Study on therapy

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As promised here is a link to my study on experiences with autism and psychotherapy https://bit.ly/3gWQQ3U

Thank you so much to tose of you who participated. Have a wonderful day

That site requires subscribing or logging in with Google or Facebook to see the article? Is there a way you can provide an unrestricted link?

Hi Aspie1
Thanks for writing, I could have made it more clear.

If you click the link and then scroll down, the article should appear.

Please write back if that doesn't work.

Janus

I was able to find an unrestricted download link. Thanks.

I went to many meetings for Adult Children from Dysfunctional Families, and in the preamble, they always read "they told us our feelings were wrong."
I have come to think of therapy as remedial parenting, and there are a lot of bad parents out there who can't even assess themselves.

In my case, people took it one step further: my therapist joined in on invalidating my feelings. Whenever I told her how my family was yelling at me or mistreating me, all she did was say "Aww, you felt sad when they did that", or sometimes just "aww". Both in a cooing tone with her head slightly tilted to the side, not unlike how bullies taunt their victims. She didn't teach me any verbal self-defense tactics, let alone stand up for me by telling my parents about the harmfulness of their actions.

I interpreted that to mean "Quit whining, you loser, nobody cares how you feel! Because you're just a kid! Suck it up, buttercup!" So in a way, I did just that: I stopped telling about conflicts with my family, and instead kept her busy with fabricated issues, like worrying about pop quizzes. I also took up drinking, by sneaking my parents' whiskey.

Aspie1
It sounds like you got a bad therapist and you dealt with her creatively. I shudder to think of how many children are sent to incompetent therapists.

38% of therapists are consistently unhelpful https://bit.ly/2XTSHPJ
Psychotherapists who do not receive therapy themselves, have the poorest outcomes https://bit.ly/3cVWss5

Dear_one
Therapy is remedial parenting - I like that phrasing.
You make a good point, psychodynamic therapy aims at increasing awareness of how current behaviour is influenced by past relationships. Children find ways of dealing with bad parenting. These ways become patterns and are difficult to change as we grow and no longer need them.

^^ Thanks. The trouble with PhDs is that they don't think they should say "I don't know." My most helpful counsellor was barely qualified, but eager to learn and collaborate on, rather than prescribe, a recovery from trauma.

very cool, respect!

This is an interesting point: therapists truly don't understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of therapy. So when they ask rhetorical questions about feelings, or parrot back the patient's statements, it makes them look stupid, unqualified, and untrustworthy. I mean, really, how dumb does a therapist need to be, as not to know how being yelled at by a parent makes a kid feel? But because they're never on the receiving end of such questions, they don't understand how they come across, and how unhelpful they are. They just do it because it's what their textbook training and/or personal beliefs dictate. As a result, you have 12-year-old kids taking up alcohol just to cope with such therapy, on top of a stressful home environment.

Another problem is that practicing therapy is too easy! It takes no effort at all to ask "how did that make you feel?" and parrot back statements (a.k.a. "reflect" ). Also, it's far too easy to control the patient. If he says something that's beyond the therapist's textbook training or personal beliefs, he/she can easily gaslight that statement out of existence: by silently staring at the patient, mocking him, or pretending not to understand what he's talking about. So basically, the therapist gets to have unlimited power, do nearly-effortless work, and make big bucks from it. If that's not easy, I don't know what is.

If you think about it, a 10-year-old child can practice therapy easily. Heck, I did a better job playing therapist for my parents who fought with each other, than my actual therapist did with me. Therapy needs to be made harder to practice, to keep blithering idiots out of the field. Or cut its pay to the level of nurses, so only people with a true calling go into it. Or mandate all therapists to prescribe antidepressants upon request to people of all ages, so their patients are actually helped, not strung along with a solution dangled just out of their reach.

^^ I think that regulating therapists might best be left up to something like Yelp reviews. I'd like to see a non-commercial service with elaborate safeguards against fake accounts, like a bank. Anyone with a receipt could easily rate the product or service they received. Such a service could also be used to warn us about unreliable people. Everyone would get, say, 100 votes to distribute as current warnings about others, anonymously. You would be able to look up how many warnings there were about anyone, and how many people those came from, but not who. If you saw someone with 100 votes from one person, but few others, you could sense a personal grudge rather than the red flag of a high total from many people, for someone not well known otherwise. Bullies would have a harder time getting ahead or changing venues.

Hey Janus
I wish I had seen this thread when you were taking the survey. I can't see the article. But I am very interested in what you are doing as I am trying to advocate for changes in how Autistic people have psychotherapy.