#because a therapist isnt a person to the clients either sometimes

[yoonyia]

accidently instilled a god complex into someone

woopsies

my therapy is failing

[psychoticallytrans]

hi i hope this isnt a weird question to ask but. uhm tomorrow i have to tell my therapist about a maybe-psychotic-depression episode i had last week and im like, Nervous:tm: and unsure how or what to say? this is probably So stupid to ask but is there. i dont know. a script for this kind of thing, a limit to what i should disclose (im trying to avoid institutionalization, im in college and i cant afford to miss class)? therapy in general is new to me and while ive maybe had episodes like this in the past, the one i had last week was a new level of intense, too, so im just very out of my depth. thank you so much if you reply to this and if you cant thats okay too <3

This took me a long time to get around to. This probably won't help you in particular, anon, but I hope it helps others.

I will disclaim before this post that I have had extremely traumatic experiences in therapy. I came out of therapy with more disabilities and more severe ones than when I went in, and at least one of my therapists can be pinned as a direct cause. That will color this post.

The problem of therapy and disclosure is that... therapists are people, and they are people whose word holds an incredible amount of sway when considering how to act in regards to their clients. That sway is a problem because of how ableism and specifically saneism interact with the medical industry and with society. We are not seen as arbiters of our experiences. They are seen as the authorities on us. Everything you disclose will be filtered through the therapist, all of their prejudices and preconceptions, before it becomes something that the medical system will take seriously.

Amplifying this is the unavailability of therapy and how very few therapists are also mentally ill. If they are, it's even rarer to find one with a disorder that is considered "threatening"- for a reason. The inventor of DBT was BPD, and the second she revealed this, she was essentially exiled from her community. This means, in order, that a) a lot of people have to either adapt to their therapist or go without therapy and b) that therapists can very rarely actually relate to the experiences of clients that need heavy-duty help.

They might be presented as cutesy and "just here to help", but therapists are still medical professionals administering medical treatment with medical authority, and should be treated by disabled people with every caution that you treat a normal doctor with.

As such, this is my advice.

a) Don't disclose any heavy duty symptoms or trauma until you've tested them on some lighter topics, and they've handled them well. "Well" means not denying your experiences, respecting boundaries that you put up, and not acting like mental illness being in your head means you can think yourself well in a few hours. To define "heavy duty" generally, think about what you would put behind a trigger warning for an audience of adults.

b) Don't sign anything without reading it in full. If you don't understand it, tell them you need time to understand it before you can sign it. If they respond to this by telling you to just sign it or that it's not important, that should send alarm bells clanging in your head.

c) Request your medical record. Even if you're not concerned about your therapist, it lets you see their notes. It can be very informative.

d) If they pass as a decent person, then only one disclosure should get you institutionalization: confessing that you are going to hurt yourself or another person. If you can't afford institutionalization, and this is a problem for you, then you are going to have to find ways to deal with that without telling your therapist that. This is actually very easy. As long as you don't tell them that the feeling is current, you can ask for advice. "I sometimes have problems with wanting to hurt myself. Can you help me?" or "I worry that I might do harm to other people- what can I do to avoid that?" are great ways to phrase it that should still get you help as long as you can keep them in the past or future tense. If either of these is an active problem for you, seek whatever help you safely can.

e) Understand that therapy is medical treatment. It is very possible to perform great healing with it. It is also very possible to perform great medical malpractice.

You only have one mind. Be careful who you trust with it.

[newl0ndonfire]

im just popping in real quick to say that i agree w everything u just said regarding the Jet stuff. ive been following some of those blogs defending op, and many (not all ofc) actively participate in exclusion ace discourse. i cant help but see it as an aphobic post masquerading as an anti-racism campaign (bc then anyone who disagrees is racist). even if that isnt the case, op's argument is incredibly fallacy-ridden & u hit all the points i would have had i not been too chicken to come off anon

thank you so much for sending this! you’re so sweet 

i totally feel you with staying on anon lmao. i didn’t reblog, comment, or like anything until i had been on tumblr for two months (even then, my first post was an accident) and exclusionists just...... need to stop. like it doesn’t matter if you previously were in MOGAI and convinced yourself you were ace but actually suppressed who you are. my heart goes out to them because that kind of experience just leads to more suffering. but 1. i personally have never seen or met a MOGAI member(? supporter?), much less one who is ace and 2. we’re still human and deserve basic respect. there is no reason to harass people (much less minors) for their sexuality.

as far as i know, ace and aro jet star HCs aren’t really popular anymore (mostly because of exclusionists :/), not even HCs of him on the spectrum or willing to have sex but not sexually attracted to people (which is the definition of an asexual). like even if people don’t want either spectrum in the LGBT community, we’re still not straight lmao (straight = cisgender, heterosexual, AND heteromantic) and we don’t deserve the shit people say and do to ace/aro spec people.

the post is totally and obviously aphobic (god i hate how that word have become devoid of meaning bc of exlusionists) drivel masquerading as anti-racism. like i showed it to my therapist today and she looked at me and said “these people have serious issues if they think this kind of shit is okay. i’ve had thousands of clients who needed a therapist for their marriage because one person is asexual or aromantic and the other one wasn’t. and why does this read like a cosmo article?”

i’ve found that calling people out for fallacies on this blue webshit tumblr usually gets you harassed or falsely accused of something (usually anti-femisnistic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and/or ableist), but i am just so done with people shitting on asexuality and aromanticism and i just couldn’t hold it in

like the second to last line, second post “let him care about himself. let him be selfish sometimes. let him be human.” no. just so much no. you can care about yourself and not have sex. you can not care about yourself and have sex (sex addiction exists). you can be selfish without having sex. you can be selfish and have sex. but most of all, humanity is not based on having sex. sharks, frogs, birds, dogs, and spiders all have sex. that makes them alive, not human. plants are alive but don’t engage in sex (pistils and stamens are the female and male parts of a flower, respectively). fuck you for saying you need to have sex to be human

in case you can’t tell, that second to last line really pissed me off. the modern world is sex and romance based (look at ads. sex sells so it’s used all the fucking time) you’re not broken or fucked up if you don’t want sex and/or romance. telling people they're damaged because they’re on the ace or aro spectrums is fucking harmful. like give yourself a pat on the fucking back for the blood on your hands and deaths caused by your shitty belief.