October 17, 2010
The therapist I had from the winter 2001 to May of 2005 was someone who, in addition to putting a lot of pressure on me to date men whom I didn’t feel comfortable with, used to tell me "Try to look for the positive” in any situation that I told her made me feel bad. She wasn’t at all interested in my thoughts or opinions about my own life or in what I felt to be the truth of my experiences; she twisted everything I told her to fit her view of the world and her beliefs about my capabilities.
There was one guy that I stayed with for a few months only because of her. The first time I ever went out with him, he displayed so much inappropriate anger toward one of his female roommates that I never wanted to see him again. I told my therapist that I wasn’t interested in him, but her response was what it always was when I told her about situations that didn’t feel right to me, which was that she thought I didn’t want good things to happen to me, that she thought I was always looking for what was wrong in a situation instead of what was right with it.
The same guy turned out to be a heavy drinker; I once showed up at his house on a Sunday afternoon and he told me that he’d had 18 beers to himself. He’d been drinking since the morning, and he insisted that the only reason that I thought he’d had a lot to drink was that I’d never drank or done any drugs at all in my life and so my perspective was off. When I told my therapist about the man’s drinking, she said “Maybe you can help him get into counseling, maybe you can suggest that he join AA,” as if anything in the life of this man whom I’d never wanted to date in the first place was my responsibility.
I took my furture seriously, so I had committed myself to doing what my therapist wanted me to do. It turned out that she had a lot of problems of her own.
I was finally able to break up with that boyfriend when my therapist went on vacation for 2 weeks and had someone else covering for her. I only needed one word of support to help me make a good decision, and I got it; I told the fill-in therapist what was going on and she said “The most important relationship in his life is with alcohol,” which had been obvious to me for a long time.
I think that what happened to me at 18 was that being in the hospital decimated all of my self-esteem. I had asked to be there but it didn’t at all turn out to be the experience I’d expected, and the experience I did have was one that I thought about every day for at least 10 years afterward. The first hospitalization was the worst one; none of the others that followed were close to being as terrifying or as emotionally painful, because the first one removed from me all sense of who I had been and left me with nothing but an inferiority complex and subsequently painful memories of what I saw as my former self. From then on, I thought that every time I had a feeling it meant I was mentally ill, and I was probably in the hospital another 8 times before I was 30.
There's a movie from years ago called "Ordinary People," and in it the psychiatrist questions that exact feeling of inferiority in his teenage client who's been in the hospital and is now trying to reconcile life before having been there with life after it. The psychiatrist says "What, you were great then and you're s--- now?"
Unfortunately, most of society reinforces the "you're s--- now" belief. When I was a late adolescent and trying to adjust to what for me had been a profoundly distressing experience of having been hospitalized, there was and still is so much stigma attached to having a psychiatric history that it made me vulnerable to ideas that were unhealthy, ideas that I’d never been vulnerable to before. As soon as I started to try to live with my label of mental illness, I immediately became driven by the idea that if I had a boyfriend it would mean that I was normal, it would mean that I would be restored to being an important member of society the way I thought I was when I graduated from high school with good grades and a lot of achievements for someone my age.
That idea wasn’t at all ameliorated by most of the counseling I got, which was focused on diagnosing and was mostly pointless, unhelpful, and harmful. I think that what I finally got out of trying a few different counselors, one for 8 years, one for 3 years, a few for 1 year here and there, was the understanding that it’s never a good idea to give the entire responsibility for any part of your life over to another person. Whether it’s your mental health, your finances or anything else that’s yours, you are the one who has to live with your decisions and learning how not to let people pressure you to live your life their way is not just a good idea, it’s a survival skill.
I also think that my years of counseling left me with the sometimes amusing, sometimes unfortunate, sometimes offensive habit of advising people about their personal lives whether or not they’re asking for my opinion. Automatically knowing when to mind my own business was one of the casualties of my quest for good mental health.
Copyright L. Kochman October 17, 2010
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October 19, 2010 @ 11:06 p.m.
What's happened in mental health care in the past 15 years has never happened before. The pharmaceutical industry has dominated psychiatry and psychology to the point that even otherwise ethical, intelligent people who enter those professions aren't learning how to help people deal with their problems and move on with their lives, those practicioners are being taught that diagnosing people as soon as they're born and telling them that they're going to be mentally ill for the rest of their lives is helpful and a good thing to do.
Even practitioners who don't like all the diagnosing and the medicating are so used to being in a system that promotes those things that they don't get used to dealing with people and can be ineffective even if they're not harmful.
I think it's probably the rare and lucky person these days who has a genuinely helpful, positive experience in counseling; most people who go to counseling now probably end up with far more and worse problems than they had before they went.
I don't think it has to be that way; there are still a few good counselors out there. I also don't think the profession has to stay or continue to be the way it's been since restrictions on how the pharmaceutical industry could market its products got lifted in the late 1990's and the industry started on its plan to medicate the world.
Copyright L. Kochman October 19, 2010
The therapist I had from the winter 2001 to May of 2005 was someone who, in addition to putting a lot of pressure on me to date men whom I didn’t feel comfortable with, used to tell me "Try to look for the positive” in any situation that I told her made me feel bad. She wasn’t at all interested in my thoughts or opinions about my own life or in what I felt to be the truth of my experiences; she twisted everything I told her to fit her view of the world and her beliefs about my capabilities.
There was one guy that I stayed with for a few months only because of her. The first time I ever went out with him, he displayed so much inappropriate anger toward one of his female roommates that I never wanted to see him again. I told my therapist that I wasn’t interested in him, but her response was what it always was when I told her about situations that didn’t feel right to me, which was that she thought I didn’t want good things to happen to me, that she thought I was always looking for what was wrong in a situation instead of what was right with it.
The same guy turned out to be a heavy drinker; I once showed up at his house on a Sunday afternoon and he told me that he’d had 18 beers to himself. He’d been drinking since the morning, and he insisted that the only reason that I thought he’d had a lot to drink was that I’d never drank or done any drugs at all in my life and so my perspective was off. When I told my therapist about the man’s drinking, she said “Maybe you can help him get into counseling, maybe you can suggest that he join AA,” as if anything in the life of this man whom I’d never wanted to date in the first place was my responsibility.
I took my furture seriously, so I had committed myself to doing what my therapist wanted me to do. It turned out that she had a lot of problems of her own.
I was finally able to break up with that boyfriend when my therapist went on vacation for 2 weeks and had someone else covering for her. I only needed one word of support to help me make a good decision, and I got it; I told the fill-in therapist what was going on and she said “The most important relationship in his life is with alcohol,” which had been obvious to me for a long time.
I think that what happened to me at 18 was that being in the hospital decimated all of my self-esteem. I had asked to be there but it didn’t at all turn out to be the experience I’d expected, and the experience I did have was one that I thought about every day for at least 10 years afterward. The first hospitalization was the worst one; none of the others that followed were close to being as terrifying or as emotionally painful, because the first one removed from me all sense of who I had been and left me with nothing but an inferiority complex and subsequently painful memories of what I saw as my former self. From then on, I thought that every time I had a feeling it meant I was mentally ill, and I was probably in the hospital another 8 times before I was 30.
There's a movie from years ago called "Ordinary People," and in it the psychiatrist questions that exact feeling of inferiority in his teenage client who's been in the hospital and is now trying to reconcile life before having been there with life after it. The psychiatrist says "What, you were great then and you're s--- now?"
Unfortunately, most of society reinforces the "you're s--- now" belief. When I was a late adolescent and trying to adjust to what for me had been a profoundly distressing experience of having been hospitalized, there was and still is so much stigma attached to having a psychiatric history that it made me vulnerable to ideas that were unhealthy, ideas that I’d never been vulnerable to before. As soon as I started to try to live with my label of mental illness, I immediately became driven by the idea that if I had a boyfriend it would mean that I was normal, it would mean that I would be restored to being an important member of society the way I thought I was when I graduated from high school with good grades and a lot of achievements for someone my age.
That idea wasn’t at all ameliorated by most of the counseling I got, which was focused on diagnosing and was mostly pointless, unhelpful, and harmful. I think that what I finally got out of trying a few different counselors, one for 8 years, one for 3 years, a few for 1 year here and there, was the understanding that it’s never a good idea to give the entire responsibility for any part of your life over to another person. Whether it’s your mental health, your finances or anything else that’s yours, you are the one who has to live with your decisions and learning how not to let people pressure you to live your life their way is not just a good idea, it’s a survival skill.
I also think that my years of counseling left me with the sometimes amusing, sometimes unfortunate, sometimes offensive habit of advising people about their personal lives whether or not they’re asking for my opinion. Automatically knowing when to mind my own business was one of the casualties of my quest for good mental health.
Copyright L. Kochman October 17, 2010
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October 19, 2010 @ 11:06 p.m.
What's happened in mental health care in the past 15 years has never happened before. The pharmaceutical industry has dominated psychiatry and psychology to the point that even otherwise ethical, intelligent people who enter those professions aren't learning how to help people deal with their problems and move on with their lives, those practicioners are being taught that diagnosing people as soon as they're born and telling them that they're going to be mentally ill for the rest of their lives is helpful and a good thing to do.
Even practitioners who don't like all the diagnosing and the medicating are so used to being in a system that promotes those things that they don't get used to dealing with people and can be ineffective even if they're not harmful.
I think it's probably the rare and lucky person these days who has a genuinely helpful, positive experience in counseling; most people who go to counseling now probably end up with far more and worse problems than they had before they went.
I don't think it has to be that way; there are still a few good counselors out there. I also don't think the profession has to stay or continue to be the way it's been since restrictions on how the pharmaceutical industry could market its products got lifted in the late 1990's and the industry started on its plan to medicate the world.
Copyright L. Kochman October 19, 2010