I was describing my insane in-laws for the record.
Was telling what I thought was a common story of my upbringing. She burst into tears.
Therapist here. I’ve had clients say this “I’m sure you hear this all the time” line to me before. It’s always a little surprising to me, because while, yes, we do hear a lot of the same type of traumatic stories, we’re trained to regard every single patient as unique. And that’s because they are. No one’s story is like any other’s. There may be similar elements, but they’re ultimately all very different due to the details. Just as you regard everyone you know as highly different, we see our patients the same way.
Don’t ever be afraid that your therapist sees you as “just another X-type person.” And if you get the sense they do, get a different therapist.
Honestly the only time I’ve said this it was a relief to know that the answer was yes, because while it sucks others are hurting it made me feel far less alone and obscure.
The suffering of others is very comforting.
One of my first sessions with my therapist, I said something that made them crack and go “WHAT”. They apologized almost immediately for losing their composure but I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Is it like correcting your kindergarten teacher, and being right?
When I used to smoke, I started bumping into this therapist in D.C. outside my building on a busy street downtown. She had actively tried to get on some Bachelor-esque reality show (it may have actually been The Bachelor). Eventually, she told me about the time she pissed in a boss’s coffee mug. Or my favorite: the time she did blood magic to prevent rain from ruining her and her friends’ beach weekend. She eventually said she needed to stop meeting me for smoke breaks, because she was dating someone, and if we kept it up, “she would take what she wanted.” Therapists, man. Definitely very stable.
…and that is how I quit smoking.
That’s probably the healthy mindset that leads to better relationships. If I’m being honest, I lean a bit more toward, “…good times, I should take up smoking again…”
Holy shit!
My therapist is a nice young mom, and I coincidentally know her dad a little bit and they’re nice people as far as I have seen. Maybe she has a closet full of medieval torture devices for all I know though.
Anyone that has gone to college with a psych major know that they’re not stable, that’s why they’re in the major. They’re either psychopaths trying to learn how to be better psychopaths or have issues.
Psychology was the most popular social science major at my university. It was considered the business degree but for decent folks, like a generic or liberal arts degree.
The idea that a psych major is unstable or unique in any way is absolutely foreign to me. There were a lot of white people, though.
I’ve never seen anyone take psych as a major like they did for a liberal arts degree. Maybe different schools do different things? I was definitely being too general and there are exceptions. There weren’t exceptions at my university in my personal experience, but you could have some.
Yeah my experience is the same as yours. Every one of the people I’ve met that studied psychology in university were either mentally lost, crazy, manipulative or a combination of those. But I’m from France and school is free here so there are a lot of people going to university just to try or because they have no idea what to do otherwise, the crowd might be different when you have to go in debt to study.
School isn’t free, but we do have a lot of students with rich parents. That might be the psychopath section of my experiences.
Yeah it’s honestly one of the most believable aspects of the Harley Quinn character
People aren’t even pretending to post memes anymore…
I await the “hurr durr everything’s a meme” comments.
Be the change you want to see grumpy person!
I had a psychiatrist tell me he’d keep seeing me weekly until he gets bored of me.
Unfortunately, the ethical implications of this would be troubling. Refunds would have the effect of reinforcing whatever the patient did that session. If doing or making up wild stuff is what gets you a free session, some people are going to realize that. If other patients catch wind of one person getting a refund, they may end up doing and saying wilder things, too. Patients’ best interests would take a backseat to the entertainment of the therapist, and that’s pretty messed up if you think about it.
Yeah, ethical therapy person gotta ruin the fun. Sorry guys. But there is potential in a refund model. It could go far if it’s used to reward positive things, like putting the most effort into working out an issue, or making the most personal growth over a period of time.
And double pay for lazy depressed people!
/sj
I actually did have a therapist offer to refund me once. I found her incredibly rude and she said things to me I found that were like negging and patronizing almost? I came away from each session feeling like she didn’t like me at all, and that we hadn’t done anything at all, like I was speaking into a void to someone who offered me exactly one piece of advice the whole time. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out if I just wasn’t getting something or was I just the asshole or what, and in the final session when I finally burst into tears because I felt so belittled and like she disliked me, I told her I could not continue with her because of this, that she had said almost NOTHING to me save for one sentence that I considered anything like therapy, and that I could not continue throwing a lot of money at this when I felt completely unsupported and unsafe, and I left. (Whether I was wrong or not we weren’t getting anywhere or jiving so there was no point). She left me a very patronizing voice mail where she snarkily apologized and offered to refund or refer me elsewhere. I did not return her call. Maybe it was a me problem, to this day I don’t know, but I had two therapists after that (one retired) and we got along just fine and made plenty of progress. I really don’t know. I am not going to not pay someone for their work regardless of what I think of the job they did as that’s not ethical, but that was several hundred dollars wasted.
I did have the faintest sense that the senior therapist in that practice didn’t think a lot of her either, as she walked into one of my sessions as we just had sat down to begin and said kind of coldly “May I talk to you?” to my therapist and they took off and talked for a bit, and she didn’t seem awfully happy when she returned (and she deducted that time from my session which amazed me). She isn’t there anymore according to their website. I really don’t know. I still feel awful when I think of her.
Just because people have a job, doesn’t mean they are good at that job.
For sure you need to have rapport with your therapist or it just isn’t gonna work. And sometimes people can just rub you the wrong way.
I’m sorry you had that experience, but glad that you continued trying and had better ones. There are definitely bad therapists, and more often it’s just a bad fit. The same way you’re not going to be friends with everyone, not every therapist can really work for you. It can take a few tries to find one that really clicks. I’ve met too many people who just gave up after one try, some after literally one session. Most were not anywhere near as bad as your experience. So give yourself a lot of credit that you kept trying even after that!
I wrote this out partially for anyone else who may be earlier in their mental health journey. If it’s not a good fit after a few sessions, you can ask for a referral or just stop and find someone else. A professional will not take offense. It’s pretty normal and an expected part of their job.
That’s terrible. That therapist needs therapy
Either would encourage lying. Therapy cannot happen if the client is not completely honest.
Besides that, it ignores how therapists get paid. Imagine if your boss just decided to refund a few hours of your time each week. Just take it right out of your paycheck, and hand it back. It’s fucked.
Rewarding people with the most positive behavior might still backfire, as the point of therapy (at least for me) was to stop comparing myself to others all the time. Even a small improvement for someone should be applauded, especially if you’re already struggling with the small things.
That’s a great point.
Not to mention the “most entertaining” part, like “your ex painted the DOG for revenge? Ahahah that’s wild, this goes in the list”
I briefly went to a therapist 30 years ago. Like many people who go, I was worried that they wouldn’t think I was actually depressed and wouldn’t give me anything or do anything for me. I needn’t have worried, as the guy hadn’t listened to me for more than two minutes before he said “we need to get you on Prozac.” He had me meet with their staff psychiatrist who turned out to be a 70-year-old Cuban. This guy just rambled for an hour without ever asking me any questions; at one point he actually said “back in Cuba, we had a lot of problems with the blacks - you call them n*****s here” which was pretty eye-opening (keep in mind this was a counseling service run by the state university I was attending at the time - and this was the 1990s, not the Jim Crow era). After I got my prescription I mentioned this comment to the therapist and he just rolled his eyes. It was obvious that they kept this guy around for his ability to prescribe drugs and for no other reason.
I didn’t know Hulk Hogan was a Therapist
When I was in therapy my therapist said she could write a paper on me. This was flattering but also hmmm.
my surgeon wanted me to donate my body for research. he retired before i died (we expected me to survive ten years something like thirty years ago) but there’s a small corpus of research out there on me. seven or eight papers from various doctors. it’s kinda weird.
he retired before i died
I had to read that twice, but yeah, it does make sense. :D
Yup, me too.
My sister in law was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine for surviving a massive overdose of malaria medication she was given by mistake. It was something like 20x what any human has ever survived.
Are you still alive?
some of me
I’m sorry for your loss
He’s been dead 20 years come October.
Wow, that’s actually really cool. Information from you is helping doctors further their understanding of the human body. You’re making a positive contribution to the world just by existing. That’s awesome.
The first time I saw a psychiatrist, she asked if she could hug me.
It was cool with me, so I accepted. She seemed truly moved, and although I can hypothesize as to why, but I don’t think I’ll ever actually know.
It does make me think I should write a book sometime.
Like she could have you bend over and she’d put a paper on your back and write on it?
Must be in therapy for self esteem problems.
whenever someone suggests therapy, i think about how little i already trust regular doctors and all the horror stories about therapists
You mistrust doctors because they’re not educated in psychology. The horror stories are 1. stories and 2. even the ones describing real events are flushed into your feed because they’re outrageous. Nobody will upvote a boring story about a therapist doing their job and slowly getting to the bottom of some hyper-specific unresolved issue some random person has.
I’ve cried at my psychologist place multiple times but each time was not because of her. It was welling up of deep, un-addressed feelings, or a sense of relief of some kind, or sometimes pure catharsis.
Sessions were often exhausting but because of being emotionally engaging and being about things that were deeply emotional to me. I apologized several times for becoming overwhelmed, feeling weird as a chubby grown man breaking down, but she always reassured in a way that made me feel safe, un-judged.
Her goal was always to help me work through last traumas and keep improving living on my own. And she helped tremendously.
There’s definitely some crap therapists out there, and some who are great at some things but terrible with others. Then there’s some who have studied thoroughly and keep up-to-date to help people, because even if it’s taxing for them, their passion is in helping people.
Don’t dismiss horror stories or the fear; dismissal isn’t helpful. Guiding instead with positives, with some good to help ease the fears, is far more helpful.
Probably you hear more of those stories because if you have a bad experience you tell everyone, while if you have a good one you don’t tell ot that much.
I had a good experience doing therapy. The psychologist was a professional that applied modern psychology techniques for my case and they worked within what’s expected.
I can’t believe the scientific community of Lemmy is unfamiliar with the literature behind therapy.
literature is boring, hearing crazy stories is more interesting ^That’s a joke please don’t downvote me too much^
laughs in Lacan.
Dude just made shit up, it’s a fever dream with three dollar words.
This would be a great setup for a dark comedy.
Or a straight-up horror film. Just think about the incentive this creates.
I’m probably the most introverted client mine has ever had.
You just go there to sit for an hour and then go home to wait for the bill to arrive too?
I arrive with two steam decks
Co-op Stardew Valley with the therapist for an hour a week
Is the hit new meme that therapists job is “fun”? Cuz thats lame.
At this point, when they ask, I reply with, “Have you seen The Bear? Season 1, Christmas Dinner? Let’s let that simmer.” 😜
Wasn’t that in S2? The only episode i’ve skipped 🙃
Fair point. The seasons I’ve watched kinda blur together. When I first started watching it, I barely made it through the first episode, but by halfway through ep2 or 3 later that week, I caught myself going full prey-animal: pulse racing, skin tingling, little hairs standing up, the works.
Let’s just say that all I care to recall about the Christmas episode is that it was a holiday dinner with his family, and something about seven fishes. 😅 I’m, of course, done watching the series. I know what happens after one opens a restaurant by the skin of your teeth while also cramming down an emotional Vesuvius, etc. I’m good.
