Mary S

That definition of "warm" seems OK with me, but my impression is that what a lot of therapists seem to consider "empathizing" doesn't seem like showing accurate empathy to me -- for example, a lot of them seem to consider saying "You feel X" to be empathizing, but for me it's quite the opposite of accurate empathy when someone says that to me -- to me, it's inconsiderate, "in my face" behavior.. But perhaps you don't consider "You feel X" applied as a rule to be properly empathizing?

Oops -- title of thread should be "Therapist Qualities," not "Therapust". But I kinda like "therapust " -- perhaps a kind of Freudian slip? Kinda like a cross with "pustule"??

I've often heard it said that a good therapist should be a warm person. Trouble is, I don't go around thinking of people in terms of whether or not they are warm. Looking in a dictionary, or even a book of synonyms, hasn't been helpful, because "warm" as a personality characteristic is just one of many meanings of the word. When I've looked it up on the web, I've gotten links to sites saying things like "How to be charismatic" -- and charismatic is definitely not a characteristic I'd like in a therapist. But today, I tried again, and found this site, which gives the following definitions of "warm" and "moral" I'd sure choose the latter over the former -- and the article reports on a study that concluded that most people agree. My conclusion: The people who advise therapy clients to look for a "warm" therapist are giving poor advice. Possibly they are people who consider themselves "warm" and put that characteristic over being "moral"?

I think that this is an example of therapists focusing on "guild ethics" rather than "professional ethics". (See http://therapytheclientside.invisionzone.com/search/?q=guild)

I have some comments on this part of the article: "Another strategy you suggest to keep clients engaged is to have them play a role in choosing the type of treatment they will get. Why is this important and what are the challenges to putting it into practice? Swift: This is part of building collaboration with clients. Part of the clinician's job is to give the client the information so he or she can offer an informed opinion. It's not about giving clients what they want. It's about helping them feel they have a voice in that decision-making process. It can be strange for clients to offer their preferences if they are used to just doing what a health professional says. But the more that we can get them to play that bigger role, the more invested they will be in the treatment." This sounds patronizing and arrogant to me. I'd say that clients have a right to play a major role in choosing their treatment -- specifically, I believe clients have a right to be given information about possible treatments, plus the advantages and drawbacks of each possibility, in order that they (the client, not the therapist) can make an informed decision about what treatment to choose. This is what in the health professions is called "shared decision making", and I think it is becoming more common in medicine. So clients may in fact not be "used to just doing what a health professional says." Calling having clients "play a role in choosing the treatment they will get" a "strategy .. to keep clients engaged" misses the point that clients have a right to informed consent. It's not about "helping them feel they have a voice in that decision-making process"; that also misses the point that this ethically is their right.

Welcome, Iggy.

Oh, yes -- my worst therapist once said, "Consider me to be something like a computer: what you say goes in, mixes around with my training and experience, and out comes a response!". I was speechless. Her comment was in response to my asking her a question that could also be phrased in terms of a computer metaphor: my question was like asking for details about the program that the computer was running. So her response also showed that her understanding of computers was far less than my non-expert but basic-literacy understanding of how they work. Based on this and other experience with therapists, I have to agree with your comment "The mental health system seems built on a foundation of whim and impulse masquerading as science and fact." In trying to think of a word to describe this, I looked up charlatan, and got the definition "a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill; a fraud." Sadly, that does seem to describe it, at least for many therapists -- some more than others. But I suspect many of them don't realize that they are charlatans -- they are just super overconfident. But for some of them, the problems seems that they are too trusting, too easily convinced, perhaps gullible -- e.g., the problems with replication come from believing poor quality science, out of ignorance of what high quality science is. And I was very gullible when I first tried therapy; I didn't know how to deal with the contradiction between what the therapists did and my understanding of science. I gave them too much benefit of the doubt, and discounted my own ability to evaluate their competence.

Yesterday morning I heard a couple of things on the radio concerning sexual abuse that discuss problems that have parallels in the problems of bad/counterproductive/abusive therapy. I’ll discuss these in different threads. One was an interview with an activist nun (Simone Campbell), discussing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She summarized Pope Francis’s comments that clericalism is “the righteousness on the part of the ordained clergy, that they were always right, that protected them as opposed to caring for kids or for the others who were abused by the clerics.” When asked if admitting women into the clergy would help solve the problems, she said, “Well, I actually am kind of worried about that. I mean, unless we change the system - if you just made us cardinals or bishops in the same system, we'd probably get as arrogant as they are. This is what we have to change - the culture of arrogance.” Both of these concepts do seem to apply well to the problems with therapy. But imagine a therapist saying the things about therapy that Sister Simone said!

Welcome.

Adam, In case you haven't seen it already, Finally Angry's comment http://therapytheclientside.invisionzone.com/topic/147-gender-imbalance-with-therapytherapists/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-2861 and some of the follow-up comments get into another big type of mistake therapists make.

There have been some responses to the comment I posted on the website listed above. One of them said, "...Now that you have stopped volunteering for abuse ...", and another person commented to the effect that that was an inappropriate thing to say. So there are still some baddies out there, but at least some therapists who have some sense of common decency.

Finally! Some therapists are recognizing the importance of acknowledging mistakes, apologizing for them, learning from them, and obtaining permission before engaging in interventions. http://www.nicabm.com/why-practitioners-need-to-talk-about-mistakes/ It's about time --- since these are considered basic professional responsibilities in most professions!

I think there is to be a third phase before they are done. Then I guess it's a matter of figuring out where/how to publish the results.

I would say this slightly differently, namely: that one important use of the chart can be to help the client communicate to the therapist when the therapist is "pushing" the client out of the client's Window of Tolerance. This is included in the following comment I just submitted to the website: "Here are my reactions (as a client who has had counterproductive therapy) to the Window of Tolerance graphic: First reaction: This is a good idea! Second reaction: But it’s just saying the obvious (from my client perspective), so it could be patronizing for the therapist to introduce it to the client as a way of “explaining” something. Third reaction: But I can see how it could be very good for facilitating communication between client and therapist. For example, if a therapist does something that is outside my window of tolerance, the graphic could help me try to communicate that to the therapist (e.g., by saying, “What you just said is outside my window of tolerance and in my [specify which] zone.” Fourth reaction: But I find it hard to imagine any of the therapists I’ve tried adopting this graphic. One problem I’ve found repeatedly with therapists is that I think in “shades of gray”, while they seem to think in “black and white” terms. And I’m very visually/spatially oriented in my thinking, whereas therapists so often seem to be not just “word-bound” but often “label-bound”. But the graphic requires both the “shades of gray” and “visual/spatial” types of thinking. Final conclusions: 1. This graphic can be a good “tool” for communication in therapy– but the therapist needs to be willing and able to use (or at least respect) the “shades of gray” and visual/spatial thinking that the tool requires. 2. So for some (maybe even many?) therapists, teaching the therapist to respect and use these types of thinking needs to be an important part of their training."

I just came across this: http://www.nicabm.com/trauma-how-to-help-your-clients-understand-their-window-of-tolerance/#comments. It at first seemed good, but then started to seem obvious. But sometimes it can be good to state what seems obvious (but sometimes htat isn't a good thing to do.) Just curious what others think of it -- does this seem useful? Or potentially useful?

I believe the survey above is no longer active -- they have looked at the results obtained by the close date, and sent out the second survey to respondents of the second survey. (The second survey asks respondents to rate the importance of the adverse effects of therapy reported in the first survey.)

Welcome. I'm so sorry that you had a damaging therapy experience. I hope this forum is indeed helpful for you (as it has been for me -- I'm not perfectly over my harmful therapy experiences, and probably never will be entirely, but this website is helping me make progress). We don't all agree on everything, but I think that's part of the value of this forum -- that we can sometimes disagree, but respect that "different strokes for different folks" does fit the reality of the huge variability in what human beings are. In fact, that might be helpful to you in dealing with your self-doubt: There is no "one way is right for everyone," and your own knowledge of yourself is important in figuring out what is helpful (and what is harmful) for you. To me, at least, this is a far safer context than therapy for considering differences -- therapists (in my experience) seem so certain that they know what the client needs. That is so difficult to deal with when it contradicts your own experience -- and they don't even give you any reasons for their opinion.

I was thinking about how so many therapists seem to be know-it-alls, so I tried a web search on "know-it-all therapist". I looked over the first ten pages the search returned, and only found one site that had what seemed like a decent discussion of the topic: http://buildingfamilycounseling.com/2015/04/therapists-dont-know-you-as-well-as-you-know-you/

I agree; the profession needs some very serious reform. It both saddens and angers me when I see calls for "more mental health services" -- what we need first is better mental health services. More of the current poor quality can even make the situation worse. At this point, I guess all we can do is continue forums like this, and posting on therapist forums that need critical comments. There is also some hope that younger generations will push more for transparency, and that will help. There is also a little hope from the fact that there is increasing awareness that a lot of so-called "scientific" research in psychology is junk science. But we've still got a long way to go.

I don't agree that "A Ph.D. degree implies that someone is smart in the head." Maybe a Ph.D. degree in physics does, but not a Ph.D. degree in psychology. Your wondering "if therapy training is deliberately or inadvertently creating greedy, selfish, and manipulative mindfuckers" seems a rational response to the reality of my experience. I suspect there is a "self-reproducing" aspect to therapy training: If the trainers are arrogant and manipulative, those traits are likely to be passed on to on their students. But also, the field is likely to be attractive to people who already have those traits, and want to have them "affirmed" as desirable. Part of the reason I believe this: My worst therapist was a trainer when I was her client. (I still think there are some good therapists out there, and some trainers who set a good example -- but that the field has far too many who are arrogant, manipulative, etc.)

Adam, Thanks for the explanation. I can see how the training can be a conditioning to be more predatory. But I think many of them have a predisposition that also comes into play -- e.g., SMMB's therapist who really seemed to crave intimacy; one of my therapists who seemed to really like to laugh at her patients; the one who seemed to crave power.

1. Could you explain what you mean by "overt predator" and "playing the role of predator.? 2. I'm not convinced that therapists adopt an "ambiguous and fake persona" and represent it as authentic -- I suspect that in may cases the ambiguous and fake-sounding behavior is really their authentic scatter-brained or superficial way of thinking.

Yes, there was a lot that was patronizing, nauseating, arrogant, ignorant. But the ratio of positive to that kind of stuff was greater than with most things I've read by therapists. I am not against using the word 'boundaries" in talking about therapy, but think it needs to be used in almost the opposite way that most therapists use it: The real boundary problem with therapy is that therapists violate client boundaries -- in particular, by "doing their thing" without explicit consent from the client, or with misrepresentation of what "their thing" can do, in particular, not discussing the harm it can do.

I can't honestly agree that "all therapists are predators" -- in my experience of trying perhaps 15 therapists over a period of perhaps 30 years, there were 2 that I can't see calling "predators". They were basically kind, decent people, trying to help, who realized they didn't know it all. And their basic decency was a little helpful. (There was also a third who did have a slight predatory streak -- but he recognized it when I pointed it out, so I'd consider him basically decent, too.) But that still leaves my experience as giving an estimate of about 80% of therapists as predators -- far too high for a profession that calls itself "helping".

Finally, the "replication crisis" in psychology has gotten into the popular press: http://www.newsweek.com/power-poses-dont-make-you-more-powerful-studies-664261 (This article is only about the replication problems in a non-therapy psychological research, but hopefully the increased attention to the problem there will extend to exposing the poor quality of research on psychotherapy.)