I were somehow to blame. Or was she reducing him to this one act?

To be honest, I had become a little weirded out by the gay porn around his apartment. Besides that, he had fake choked me when he got annoyed with me about something. It is  also true that my father’s abuser used to visit us regularly at our house. So, I unconsciously chose a person who indulged in harmful sexual behavior; was that her idea? A better thing to ask a client would be, What did you learn from him? Of course, that would be after listening to your client begin to work through his grief.

This was a huge betrayal and also a complete miss by the life coach. It took me years to consider working in that same spiritual system until I really came to understand the concept of people as messengers, not the message. The message can be great, while some percentage of the messengers will be basically sane people. And to be fair to the life coach, she was a life coach and not a therapist.

 

The Sudden Doubling of the Therapy Fee

I worked with a woman for almost four years who was extremely helpful to me with many issues, including losing my sister Margaret. At the same time, by later 2014, I was getting ready to move on, at least a little bit. I told her, at $45 an hour (intern’s fees, obviously), I wanted to start seeing her once every two weeks instead of once a week. Which I thought was a good, sane move. My wife and I were in couples’ therapy, also, and it was all therapy all the time, and I was sick of it.

I was shocked when she told me her fee was now $90. There was nowhere to go with this impasse; she wasn’t hearing how ridiculous I thought it was that she was just keeping her income the same. “You can make it happen,” she said, doing a classic therapist move and making this sudden fee increase about my ability to grow in earnings. At the same time, she wanted to start focusing on erotic transference, which I had mentioned months before. I was like, whatever, I think you’re attractive, but I am married, and fuck this.

 

The Couples’ Therapist Who Threatened to Kill Me

Overall, this woman is an excellent therapist in many ways. This may surprise you, given the title of this example. But she is. However, she once told me that she would kill me in my sleep if she were married to me. Which was odd, because the person I married, not her, was sitting right there. My wife did not defend me, and I believe I may have said, “Only if I didn’t kill you first.”

Over time, I began to sort this out: First, no proposal of marriage had been extended, and second, what was she trying to say about my marriage? After this, in my head, she was more allied with my wife. Yes, this therapist’s words may seem like the worst offense of all; however, this woman was a real person and less given to hiding behind the role, and in a way, I prefer dark emotional realities to doing weird shit like doubling your fee suddenly. I regret now that I didn’t ask her what she meant and explain how this statement skewed the therapeutic relationship.

 

The Disappearing Therapist

Around the time my youngest son was born in 2016, I had a therapist, another intern, whom I liked. His fee was a very palatable $14, and I saw him at a therapy school in Oakland, a beaten down place that will probably make a good haunted house in a few years, unless someone performs an exorcism of the ghosts of clients’ pasts. He was a hockey player and a cool guy, I thought, and it was a relief to work with a man again. But he was clear that he had been divorced recently, and after a few months, he said he would soon be moving back to the east coast. However, he kept promising to be available by phone as I transitioned to a new person. For free. I thought this was strange.

But then suddenly he was gone without warning. I found out that his beloved dog had died, and he had just taken off. No, he didn’t tell me this; someone else at the school did. I tried to call him once to say I was sorry about his dog, and I’d like to hear from him but that I understood. Still, I hoped he’d at least have the decency to call once. The truth is, he was making a bullshit promise not meant to be fulfilled, and I knew this.

 

“Captain on the Bridge”

On the recommendation of the couples’ therapist above, I tried out a career counselor. On the day we met, she let me into her office first. I was looking at both available chairs as valid choices, and then the energy got really weird. Obviously, the Captain sits in a certain seat. Ok, fine. During the session, she laughed and said I was someone easily overwhelmed. I saw a flash of meanness in her face. No thanks, Captain Janeway. However, she did give me good advice for building a writing career in that one session.

 

These Principles Are for You, Not Me

In Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap, he joyfully fires an employee for being a “time slacker” to his “time cop.” Listen to the audio by the author (beginning at 4:28:19) to hear the glee in his voice as he relives firing her for being late picking him up from the airport. I know, I wasn’t there, and maybe he was justifiably fed up, but the Hendricks way is to own your roles in relationships and inquire into them. Well shit, I guess not in this case. To be fair, though, their model has been extremely helpful to me over the years.

 

Falling Asleep

This one is not my experience, but it’s a shocking one: One of my sisters, way back in the 80s, saw a therapist who would fall asleep as my sister talked. Now, my sister is not a boring person. So, come on, have the integrity to admit to yourself and your client that you are not doing a good job.

 

Reflections

While these experiences really sucked when they happened, I learned some good lessons:

First, my experience of emotional neglect hasn’t been healed by therapists, and probably it never could be. You can’t replace a parent’s love with some paid adult who has their own life. Nor should you try to, realistically. Why does therapy even attempt to promise it could?

Second, why is a person motivated to help others in this way? There can be some motivations that are not about healing people. A therapist needs to work extra hard to remind their clients that they are also only a human and only a guide; one of my main problems in the above examples was thinking these people were somehow more evolved and capable of unconditional love. I can blame Catholicism for teaching me that priests are closer to God, but that is another article for another time. Therapy really is secular confession, and while therapists may have more of an intellectual understanding of humans, some of them are as safe as some priests.

Third, I can see I didn’t recognize when to challenge someone and held on too long in a few cases.

Fourth, a big problem is how to trust someone you know nothing about. I still enjoy therapy, but I don’t expect to trust anyone quickly.

Fifth, I have adopted some personal guidelines. These are rules that can be broken if necessary:

• Assume the therapist is crazier than you until proven otherwise.

• Don’t work with women any more.

• Let the relationship grow over time; I don’t need to go in there with a whole life story. That is not a good way to build relationships, anyway.

• Establish how much the therapist is available by phone between sessions.

• Fight back if they do or say some bullshit.

• Look for humility, a willingness to admit a mistake.

• Look for a willingness to love you over other things.

• If things get weird, it might not be you. If a therapist wants to kill you in your sleep and has joked about having control issues, maybe she has control issues.

• I am in charge of my own mental health, and I don’t need to obey the “only see me or do one kind of therapy at a time” rule.

• Beware of diagnostic fads: incest in the 1990s, ADD now. Everyone’s story is theirs and doesn’t fit into some category.

• There needs to be an underlying agreement for both client and therapist to grow in the relationship. The therapist needs to see the client as a teacher also, even if the therapist cannot share as much.

• Let go and move on when necessary. Sadly, some therapists are not interested in growing, and you can grow beyond them. Or you might be growing in different directions which don’t lead to working well together. Or relationships just reach an end for some unknown reason.

• Without actual love, the process does not work. Find someone who genuinely loves you; being Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t feel good.

• Find someone you genuinely love; letting a therapist be a real person feels and works far better than looking for a human god.

Finally, thank you for reading this. I hope it is helpful in some way because I question the wisdom of revealing all of this shit to both people I know and complete strangers. Thank you to all the therapists who have helped me over the years, as well as the ones who have helped me by not helping me.