r/therapycritical

For a while I was going to bed very late, around 5 in the morning, and waking up at 2 in the afternoon. This alarmed my parents and led them to take me to therapy, where the psychologist recommended Cut off all the electricity to the house from 1 am to 6 am

So yes, you could say I'm under curfew; the power goes out every night, regardless of whether I have to finish a university assignment, which honestly bothers me so much that I can't sleep.

I literally lost an important file because of them, and instead of sending it now, I have to do it later.

Furthermore, this psychologist said things like "stop wasting time" to me aggressively while I was having a panic attack, and threatened to send me to a mental hospital if I didn't change within a month.

I'm so upset and angry that I can't even sleep; all I can do is hit my bed while screaming in frustration.

I'm currently processing some next-level traumatic shit that has fallen onto me at the moment.

If therapy shills see a person who keeps getting into messy relationships, or messy situations, they will look at them and go all condescending.

"Did you do the work? (tm) If not, oh, my sweet summer child, you have no idea how you are the only one responsible for your situation... because you keep choosing the wrong people!" (-> this person thinks they're right for you when they probably know jack shit about you at all)

"Healthy relationships don't have high highs and low lows! They are stable, loving, constant, supportive... look, my partner and I never argue, we always make time to communicate, we do check-ins..." blergh, first, uneventful relationships are uninteresting, and second, this isn't a fucking HR meeting, this is a human relationship, ffs those check-in things are artificial AF. Look at the globality of your life with your partner, don't make this into some weird Instagram thing...

"Oh, I'm so glad I'm out of this, I'm a strong independent woman, I'm single and proud, look at me, I don't chase, I attract, and I choose wisely who enters my life!" -> this person probably is such a pain to live with that nobody in their right mind would want to spend a month beside them anyway.

"You need to love yourself (tm), to be the main character of your own life, you need to take your power, to focus on yourself" -> it's not always about us, idiot. I'm not the main character. I'm the NARRATOR of my own life, and the point of view from which it's seen, but ultimately there's no real main character, as we are always co-creating stories with others. If anyone ends up as the main character first, not me please, I'm good being just the narrator, and second, they probably are a bit too self-absorbed anyway.

And other ones I'm lazy to discuss, but you know.

Not just that, but when I think back about being in a therapist's office, and how "they" have the knowledge, how they are supposed to help and guide you and they're "professional" at knowing better, it just feels like... yeah. Being talked down to. Being considered lesser.

In essence, it's just like religion. Interesting how we keep coming back to this parallel. Therapy is pretty much a secular religion now.

That was Amagi's post in the evening, thanks, good night.

After just two sessions, i think i want to change of therapist.

It's curious, because it's not that i felt abused or anything, in fact my current therapist it's always talking about how the system makes us sick, and that's great for a therapist!

The thing is that my sessions feel more like intellectual discussions, in which he monologues, and i sometimes vent about my toxic environment, instead of talking about the things i want to talk and fix.

Looking for alternatives, i feel so lost, and surrounded by CBT or similar, instead of the alternative focus this person offered me.

I don't know what to do!

Disclaimer : I am not talking about clinical consensus on diagnosis here in this post. This thread is more about public discourses and social change.

I've been thinking about how public discourses surrounding mental health now push us as a society to favor Therapeutic Ethics instead of legal and moral framework of ethics.

An argument by Martin (2006) that Therapy Culture (therapeutic ethics was the term he used), overtime, slowly psychologizing virtues and pathologizing vices. I started to reflect about the implication of 'mental healthiness' becoming a new virtue, since before therapeutic ethics gain dominance, we used to rely on sin system which is a spiritual economy (where sin and bad karma are a form of debt). The sin system worked for awhile in theocratic society. We went through a pretty big change after secular moral philosophy gain dominance.

I also think of a paper by Hallett (2025) when he proposed that legal process should made it clear that insanity defence should be valid only if a person clearly lack the ability to control himself, and other 3 criterias (such as lack of knowledge, and inability to reason, and so on).

We also have Thomas Szasz himself in 2011 criticizing insanity defence. Szasz thought that insanity defence take away the human dignity to be judged as a moral agent, and it take away a person to be taken accountable for their misbehaviors.

Although some might think of Szasz's argument here as ableism, I think it could also be anti-determinism. Szasz thought that we should not remove human agency from someone with a mental health diagnosis.

With more and more research trying to connect psychiatric diagnosis with genetics, it makes sense how more diagnosed people start to see how their behaviors and feelings are out of their control. This also extends how diagnosed individuals using the deterministic argument that their behaviors are outside of their control, and misbehaviors (in a case that there is some self-control) are to be categorized as the inevitable results of their diagnosis.

If you read to this point, yeah, I think this is an extension of insanity defence, but now it is also outside of courtroom, while the criteria gets less strict about agency.

Take for example, gossiping. In the sin system, gossiping is an unacceptable behavior. And now we get frustrated people feeling OK with destroying someone's reputation and livelihood while justifying it as a harmless venting, and some might argue that gossiping is a tool by the marginalized to fight authority (which is an ok Anthropological perspective), but a simple fact now is that Therapeutic Ethics might be more dominant in terms of moral claims that other form of ethics.

Take a case of Jason Arday, for example, which is highly politicized to the point that we couldn't possibly know the truth. There is this argument by a group of mental health professionals that claimed that Arday should be immuned to criticism of dishonesty since neurodivergent brains recall timeline and facts differently. While what happened to Arday by the hands of media outlets was truly terrible, to claim that factual integrity should not be expected from someone because they are neurodivergent, stretch the 'extended insanity defence' further. But if we are to look at the situation again without making an assumption based on this deterministic view, it might be rational to judge fairly and finding the truth about the plagiarism claim, and it might be easier to look at behaviors and facts without assuming underlying therapeutic causes.

I take this sort of argument seriously and think about them. What if we as a society is now stretching it too far? People are now more confused about accountability. The moment a criminal was revealved to be bullied, somehow, many would quickly feel sympathetic and express that the criminal in question are a passive victim of circumstances (again, this not to victim blame, but to highlight how misbehaviors and unethical behaviors could now be explained away by this framework).

Therapeutic Ethics also work against someone with a diagnosis who can control themselves (despite protecting those who 'have no control'). Let's say that Jane is in a bad mood 40% of the time she's at work, and she received a diagnosis that fit well with mood-related disorder. But if Jane has some self-control left, that same extended insanity defence effect would not be applicable on her. Jane might be labeled 'toxic' or 'mentally unhealthy' and so on.

Let's think of 3 scenarios for Jane here.

1. John takes Jane's diagnosis at face value and believe that Jane should be immuned to both criticism and demands for accountability.

2. James takes the moral route and think Jane still has self-control enough to be held accountable. James see Jane as an adult who can make her own choices, and Jane has a potential of improvement or to feel less suffering.

3. Jake takes Jane's diagnosis as a stigma. Even when Jane is in a good mood, Jake would assume her to be in a bad mood. Jake interprets Jane's normal human fallable acts as a sign of illness. But Jake thinks Jane should be immuned to both criticism and demands for accountability.

Out if these 3 scenarios, John and Jake might look at Jane through a lens of 'illness' where Jane's actions are outside of her control. James attitude sounds the most judgmental, but it is the only scenario where someone does think of Jane as a human being with agency, and some level of control over her life.

The tension I am facing after thinking on this topic, is how our culture wish to promote mental health as a right, but somehow, the attitude of Therapeutic Ethics itself has a tendency to make someone with a diagnosis believe they will not have agency (or less agency) over their own actions.

Therapeutic jargons are now inflated into everyday use of language. Trauma and abuse are now something almost every individual who are into Therapy Culture claimed to possess. And I think it escalated to the point that some experts even claim that "almost everyone carries unresolved trauma" (Gabor Mate, for example), while they fail to define the term in accurate ways, and trauma ended up being correlated with all sorts of physical conditions such as migraine, hypertension, and so on.

And I began to look at this with awe. Now it's a common belief that almost everyone has unresolved trauma. Now it's common to think of a person with diagnosis as someone who shouldn't be seen as a moral agent. And now we somehow buy into a culture of seeing ourselves as a passive victim of a pre-determined condition.

As much as experts try to maintain an apologetic stance by saying "many mental health conditions are normal human reactions" to combat stigma, there has been a real observable social change from the early 2000s to now in the 2020s, that slowly reduced the role of moral ethicsin favor of Therapeutic Ethics.

As the title suggested. The question here is "Are we replacing classic morality with therapeutic ethics?" and if we are, at what cost?

I’m trying to understand something about the therapy process rather than asking anyone to interpret my therapist specifically.

I’ve been discussing lack of support while dealing with a serious chronic illness. The examples I’ve brought up are situations where people had direct knowledge of what was happening: knowing I was hospitalized and not checking in, being physically present at an important medical appointment and falling asleep, or directly witnessing medical emergencies.

My therapist has twice asked whether people might underestimate what I’m going through because I present as strong, capable, and functional.

I understand that hypothesis in situations where someone doesn’t know how sick I am. What confuses me is its relevance when the person already had explicit knowledge or was physically present.

I explained that distinction the first time, so I was surprised when the same hypothesis came up in a later session.

My question for therapists is more general: when a therapist returns to the same hypothesis after a client has explained why they don’t think it fits, is that typically something the therapist is intentionally exploring? And is it appropriate for a client to ask directly what therap

I terminated with my therapist after a confusing and painful dynamic, and I’m looking for some outside perspective on how she handled things.
A while ago, I confessed to her that I had developed strong erotic transference toward her, and that I was also experiencing a lot of shame about my attraction to women in general. Instead of handling this clinically and helping me process it safely, a pattern of severe boundary violations started happening or at least I’m overthinking it?

Seeking Validation: When I told her my feelings were fading at one point, she laughed and asked, “you are not into me anymore?”

Romantic Hypotheticals: She told me that we couldn't be together because she is "older" and because “she was not my type” based on comments I made about how I would like a woman to be

Teasing Her Sexuality: When I shared my shame about liking women she was leaving suggestive comments that she could also be bi or lesbian

Using Guilt to Keep Me: I tried to terminate once, but she guilted me into staying by saying "therapists are human too and get attached" and telling me how sad she was that I wanted to leave. After that, therapy completely devolved into a confusing "friendship."

When I decided to terminate she accepted but did not offer a final session.

After 4 months I have stared thinking about her less, but I am still cycling through a lot of grief, bargaining, and self-doubt. I find myself wondering if she's thinking of me, or if I could have just "contained" my feelings better to save the relationship.

Has anyone else dealt with a therapist who used your transference to feed their own ego? How did you untangle the confusion and rebuild trust in your own intuition?

self produced ug rap about the mental health industry and moving through trauma

hello lesbians, i (23F) went back to therapy after a long time and decided to finally open up about my sexuality to my therapist (i live in a country where it’s illegal to be gay, and the sentencing for that is 7 years in prison iykyk )
my therapist is generally a kind man, he follows a developmental approach in therapy,
he told me that gay guys come to him all the time and it’s “manageable”
and then he told me about how one of his gay client got married to a woman cuz he wanted kids eventually in his lifetime even tho he’s not sexually attracted to women at all ,
he asked me if “i am willing to get fixed or not?”
i told him i don’t think that’s possible, i will live a lie , i only have had sex w women, only dated women and only imagine being with women , even though my reality does not make that quite feasible, he pitched the idea of me marrying a man w no sex drive as a solution?
he asked me if i am ever planning to have kids , my answer is “no”, he asked if i ever imagined myself as a mother, my genuine answer was “i already raised my younger siblings by myself i know i don’t want kids, i”ll never be what they need”
idk but i left the session feeling very confused ,
ik i can trust him cuz he promised me that it’s a safe space, but at the same time i feel like i am in conversion therapy lowkey, he did say that my sexuality is not “typical” i felt hurt…i feel like he saw me as some sort of leper…i did ask him if that changed the way he sees me as a person, his answer was no
i am eventually going to leave the country to study abroad but until then i am just working odd jobs and saving money so i can get out,
idk if someone went through something similar? i would love to know how you got through that experience because it feels isolating , i am currently single, my ex gf cheated on me and i blocked her, so i literally have no one to talk to about this

Expect your therapist to laugh behind your back.

I went back to the mental health clinic today for an intake. Conclusion: I don't need treatment and don't fit their criteria.

Over coffee, we joked around a little. It was very calm and casual. At one point, he said, “You wouldn't believe how many people tell the same story over and over again.”

I laughed too. I recognized my former self in that oversharing. I was once one of the people we were laughing about.

Seeing it from the other side made me realize how ridiculous the therapeutic dynamic can be.

Never forget the power imbalance.

It wasn't like this 10 or 20 years ago. The number of people I know being prompted by therapists to cut off loved ones (instead of expressing their standards and needs, building skills) is really sad. Even worse, I'm seeing especially young people feeling like they can only talk about the heavy sh1t with a therapist. Keeping friendships superficial and light.

I'm really grossed out by this. Although my experiences with therapy were never cannibalistic like this, I am hesitant to ever go again.

Apparently if I “think positively and put good energy into the world,” I can fix all my health issues.

Looking forward to all the money I save on medications, I guess.

This woman has a license and a degree too, and supposedly practiced “evidence-based“ CBT and DBT.

hello, 40/m here. i have mold toxicity and basically its thrown all my life problems front and center, also has given me depression/anhedonia. im wondering if therapy has worked for you and would really like some first hand stories on how it helped you

I had a really upsetting session with my therapist today and I’m wondering if her response was normal. I’ve been seeing her for about 6 months. I’m 23 and she’s in her 50s. Recently, she made several comments about a medication that made me feel pressured and invalidated. Today I finally tried to bring it up and told her that a couple of things she had said over the past two months had bothered me.

Before I could even fully explain myself, she immediately got defensive and her tone seemed angry. She immediately said, “I NEVER said that, I don’t know what you are talking about. I NEVER invalidated you.” She laughed at me and right after said “you are projecting right now.” She scoffed and said “that might be YOURRR interpretation of things, but you are definitely misremembering because that is not what happened and that is not what was said”. She also said “I’m sorry IF you felt that way, but I feel very disappointed, I have been trying to help you this entire time, I don’t know where this is coming from, but it seems like you are trying to blame someone”. She said all of this at once 😭

I was honestly shocked and became so uncomfortable that I went into damage-control mode. I reassured her that I wasn’t blaming her, apologized, and even denied feeling pressured even though I actually had. I just wanted the conflict to stop.

Then near the end of the SAME conversation, she brought up one of the comments again and asked what she had said. I repeated it, and she responded, “Yes, I did say that.” That really threw me off because earlier she had insisted she never said it, told me I was projecting and misremembering, and laughed/scoffed at me. I had only brought up a few of the comments that bothered me, and after seeing her reaction I can’t even imagine bringing up the rest.

She is my first outpatient therapist, so I genuinely don’t know what is considered normal in therapy. Is this an appropriate way for a therapist to respond when a client tells them something they said felt invalidating? Are you not supposed to tell a therapist if something they said bothered you?

She threatened me with the police after i made a subject access request for data about me she claimed existed during a complaint I made, so I asked for it (claimed she made a referral for me - which I was not aware of). She also threatened to open a harassment case over me sending a SAR and said the case would include all contact with her regulator.

Data requests are a legal statutory right, and I asked for data - not making other remarks or threats etc. of the kind (and never have done) and everyone has a right to raise concerns with a regulatory body. I made the complaint in response to the harm I experienced.

I made a data request to the police to see if anything was recorded, and it was: a report for harassment that was closed (under a code that means she didn't/couldn't support her claims) with the dates she included were the exact dates I sent a SAR and the day she received an email from her regulator notifying her of a complaint.

When I told her regulator about this and raised it as retaliation and intimidation, they ignored everything and literally said it's not in their remit.

In the first complaint she also made risk claims that were not backed up by any evidence. They literally just took her at her word. I'd heard stories of people saying that when they complained, their therapist pathologised them and made up stories about them being a risk to others etc. but I always thought it was rare in reality, or that regulators in this day and age would be more savvy to checking those kinds of claims... and yet it's happened to me. They don't need evidence, they just need to make false claims and that's enough.

Therapy regulation is so fucked and non-existent. If therapists are allowed to report clients to the police for asking for personal data and contacting their regulators, what else can they do?

It feels genuinely tormenting that it was taken this far. It's brought my trauma and the trauma of not being believed right to the forefront. Nothing I did was in bad faith but now my view of therapists is so deeply damaged.

In our culture now, the second you say someone negative about therapy, the cultural western narrative assumes you're just projecting your issues, or refusing to deal with your problems. I was never one of those people who 'didn't believe' in therapy or dismissed it without trying, but now when people mention therapy and how great it is I get a visceral, isolating response and I can't even share it. It's just because I feel genuinely traumatised and scarred by therapy and it seems like there's no kind of established support group for this.

​

I need to RANT.

(TW abuse)

What's important for this story is that my kids & I went through a horrible tragedy in April of 2023, that left my kids fatherless ( no sorry needed. He was a POS)

Since then everyone is in therapy. My middle child, Ashalia (m2F age 7) has done play therapy from 4 to 5 and regular therapy when she was 6 until now. The therapist she had was great with her, helped with her moods and anti-social behaviors and gave me strategies to use when she would get difficult and destructive.

Then out of nowhere dude leaves the practice and it takes a month for us to be scheduled with someone new.

The whole situation sets off Ashalia's abandonment issues. She was 4 when her father died and to her understanding of events, her dad never said anything, never left a note, or a toy, just one day they are happy and playing together and the next day there's a bunch of police in the house and her dad is gone.

So during the between therapists time she is just ramping up negative behaviors. She ran away from school, she was hitting people, spitting, she licked hand sanitizer, it was bad.

We get in and start seeing this new therapist Jaxon. I didn't really like him off the bat. I have autism though and I was willing to give it time for me to be more comfortable around someone new. My biggest problem was that Jax did not maintain boundaries with Ashalia. For example, Ashalia was talking and Jax says, "I'll let you finish talking about Pokémon but then I need to talk to your mom." Ashalia does the normal 7 year old infinite run on sentence and is just talking. She's moved well past Pokémon and has been on other things for a while. At first I'm just watching like, "how is this person going to handle this?" But after like 5 minutes I decided to jump in.

I said "hey, just so you know, Ashalia really needs for boundaries to be enforced. You set a boundary and she has exceeded it."

Jax said something along the lines of "I'm very patient. Things that might annoy other people don't annoy me."

I tried to re-state that it's not about patience, it's about teaching Ashalia that boundaries exist and she needs to observe them.

In the same session, they went to get a toy from outside of the office and my daughter, who at this point has known this man for all of 20 minutes, grabs Jax's hand to walk out of the office. Jax just shrugged and said okay.

Like !@$&\* are you actually kidding me right now. You get a client that has had trauma and abandonment and boundary breaking as their biggest hurdles and the mom even SPECIFICALLY TELLS YOU that you need to be setting -- and maintaining-- boundaries with her and you're just okay with her grabbing your hand? Not a thought in your head of saying to this vulnerable child like, I don't know, "hey buddy can you ask me if you can hold my hand first?"

So, I already don't like this guy, but like I said, I'm willing to give him a fair chance. At week 3 appointment I already know I need to miss week 4 because I needed an emergency dr appointment. So I asked my wife to come with me so I could show her where the office is & etc. The session was mostly Ashalia & Jax talking and me n wifey chilling in the waiting room.

That week Ashalia had a REALLY bad night. She refused to go to bed and when she got to her "if you don't go to bed by the time I count to 3 I'll pick you up and put you there." warning she screamed at the top of her lungs and ran away. My wife picked her up and carried her like a sack of potatoes to her room. During this 2 minute walk Ashalia scratched, bit, pulled hair, kicked, grabbed my wife's breast and twisted it, and screamed. A few minutes later, as my wife was carrying the baby to put him to bed, Ashalia ran out of her room and punched my wife in the stomach.

When she gets like this, she will not stop until she is stopped and we put the baby lock on her door for the night. This was intended to give her a consequence for her behavior and to keep her (and the rest of the house) safe.

The next session Ashalia complained about the baby lock on her door. A day later I get a call from Jax wanting to talk to me about my "extreme parenting methods." So I spend the next god forsaken hour explaining to this man, who has known my child for a grand total of 4 fucking hours, that the baby lock is used:

\* during the night -- when adults with fully developed brains are sleeping.

\* when she has broken too many bed time rules

\* when she has done something dangerous during the night

\* when she is actively harming other members of the house

I even agreed to meet with this man and my wife to talk about alternative methods for parenting Ashalia.

The next day I got a call and emergency visit from CPS. Now, they can't tell you who made the report but they can give you the wording of it. As soon as I heard about the baby lock complaint, I knew it was Jax that made the call. In and of itself it still would have felt really underhanded especially since I was trying to work with the guy to find better solutions. But dude started his report with mentioning the trauma our family went through in April of 2023. Trauma that my older daughter was subjected to. Because of Ashalia's age and slow speech development at the time of her father's death, I may never know if Ashalia also suffered the same abuse my older daughter did but her behavior strongly suggest that she did. However in Jaxon's report to CPS he asserted that Ashalia was a victim of the specific type of abuse my POS late husband subjected my older daughter to before explaining the child lock situation.

The CPS worker essentially told me that the bit about the baby lock wasn't a concern especially because it was already noted in Ashalia's file as a remediation step for him getting out of the house about a month after his father died. But that the first part of the report-- the part that had been almost 3 years ago-- legally had to be investigated within 24 hours.

I called the office where Jax works and filed an ethics complaint. Saying that the visit from CPS re-traumatized me. And that his report was wholey inappropriate and unethical. The supervisor I spoke with kept trying to say that Jax didn't mean any harm and was just trying to do what he thought was the right thing. Now, I am normally very conflict avoident. If someone even sneazes in a way that makes me think they are mad at me I go hide. But, this was about my kid and I shut that shit down fast. I just answered that if that was the case, he would have just put his concern in the report. Instead he started the report with things that happened years ago to weaponize the system against me and make his point for him.

About a week later, I texted the supervisor dude to tell him that during a 10 minute stretch where Ashalia was not being directly supervised, ( I was out feeding the chickens) she managed to remove the lightbulbs from the ceiling fan in her room, put them in her pillow case, and put the case in the sink and fill it with water to "make electricity." 🙄 Ashalia wasn't angry or trying to be trouble-some, this was just a normal day for her. I used it as an example of why it can be dangerous to let Ashalia exist unsupervised.

Supervisor dude calls me and says that his company doesn't think that they have the capabilities to give my daughter the help she needs so they will help me find a better fit for my family but they are going to drop my daughter as a client.

I am so unspeakably angry, and sad. Yet again my child is abandoned by a adult male role model. She was doing so well with her previous therapist. I tried so hard to emphasize that her behavior, while it can be destructive and dangerous, is manageable whith the strategies we have. I made sure to let everyone know that I am willing to work with them, that we are a team with the common goal of helping my child. Her previous therapist understood this and helped me form the strategies that work for Ashalia now.

Was I over reacting to the situation? Did my anger ruin things for my daughter? What should I have done differently? What can I do now?

I had my first therapy session with a new therapist. In my submission to schedule a session I mentioned gender issues and possibly gender dysphoria but that I do not want to explore gender and would rather go through other avenues such as coping strategies and other forms of self care as well as other explorations.

I was talking about my relationship with my parents and issues with my dad and in the end of the call she said in the next sessions and when I'm comfortable she would like to do a existential approach to my identity and my questioning and etc.

This is not what I asked for in my submission statement. This is not what I want. Are all therapists just going to force something on me which I don't want to explore and would rather find coping strategies? This is my 3rd attempt at finding a good therapist.

I don't want to explore my gender identity, I don't want to be told what to do or manipulated into exploring something I don't want to explore.

Are all therapists just going to keep trying the same bullshit I did not ask for? Is there no other model? I'm honestly about to give up on therapy if therapists won't do what I fucking ask them to do. I don't care about my gender identity and I don't want to explore it. I just want to feel better. Is that so hard to understand? It feels like talking to priests who want to tell me what is sinfull and what is not.

Therapy is so fucking useless. I just spent 45 minutes telling this person I don't know what to talk about. This is what I have to spend $30 a week for just to have someone "official" see me as depressed just so I can apply eventually for disability because I wanna end my life? Really?

This shit is such a joke and just makes me wanna leave faster. I swear to god the only thing keeping me alive right now are a handful of video games.

I will preface this by saying... I'm not sure I would align with being therapy critical, as having certain therapists at certain times in my life have proved to be extremely helpful and I've overall made a TON of important strides in therapy. Also, I've noticed a lot of ppl on this subreddit advocate using chatgpt and stuff & I rly don't resonate with that.

I won't go into the nitty gritty of everything I've had going on my entire life but basically I've had ongoing struggles with cptsd. I used to have a substance use disorder too but that has been in remission & stabilized to a point that I have zero cravings and don't even entertain the idea of drinking because honestly it seems boring and not like "me" anymore.

So, for the past year and a half I've been seeing a therapist that's been helping me, like, feel my feelings and building a window of tolerance for experiencing emotions and bodily sensations. Basically she uses a mixture of mindfulness, IFS, and somatic experiencing mixed w some trauma informed CBT. And like... in theory that sounds great but...

For some reason I just have the ick.

I feel judged. I feel like a lot of my thoughts are dismissed as "stories". When I tell her I'm bored in session she says "what's wrong with boredom?" And says stuff about me having preferred and non-preferred experiences. And asking me about how I feel in my body is starting to feel intrusive. I feel she has this righteous way about her where her opinions and beliefs become the more real reality. I can't put my finger on it but I'm feeling really disconnected and that I don't like her.

She helped me a lot at first but now I feel like we've hit a wall where I can now predict almost everything she's going to say or ask me to do. There are no plans or goals. There's no interesting stimulation or curiosity for me anymore. I feel like if I brought this up there'd be pushback and I would feel dismissed, which has unfortunately become a painfully common experience in my life. But I don't know if I am just projecting onto her, because lately I am going thru a transition, kinda sad, and I don't feel particularly safe with people on the whole.

Oh and one last thing is that... sometimes she uses sarcasm and jokes that I don't understand which drives me crazy bc also I AM AUTISTIC AND DON'T GET IT lmao 🤪 ok so idk what I'm looking for here other than maybe to vent or ask for guidance? I have also been looking at other therapist profiles to see if there are any modalities that seem new to me or helpful. I've been in therapy for a lot of my life and want some agency now that I'm stable and feel more healed and have found a lot of my voice.