The good, the bad, the ugly: Therapy and Therapists

It’s no secret that I am a fan of therapy. Since it literally saved my life, what’s not to like? But in reading the comments on this blog and my emails from readers, it has become crystal clear to me that not only does everyone not feel the same way about therapy that I do, there are some serious misconceptions out there about therapy and therapists, particularly with respect to clients like ourselves, the offspring of narcissists.

Each one of us, for all that we have a common background, is unique. And that means that we will have differing agendas in entering (or even contemplating) therapy. And yes, you have an agenda—we all do, whether we recognize it or not. Mine, when entering therapy, was to cling onto something that might lift my suicidal depression…and the agenda evolved as the therapy evolved. Each person who reads this has his or her own agenda with respect to therapy, and that depends on our mindset.

Some of us are so entrenched in our victimhood we don’t really want therapy to work. Our personal identities are as victims and we don’t really want to change that. If being a victim is all you know, when you go into therapy and it works, who will you be then? The security of the familiar but unhappy known is threatened by the unknown.  When we go into therapy with this mindset, we subtly sabotage not only the therapy, but ourselves. Hiding behind labels like PTSD or rationalizations like “I didn’t create this, why should I have to fix it?” we find fault with the therapist, the process, the very idea of change. This is undoubtedly caused by fear because to keep ourselves safe, we tend to be very control-oriented…and therapy and the changes it brings are not within our control. It is frightening to contemplate the loss of our identity, the transformation into something, someone else, when we have no overt, conscious control over that transformation.

Many of us are still very angry with our parents and others who victimized us without remorse. We want vengeance, pay back, to inflict on them the kind of hurt they inflicted on us. Our anger makes us feel powerful and strong…and safe. We hide behind it like a shield, unwilling to give up anger and revenge fantasies, resisting therapy in the mistaken notion that it will render us impotent and vulnerable again.

We sabotage ourselves with resistance…and few us undertake a therapy journey without engaging in resistance at some point. I was desperate for someone to listen to me and validate me, so I attended my therapy sessions eagerly…you’d think there was no resistance there, right? Well, I was clear on my NM and what a cruel, manipulative, sadist she was…but completely resistant to recognizing my husband was just like her! My therapist led me to the realization several times, but I simply did not see the connection. Then one day, after listening to yet another litany if complaints about my narcissistic husband, she said “Who else treats you like that?” I shook my head in puzzlement. “Who else in your life discounts and devalues you, lies to you, ignores your feelings and treats you like you don’t matter?” And suddenly I saw it and I said “Oh my god…I married my mother!” But it took her practically beating me over the head with the truth before my resistance was overcome and I could see it myself.

Too often we go into therapy with completely unrealistic expectations and when those expectations are disappointed, we blame the therapist or therapy itself, without ever looking inward to see what part we had in the lack of success. Therapy is a relationship and we are conditioned by our positions as the children of narcissists to blame the narcissist for our failed parent-child relationship, but it is not accurate to extrapolate that experience to every relationship we ever enter into.

Just like in any other relationship, in order to be successful the people in it must be working towards the same goal, pulling in the same direction. If you have a subconscious agenda of undermining the therapy, there is no way it can work. Why would you want to do that? Well, some people want to prove they are right—they say therapy won’t help them or it is bunk, and by sabotaging the therapy by being uncooperative, they prove themselves right. Some people don’t want to change, they want the people who hurt them to change: they have no motivation to cooperate with therapy. Still others want to be in control: they feel unsafe putting their emotional lives in the hands of others, so they thwart the therapy and therapist in order to keep feeling safe, even at the expense of healing. I am sure there are many, many other reasons that people are unwilling to really engage with the therapist, reasons that aren’t truly the therapist’s fault, that stymie the therapeutic process.

Our expectations, often subconscious, can also be a major cause of disappointment or disillusionment. Some of us expect the therapist to be some kind miracle worker: we sit passively and tell a little about ourselves and the therapist magically heals us. It doesn’t work that way, I am sorry to say. Therapists don’t heal us, we heal ourselves with our therapists as our guides. They prod us when we are reluctant to open doors, console us when we finally face heart-wrenching truths, point us in the right direction when we seem lost and don’t know how to proceed. But they do not fix us…we fix ourselves by facing up to painful, long-suppressed emotions and truths, by going through the pain we have been avoiding, by examining long-held—but false—beliefs about ourselves and our families. Our therapists are there as guides to help us along, throw us a lifeline as needed, give us encouragement and redirect us when we wander off the path of healing. They do not have magic wands and they cannot cure us without our wholehearted participation in the process.

I have heard complaints about therapists and how they act in session but seldom have I heard someone acknowledge his/her part in the situation. I have heard of therapists who spent the therapy hour talking about themselves: but who acknowledges that therapists are human beings who might be made uncomfortable with a prolonged silence on the part of the client? Is there any recognition that a valid technique is to toss out some tidbit about one’s own self in an effort to prime the client, as an attempt to get the client to reciprocate? Some therapists appear to be inattentive and uncommunicative: perhaps this is a style of relating that is supposed to encourage the client to ruminate and even feel uncomfortable enough with the silence to speak up. I have heard complaints about therapists who don’t know anything about narcissism or who refuse to acknowledge such things as personality disorders. So…does the client keep coming back, after hearing from the horse’s mouth, that s/he is not knowledgeable about certain things that are important to the client and shows no interest in learning? How is that the therapist’s fault? If you went to a Porsche dealer wanting to buy a Ferrari and the dealer said “Nope, no Ferraris here, we don’t carry them or even talk about them,” whose fault is it if you keep hanging around the Porsche dealer, expecting a Ferrari to somehow appear? Shouldn’t you say “OK, thanks for the info,” and go in search of a Ferrari dealer?

One of the ways we sabotage ourselves and our therapy with unrealistic expectations is to think that all therapists are alike, that they all have the same amount of insight and the same ability to connect…and that they are all equally competent in all aspects of their field. But if you believe this, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Think of therapists like houses or apartments for sale or rent: what are the odds that, without doing any research whatsoever, without making any calls or inquiries, the first place you see will be not only in perfect condition, but exactly what you are looking for? Slim, eh? Is anything more frustrating than house or apartment hunting, trying to get the right size place in the right location for the right money in the right condition? When I was last house hunting, I swear we saw at least ten houses per week for three months before we found the house we bought—and this house needed a shipload of work to counter the previous owner’s seven years of deferred maintenance.

Why should finding the right therapist be any different? Are human beings any less unique than houses? If you were looking for someone to guide you through the Everglades would you take someone whose expertise is the Rocky Mountains, just because they are both guides and you therefore perceive them to be interchangeable? Whose fault would it be if you got lost if you insist on hiring a guide who has never been in the Everglades and who tells you “this is not my area of expertise”?

The success of therapy depends on several things, but choosing the right therapist for you is the first and most important step. And you cannot be expecting your therapist to not be human, to not have human faults or foibles. Therapists are humans just like we are and act and react just like we do. Faulting another human for being human, expecting your therapist to be superhuman, works against you and the success of your therapy. Furthermore, a therapist with a background of overcoming personal difficulties, someone whose life has not been a perfect bed or roses and who has conquered his demons is probably a person whose life is more likely to have given him the experiences that allow him to empathise with you and be a better guide than someone who has lived without angst and personal turmoil. Do you want a guide who learned the route through books or one who has already trodden the path himself and knows where you are going?

Before you choose a therapist, consider what attributes are important in the right therapist for you: experience in helping adults who had abusive parents? Experience in dealing with the victims of people with personality disorders? Specific training or experience with narcissism? You should find out if the therapist adheres to any specific type of psychotherapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Imago Relationship Therapy: some therapies address only superficial reactions rather than address the underlying causes of our angst and some therapists are so rigidly bound to their chosen form of therapy they will try to shoehorn you into their paradigm rather than listen to you and help you find your own way, using their insights as guides.

You should book an appointment with a therapist who you think is a possibility and spend that hour interviewing the therapist, asking the questions to which you need answers. It is ok to bring a list of questions. If the therapist balks and tries to control the time and topics, this is a clue that with this person, you are going to have to do therapy according to his/her agenda, not yours. Will that work for you? If not, don’t book a second appointment. You should specifically ask if they ascribe to any particular type of therapy. If they do, write it down and when you get home, go to this website, http://www.goodtherapy.org/types-of-therapy.html , look up the therapy and read up on it. If it doesn’t seem like a fit to you, move on to interviewing the next therapist. You may have to visit several before you find someone you can work with but don’t reject someone simply because s/he is not perfect: you sabotage yourself that way because nobody is perfect. You just need a therapist with whom you can feel comfortable and who is willing to work with you, which includes not forcing you into a therapy model s/he feels comfortable with but makes you feel unheard, and being willing to stretch his or her own knowledge and expertise by learning more about narcissism and its effects upon victims. No matter how great the therapist seems otherwise, if those two essential elements are missing, you are not going to have the best opportunity to cure what ails you.

There are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts. No magic bullets, no miracle cures, no magical techniques to fix what ails you. You can engage in “alternative therapies” that tap into the placebo effect, but they will not cure you. The only cure for what ails you lies within yourself: you must come to terms with what you have been avoiding, with what you fear, and realize that you will not die either from the pain or from the loss of a toxic family, but you could die from your avoidance: addiction, alcoholism, suidical depression, high risk behaviours...

Therapy works for everyone…that’s right, everyone. But it only works with your participation and your own hard work. It doesn’t work if you don’t choose an appropriate therapist, it doesn’t work if you sit by passively and expect the therapist to fix you, it doesn’t work if you don’t cooperate in the therapy and stretch yourself, it doesn’t work if you sabotage it, either consciously or subconsciously. It only works if you really want it to and you put your comfort on the line: successful therapy is painful and it takes time, but in the end, you come out a happier, more whole person.

All of this said, it would be unjust to neglect the subject of bad therapists and quack therapies: they do exist. Chief among the quack therapies, in my estimation, is EFT (Emotional FreedomTechnique). First of all, it is not meant to fix the underlying cause of your pain, only to temporarily banish it: it is like putting a Band-Aid on a melanoma. Secondly, any effectiveness a patient may feel from its use is attributable to “…well-known cognitive and behavioral techniques that are included with the energy manipulation. Psychologists and researchers should be wary of using such techniques, and make efforts to inform the public about the ill effects of therapies that advertise miraculous claims.”A wise practice, when encountering any “alternative medicine” or “alternative therapies” is to look them up on Quackwatcha site dedicated to investigating and reporting the truth of these alternative methods.

Bad therapists are people who do not resist their own urges to exploit or take advantage of their clients. This can range from passivity to unwillingness to learn about your situation (victim of narcissism) to trying to force you into a specific therapeutic mould that is inside the therapist’s comfort zone but not appropriate for you, to more overt, psychologically damaging behaviour like treating you and your issues dismissively, betraying confidences, even behaving in sexually inappropriate ways with you. Bad therapists do exist…some of them are narcissists themselves, people who found an endless source of Nsupply in the profession. But, this is true of virtually any profession: they all have their share of bad apples and we simply have to be cautious and prudent in selecting the practitioner we will use.

So, is therapy right for you? Yes!! But it is up to you to find the right therapist and then give it your own best effort. And if at first you do not succeed, try, try again!

Journaling: helping you to help yourself

Journaling has always been close to my heart although for the longest time I carried around a lot odd, self-imposed “rules” about it that caused me to approach it cautiously. Could it be that you have been resisting journaling for a similar reason? Below are some of the reasons I resisted journaling; how many of them apply to you?
1. Fear of being found out, of someone finding and reading my journal and then, fear of consequences for what I wrote (like being embarrassed or even punished);

2. Fear of inadequate writing skills—fear that my spelling, punctuation, sentence structure—would be less than professional;

3. The task seemed overwhelming;

4. I believed I had to “begin at the beginning,” to go back to my childhood and write the journal in chronological order;

5. Fear of “wasting time” on a pointless endeavour (because time should not be wasted and any time spent on myself was, by definition, wasted);

6. Fear of being “disloyal” to my family, that being truthful in the journal would somehow betray them;

7. Fear of opening old wounds, triggering myself, opening myself to a greater hurt than I was already feeling;

8. A nameless sense of dread would come over me when I sat down to write.

Can you relate to any of these reasons? Did you notice that the vast majority of them begin with the word “fear”? And if fear keeps you from journaling, then you are allowing fear to be in control of your life.

Some of you may think that journaling is pointless, that it serves no purpose, and that you could better spend your time elsewhere. Fine, I accept that as a valid point of view and, if that is your point of view, what are you doing for yourself in the time that you might otherwise be journaling? Are you seeing a therapist? Getting Reiki? Meditating? Hashing it out with your FOO? Are you aware that journaling can be done in addition to all of the above and can greatly benefit you? Just a few of the benefits of journaling:

1. If events are journalled as they happen, they provide a contemporary record of events. Writing while events are fresh in your mind allows to more accurately recall the actual words spoken and gives you the clearest view of the event, especially later, if you ever have to refer to the entry for validation.

2. Journaling helps us to recall forgotten or suppressed events in our lives that are subconsciously affecting us today. Remembering such events can help us identify the causes of current day fears and behaviours that are rooted in those forgotten events. I have a fear that borders on phobia of putting my face in the water. It affected my ability to swim to the degree that I had to take beginner’s swimming lessons twice when I was 12—my terror of putting my face in the water simply halted my ability to learn anything further, even with nose plugs and a face mask! I still haven’t recalled where that comes from, but I am sure it will open a lot of other closed doors in my mind when I do finally get to it.

3. It can help us identify patterns in our lives, either our own patterns or those of others. A good example is the realization I gained, through journaling, that my NM had been taking away from me things that I cared about for my entire life, that it was a pattern with her that went all the way back to my earliest childhood…and continued right into my adult years. Taken away from me were toys, pets, personal belongings, and even family members, like my father and my children. I had not forgotten most of the events, but it was not until I began journaling that I could see the pattern and from that pattern, I was able to see more patterns: she abandoned me as a 2-year-old and was forced to take me back when I was 4. Over the next 20 years I saw her try to deprive three different women of their children, actually succeeding in one case. I still haven’t figured out exactly what was behind that, but it cannot be mere coincidence, can it?

4. The records we keep in the journal can help us keep events fresh in our minds when we start backsliding and thinking “Oh, it wasn’t that bad…” or “She wasn’t really that mean to me…” It returns us to the here and now of exactly how we felt, exactly what transpired, exactly how the other party/parties behaved. It strips away the fog of softness that time and distance put over our memories and brings us nose-to-nose with realities we are better off remembering clearly, especially when a softening of those memories leaves us vulnerable to the predations and manipulations of others.

5. It can be used to open conversations that we cannot otherwise articulate. This can be particularly useful in dealing with a therapist. My first year in therapy I found it very difficult to say what was hurting me because each time I opened my mouth to say something, this huge choking lump would form in the centre of my throat and nothing would come out. I could chat about inanities, but the stuff I was paying a therapist to help me sort out would just stay stuck behind that huge paralyzing lump. I began printing out what I had written in my journal and bringing it to the therapist and allowing her to get the ball rolling. Within a few weeks I was able to push past the lump in my throat and initiate discussions, although a lot of what I wanted to talk about I could not even write about at that time. It was a useful tool in getting my therapy sessions started, rather than sitting there stifled, with tears streaming down my face, my poor therapist unable to help because she just didn’t know where to start.

6. It can be cathartic to just write down stuff that is bothering us. The simple act of reliving the emotions and pouring them out of you can make you feel better, at least in the moment. And you can get that kind of relief each time you write it down.

7. You may find a practical use as well…in some relationships with a narcissist it becomes necessary to take legal action against the narcissist: a restraining order or divorce or other action. In such cases, a journal that includes entries of the narcissist’s incursions into your peace, his/her abuses, your mental, emotional and even physical state as a result of those incursions, can be powerful evidence in your behalf.

8. It may become useful in explaining to friends or family members how/why you went NC with certain other family members. Sometimes when you try to explain, the incidents you can call to mind at a moment’s notice sound lame…and make you seem petty to the person you are trying to explain to. When they can grasp the sheer volume of emotional assault you have had to deal with, however, as they are more apt to do if you can demonstrate with a journal you have been keeping for a long time, you are more easily able to elicit their understanding. (That doesn’t mean you have to show them your journal, only that you have it to refer to, to help jog your memory.)

So what are the rules of journaling and what do you do about those reasons that keep you from sitting down to write? Well, there is really only one rule: each entry has to be about something that was emotionally significant to you. It can be joyful or sorrowful, it can be about depression or about triumph, it can be about events that happened when you were a toddler or feelings you experienced this morning. The only rule is that the entry has to have some emotional significance to you, even if it is only puzzling over something your NM did when you were 12, or speculation about something your spouse has been up to.

And those fears and roadblocks?

1. Fear of being found out, of someone finding and reading my journal and then, fear of consequences for what I wrote (like being embarrassed or even punished). If this bothers you, then you need to make your journal private. Go to Blogger and set yourself up a simple blog and, as you set it up, set the privacy settings so that it cannot be seen on the internet and then put a password on it. Use a password nobody would guess: for example, if you like horses, a family member might guess your password if you choose “HorseCrazy” for a password. If you are afraid of horses, however, they would never guess it was yours. A journal kept in this format gives you not only privacy (there is no book to find under the mattress, no file hidden in the computer), it offers you safety: if there is a flood or fire or other disaster, your journal is safely stored in Google’s servers, ready and waiting for you when you want it.

2. Fear of inadequate writing skills—fear that my spelling, punctuation, sentence structure—would be less than professional. You are writing this for yourself…nobody else. It doesn’t even have to make sense! All it needs to be good is for you to be honest in what you write. That’s all…honest about events, honest about your feelings, honest about how others have behaved. If you decide at a later date that you want to make some entries public, you can always edit them later for publication. But that may never happen, so just write—let it pour out of your heart and through your fingers and out of you.

3. The task seemed overwhelming. The best way to deal with any overwhelming task is to break it down into smaller tasks. In this case, instead of looking at it as a commitment to write a detailed book about your life, view it as a single essay, of any length you choose, about something emotionally important to you. And the next day, view it the same way again. Just one essay today and don’t think about tomorrow until it becomes today. And then you write just one…

4. I believed I had to “begin at the beginning,” to go back to my childhood and write the journal in chronological order. That was a big one for me and it really had me stuck until finally, one day, I just sat down and wrote about an experience that happened when I was about 12 or 13. While I was writing it, other experiences from my childhood popped into my mind…I jotted down notes and the following day I wrote about that. Each time a new incident popped into my head, I made a note and then later wrote about it. Incidents kept coming to mind until I had written down 46 memories in the random order they came to me. Those are the 46 Memories that started this whole blog.

5. Fear of “wasting time” on a pointless endeavour (because time should not be wasted and any time spent on myself was, by definition, wasted). That is a false belief that somebody else planted in your head. Not only is writing a journal not wasted time, time spent on yourself is well-spent, particularly if it leads to healing on your part. Anything you do to improve the quality of your life is time well-spent. You deserve it. And if this particular fear is one of yours, it affords you the topic for your first journal entry: Why I feel unworthy of healing…

6. Fear of being “disloyal” to my family, that being truthful in the journal would somehow betray them. OK, this was a tough one for me, right up to the moment I remembered that the conspiracy of silence was what so damaged me in the first place. Ask yourself this: do you owe loyalty to those who have no loyalty to you? Of course not. You do not owe loyalty to people who don’t care about you, who exploit you, who hurt and manipulate you to advantage themselves. If you think you do, then your loyalty is misplaced because you owe no more loyalty than is shown to you. (And doing their job, like feeding and clothing you and providing you with medical care as a kid is not a sign of either loyalty or love, it is discharging their duty to you. They have to do it or get arrested for child neglect.)

If you cannot wrap your head around this concept just yet, bear in mind that a) your writing is absolutely private and b) you can delete it when you are done writing. You will get a benefit—catharsis—simply from the act of writing it out, even if you feel you must delete it when you have finished.

7. Fear of opening old wounds, triggering myself, opening myself to a greater hurt than I was already feeling. This was a touchy one for me, because with almost every entry I wrote, I had to put a box of Kleenex next to the computer. I bawled through almost all of them, including the ones that were based more in anger than hurt. If this happens to you, when you are writing, it is a good thing! It means you are reaching those places within you that are hurting, dragging out into the light of day things that have been hurting you since they happened.

If the fear is too strong, let me give you a tip I got from my therapist: sometimes we are too close to the story and it is necessary to distance ourselves a bit in order to embrace it. It is easier to write about “her” than to write about “me,” as writing about me can really stab into the heart. So, use a distancing technique: give new names to all of your family members, including yourself, and write the events as if they happened to someone else. Give your own emotions and perspectives, viewpoints and feelings to the character who is playing you, and give full voice to the feelings. Once I began doing that, it was much easier for me to write and be wholly honest in what I was writing.

You may find yourself having “symptoms,” like crying or trembling hands, a blocked throat, headache or a host of other things. Try to push through those things—don’t suppress them or try to control them, just experience them and keep on writing. Write about them… “as she wrote in her journal her hands shook so badly she could barely type and tears flooded her cheeks. A thick lump formed in her throat as she remembered being silenced by her own mother and not allowed to even speak in her own defence against the lies her sister had told…” Push through it, keep writing: some of the best insights and epiphanies come at times like this.

8. A nameless sense of dread would come over me when I sat down to write. I carry this nameless dread around with me like my cell phone—it goes everywhere I go. Anytime I embark upon something that might not turn out perfectly, anytime I try something that someone might take issue with, anytime I start something new, I suffer from this dread. When trying to write, it manifests as writer’s block: blank mind to match the blank screen. Which is why I keep a list of topics to write about, ideas that pop into my mind while I am writing on some other topic. Right now, my list of topics for this blog has 14 items on it, 14 topics yet to be written about…and by the time I reach the last of those 14, I will have added probably another dozen or more. The only solution to that nameless sense of dread it to simply ignore it and get started anyway…it has a peculiar way of fading out once the writing (or whatever else I am doing) gets going. I think it is a holdover from the days when I was expected to do everything perfectly, even the first time I did it. My NM made no allowances for lack of knowledge or experience and an innocent error was punished no less severely than a careless mistake or even intentional sabotage.

Journaling is an excellent tool to get at what’s bothering you, a safe and private way to de-stress and unload some of the burdens you’ve been carrying around in your psyche for years. It allows you to work at your own pace, stay with an issue or event until you are ready to move on to the next one, move ahead or backwards as you see fit. It is cathartic, it provides you with a record of events and your reasoning behind the actions you took and gives you insights where you never had them before. At the very least, it is a safe, private place to blow off steam when you are stressed and when nobody you know really “gets it.” It is cheap, safe, and easy to embark upon.

Why not try journaling today? The only thing you have to lose is some stress...