Judgemental psychologist

[Tyler Robinson]

Yesterday was a bad day. I was feeling down and I mustered the courage of visiting a psychologist. After all. I was suicidal too. So I decided to seek help. 

After a lot of effort I finally got an appointment and I reached there in time. She made me sit across her and then began asking me questions. 

As I kept narrating my symptoms, she was staring down at me through her glasses and acting pissed off. 

When I asked her if socialization would help me, she said "nobody would want to be friends with you." I was(in my mind) like okay. 

Then she began telling me how I must be a pain in the ass to deal with. And called me entitled when I talked about my childhood struggles and said that almost all children have bad experiences and that it's normal. 

Then she said - "I can't handle you." 

I just felt like she was trying to trigger me so much.. 

I don't feel like visiting other psychologists. 

I paid her charges and came home really down 

 

She even suggested that I should get electroshock. 

Then she said - "why should I sympathize with you. Why should anyone sympathize with you? Why do you feel entitled to others be gentle and polite to you?" 

I told her that I feel stressed all the time. 

Then she made a face like "eww" when I told her that I couldn't get over a breakup for more than 6 months. 

And she uttered something like "you're extreme." 

The whole thing felt utterly absurd. 

I just don't know. I came out of her clinic feeling angry and unheard. 

She was quite expensive. Charged me an awful lot for 1 hour. 

 

Edited January 3, 2023 by Tyler Robinson

[Eyowey]

The funniest thing you can say to a psychologist is ''I like that I can vent here without being judged'' I actually said that. 

 

[Tyler Robinson]

She said to me - "you're ruining your own life. Get busy doing something and you'll forget everything and try to act normal." 

I'm thinking in my head - "well, I suffer depression because of which I'm self destructive, so it's obvious I will ruin my life. And how would I just forget my problems by not confronting them by simply distracting myself with work and being busy. And if I was normal why would I be sitting with her. "

It's like she did not understand the concept of " getting help.. "

[Razard86]

30 minutes ago, Tyler Robinson said:

Yesterday was a bad day. I was feeling down and I mustered the courage of visiting a psychologist. After all. I was suicidal too. So I decided to seek help. 

After a lot of effort I finally got an appointment and I reached there in time. She made me sit across her and then began asking me questions. 

As I kept narrating my symptoms, she was staring down at me through her glasses and acting pissed off. 

When I asked her if socialization would help me, she said "nobody would want to be friends with you." I was(in my mind) like okay. 

Then she began telling me how I must be a pain in the ass to deal with. And called me entitled when I talked about my childhood struggles and said that almost all children have bad experiences and that it's normal. 

Then she said - "I can't handle you." 

I just felt like she was trying to trigger me so much.. 

I don't feel like visiting other psychologists. 

I paid her charges and came home really down 

 

She even suggested that I should get electroshock. 

Then she said - "why should I sympathize with you. Why should anyone sympathize with you? Why do you feel entitled to others be gentle and polite to you?" 

I told her that I feel stressed all the time. 

Then she made a face like "eww" when I told her that I couldn't get over a breakup for more than 6 months. 

And she uttered something like "you're extreme." 

The whole thing felt utterly absurd. 

I just don't know. I came out of her clinic feeling angry and unheard. 

She was quite expensive. Charged me an awful lot for 1 hour. 

 

I've been telling people that majority of therapy doesn't work because a lot of the time your own therapist needs therapy. Humans have been conditioned to believe they need to talk to someone to vent their emotions, you don't have to you can talk to yourself. Notice how we demonize speaking to ourselves but we don't demonize self-talk/thinking which is literally the same thing. 

1. She didn't deserve to be paid if she gave you a session like that because anyone can just criticize another person while they tell a story.

2. The best therapy at the end of the day is self-given as anything else is from something outside of you which is inferior to you dealing with it directly.

3. Any therapist/psychologist ultimately are just guides, we still have to do the work. There job is to hold space for you and it sounds like she couldn't even do that which is literally the bare minimum. I hope she contacts you later and apologizes. 

[Eyowey]

The only cure to negative memories is to make so many new positive memories that the bad memories become like needles in a haystack. 

[Tyler Robinson]

30 minutes ago, Razard86 said:

I hope she contacts you later and apologizes. 

She made me feel like a criminal, let alone apologize. 

[Razard86]

3 minutes ago, Tyler Robinson said:

She made me feel like a criminal, let alone apologize. 

If she has a website you can always leave a comment/testimonial. I'm sure she was dealing with some stuff and maybe she saw herself in you and couldn't handle it. Many times a client teaches the therapist, you could argue sometimes who is the therapist and who is the client? It's a very interesting occupation to me because being a therapist is your own therapy as well lol.

If she is good at her job she will contact you later, apologize, and offer to change your therapist and maybe even offer a free session.

[Tyler Robinson]

Midway through the session, I began losing interest and I didn't feel like I wanted to tell my full story. She would interrupt after every 2 sentences and ask the next question. 

Then I asked her about marriage and finding a partner. And she said - "your future husband will think you're a mental case and divorce you." 

That indirect shaming and calling me "mental case" was cherry on top. That was like meeting a doctor who specializes in weight loss fat shaming his own client.. 

A psychologist who I visit calls me mental case lol. Why would I be needing her help if it weren't obvious that I was having mental issues.. 

After she called me mental case, I began to look away while speaking to her. Since I already have eye contact issues due to my autism, and she made it much worse. I couldn't look her in the eye at all.. I gave up. She was giving me a cold angry stare the entire time making it impossible to make eye contact with her. 

The worst experience. 

I felt like "money down the drain." 

 

[Tyler Robinson]

4 minutes ago, Razard86 said:

If she has a website you can always leave a comment/testimonial. I'm sure she was dealing with some stuff and maybe she saw herself in you and couldn't handle it. Many times a client teaches the therapist, you could argue sometimes who is the therapist and who is the client? It's a very interesting occupation to me because being a therapist is your own therapy as well lol.

If she is good at her job she will contact you later, apologize, and offer to change your therapist and maybe even offer a free session.

Curiously her website has all the best reviews. 5 star reviews. But there's a problem. I saw her Facebook and some of the people leaving her reviews are her Facebook friends which I noticed only after finishing the session. I guess she told her friends and relatives to leave great reviews and testimonials for her, some of their  last names were same as hers. So I suspect that these are fake reviews just to boost her credit, she manipulated her own people to leave her testimonials to make her stand out in all the other psychologist options available to me. I should have selected those psychologists even if their ratings were lower than hers, at least their ratings must have been honest. 

She did not have even a single negative rating, it seems either she deletes negative ratings or just influences people who get along with her to leave her positive testimonials. That actually makes her a fraud. 

 

[NoSelfSelf]

What the actual f! I would got up and leave ,talking to a psychologist should be the most safest place to express yourself...

[Tyler Robinson]

 

3 hours ago, TheGreekSeeker said:

 Her behaviour and stance towards you was purely unethical. Why didn't you ask her why she was so judgmental of you?

 

I have social anxiety. I mustered courage to visit a psychologist after a lot of effort. Asking her such a question would be beyond me. 

Quote

How old was she? If she is older she might be old-school.

She must be in her 50s.

Quote

 

What was your behaviour towards her? You just wanted to vent?

This was my first session with her. My obvious goal was to explain her my entire situation and why I was suicidal and depressed and then take advice from her. If she wasn't interested in hearing me out, how in the world would she figure out what is going through my mind? 

Quote

 

Her asking questions is normal because she is trying to understand your situation.

But she can ask questions later and let me finish. She wouldn't let me resume my conversation and instead divert it with her questions. She was trying to fast forward it as much as possible because she had one hour and she was trying to pack everything in that hour. 

Quote

I've made some mistakes with a former therapist, I wanted to always talk, and she corrected me and pointed out that I didn't let her give me advice and finish a sentence.

It was her doing most of the talking 

Quote

So keep that in mind. The client might sabotage the therapy because he wants to control the outcome.

There's nothing like controlling the outcome. Nobody is stopping her from giving advice. But calling me a mental case actually reflects the level of respect she had for me in her mind and that explains why she was interrupting me 

[vladorion]

Sounds like an awful psychologist.

Has zero empathy and a ton of her own trauma she projects on her clients.

I knew that most psychologists are not good but this is next level.

Was this in the US?

[Tyler Robinson]

6 minutes ago, vladorion said:

Sounds like an awful psychologist.

Has zero empathy and a ton of her own trauma she projects on her clients.

I knew that most psychologists are not good but this is next level.

Was this in the US?

Yep. 

[Thought Art]

Keep looking for a good psychologist. Ideally one that listens, that helps you grow, challenges you a bit. 

A psychologist can push and challenge you. Sometimes someone calling you on your shit is healing. But, sounds like she was a bit too forward. I actually don’t fully believe it. 

Shop around…. Decide you will get well. 
 

Not all psychologists are the same. Not all are psychoanalytic who just listen to your story, try to u cover past traumas etc.

Though, her behaviour is strange for a first session. Some of the quotes you provide seem a bit odd. 

Edited January 3, 2023 by Thought Art

[Thought Art]

Listen to this audiobook 

 

[SOUL]

@Tyler Robinson  Not only was that a terrible therapist, she's a horrible human, please disregard and discard everything she said. None of it is worthwhile or an accurate assessment of you, sounds like she was projecting her own issues onto you and using you to make herself feel better.

You are valued and loved.

[Tyler Robinson]

20 minutes ago, Thought Art said:

Keep looking for a good psychologist. Ideally one that listens, that helps you grow, challenges you a bit. 

A psychologist can push and challenge you. Sometimes someone calling you on your shit is healing. But, sounds like she was a bit too forward. I actually don’t fully believe it. 

Shop around…. Decide you will get well. 
 

Not all psychologists are the same. Not all are psychoanalytic who just listen to your story, try to u cover past traumas etc.

Though, her behaviour is strange for a first session. Some of the quotes you provide seem a bit odd. 

Yea because she was the weirdest oddest person. I felt completely bewildered and absurd. 

She was judging me the whole time. She was less of a psychologist and more of a disciplinarian. 

She doesn't know heck about psychology. 

Calling me "mental case" shows how little value she gives to mentally ill people. 

Why is she allowed to make profit off of other's misery and allowed to look down on them at the same time. I mean she makes money off people coming to her for help and she thinks that mentally ill people deserve to be divorced or discarded and treated with contempt. The hypocrisy is just astounding.

I honestly feel like she should be barred from practice. 

[Thought Art]

@Tyler Robinson I don’t know. Sounds like everyone is judging each other here. 
 

Not every psychologist is for you! That’s okay. I’ve read enough books by psychologists talking about stories of their practice. 
 

Having a psychologist who ain’t gonna play games is good. But, also one that listens. 
Keep trying. 

Edited January 3, 2023 by Thought Art

[Tyler Robinson]

1 minute ago, SOUL said:

@Tyler Robinson  Not only was that a terrible therapist, she's a horrible human, please disregard and discard everything she said. None of it is worthwhile or an accurate assessment of you, sounds like she was projecting her own issues onto you and using you to make herself feel better.

You are valued and loved.

Yea this is how I felt. I think she had a daughter who had similar issues like mine. So when I began explaining her my mother's situation and my childhood trauma, she did not empathize with me at all.. 

When I told her my mother is bipolar, I expected her to say something like yea it's understandable that you must have had a tough childhood with a bipolar mother. Instead her response was "she is bipolar and you have to understand that this is how she is going to be. If you understand your mother you won't complain about her." 

I was thinking - wtf, how is a child at the age of 6 supposed to know what bipolar is and how is a child supposed to develop the maturity to understand the mental health struggles of their parents. They are kids and they need love and support. Their childhood was ruined regardless of the parents circumstances. 

Of course I understand now that things were difficult for my mom but how could I have known as a child. A child will take what's given to them without understanding the rational behind it. Children will respond positively to sweet behavior and negatively to anger from parents. How can a child have the ability to rationalize a parent's anger? 

Her lack of logic was astounding. She expected me to simply forget my childhood trauma by trying to understand my mom. But she doesn't realize that childhood trauma is called childhood trauma because it happened in childhood and it's effects are experienced in adult life. 

It's like she is clueless to how the human brain evolves 

[Tyler Robinson]

@SOUL I feel like she probably has a daughter like me. And she cannot handle her. And she was constantly sympathizing with my mother. Probably because she herself is a mother? 

She was quick to sympathize with my mom's bipolar mental illness struggles. But I have my own mental health struggles and she couldn't sympathize with that. 

So basically she sympathized with my mother for having bipolar. 

Yet when I talked about my mental health issues with depression and suicide, she labeled me as a "mental case." and she said how difficult it is for a mom to deal with a daughter like me. 

Wasn't it equally difficult for me to deal with a mother like my mom as a child growing up? 

The contradiction was just baffling. 

She purely looked at the whole situation of my trauma only and solely from my mother's perspective. Where was my perspective at all? 

I think she is struggling as a mom with handling her own kids and she projected her wounds as a mother on to me. She saw herself in my mother and probably saw her children in me and began blaming me right away.. 

All of her responses felt like she was blaming me the whole time for my issues. 

Her sentence "you're ruining your own life" was very telling of the fact that she thought I'm bringing everything on myself rather than things happening to me. 

She was blaming me for feeling depressed about my childhood situation as though I was intentionally creating trauma and pain when I had options to forget. 

I couldn't believe that she took childhood trauma so lightly and passed it off as something a person should forget once they grow up. 

She basically invalidated all of my feelings as an imagination of my mind rather than addressing the root cause of those feelings. 

That's why I think she was projecting her own bad mother behavior by making me feel guilty. Her kids probably blame her for her parenting or whatever. And she found an outlet to take out her frustration on me and make herself feel better.. 

She is very unprofessional since she made my issue a personal thing instead of treating it as a "client issue." 

Instead of being neutral and taking both sides, she chose to focus solely on my mother's side and I think this was very biased of her.. 

Edited January 3, 2023 by Tyler Robinson