When therapists aren't the answer
Aug. 13th, 2020 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hungryghostsWe were asked to share our experiences with the intersection of maladaptive daydreaming and DID, and it got us to thinking about the role of therapy. Namely - how little a role it actually played in getting us out of our godawful world.
As context: parents were abusive. (Big shock there.) Withdrew into daydreaming to cope. Kind of drifted along through life, using our Gifted And Talented(tm) abilities to manage until college, when we became utterly dysfunctional due to loss of structure, increased course difficulty, and increased parent abusiveness. (We still maintain that we would have handled the first two better if it weren't for the third.) Became selves-aware, began shakily putting our collective life together. Parents got worse. We crashed, dropped out, fled, and cut contact. Long period of recovery where we continued to put our life back together, helped by friends. Eventually went to a code school and graduated, somehow got a job in Big Tech, continuing to put our life together but with less threat of starvation and homelessness.
Looking back on it all, I think there were three main factors that enabled our recovery:
1) GETTING THE FUCKHELL OUT OF THE BAD SITUATION. This was the single best thing we have EVER done for ourselves. There was no way we could have built a better life for ourselves if our parents were around to keep knocking it down.
2) Getting to a safe living situation with a supportive outer social network. Our friends (a mix of plurals from all over the spectrum and supportive singlets) modelled healthier behavior for us. They taught us how to set our own boundaries and how to respect others'. They said no when they needed to and were assertive, but not aggressive. They helped us freely and never lashed out at us for asking. They even taught us basic adulting things our parents had conveniently neglected, like taxes and cooking. They weren't perfect, but they taught us a lot about how to be functional humans and what functional humans actually looked like.
3) Building internal solidarity. And this was the second best thing we've ever done for ourselves. We're able to reach each other in places that our outside friends can't, able to be present for each other at times that outside friends can't. Before we had our outside friends, we were each other's shelter. We fucked up a lot of things at first because we were stuck with (quoting LB's excellent writing) children's solutions to adult problems, but we kept each other going even then.
(And I want to mention that most of our selves-understanding came from the greater plural community. Not DID research, not therapists, not clinical resources. The plural community.)
Meanwhile, we barely had any interaction with therapy. When we first dropped out, adrift and frantic, we were also panicked over being "fake" and were convinced that we needed to validate ourselves with a Professional Diagnosis before anything else. So we spent hundreds out of our savings to get a very cursory diagnosis from a dissociative specialist, after which a set of us went "this is bullshit, we're spending money we don't have to see someone hours away who gives us the creeps, just because some people on the internet who've never done anything to help us told us we needed to? FUCK THAT." Some of us were still in denial, which escalated into internal fighting and ended only when one of us threatened self-harm and forcibly locked down our body to prove he could do it. That pretty much ended it - even the people in denial had to acknowledge that even if they thought we were crazy and fake it would be in their best interests to play along. From there, we just... wondered if we were fake less and less, until we hardly did it anymore, and the question just became ludicrous to us.
Years later, when we were attending the code school, we tried therapy again. Unfortunately, we hit a financial rough spot and couldn't continue. Then, years later again, after getting employed with Big Tech, we found our current therapist. Both times, though, we didn't learn our major life skills or internal functioning from them. They weren't surrogate parents or saintly figures who held the key to our recovery. Instead, they were more of a sounding board for our own ideas, people to check in with on our goals, and people we could talk to about Current Events and worldsuck when our friends weren't able to manage such topics. (Both therapists were from marginalized groups - the first therapist was a bi lady, and the second was a Jewish trans nonbinary person.)
Which leads us back to our overall thought train on therapy: therapy can be helpful, and even in a better world there will be cases that require trained intervention... but I think therapy is very often trying to monkey-patch bigger issues in the system. It wasn't therapy that drove our recovery - it was a healthy social network, inside and out, and being removed from the bad place and being placed in one where we were fed, sheltered, and generally treated like an actual person with rights and autonomy rather than a cog in someone else's ambitions.
I feel like "go see a therapist" is advice that's given a lot without much thought for the implications. (Hell, I'm guilty of doing that, myself.) And the premise isn't unreasonable - most people don't have the experience or training to render psychological first aid safely. Sometimes you're really, truly out of your depth, and the best thing that you can do is point someone elsewhere to a place that's hopefully more helpful. But I also feel like there's often an unspoken assumption in this recommendation, that if you can just get in touch with a therapist, they will fix everything, they'll be able to singlehandedly right years of trauma from a broken world, just like that.
And that's a hell of an unfair assumption to make. For the person seeking help, and for the person giving it. One person cannot singlehandedly "fix" another person, especially if that person's environment is actively working against their recovery. No amount of training will change this. At best, the therapist and the client will be trapped in limbo, for years. At worst, the therapist becomes drunk on their own authority, and just becomes another abuser.
(Let's face it: a bad therapist is worse than no therapist, and there are a LOT of bad therapists. The field - the very idea of helping people who are vulnerable and struggling - attracts both the well-meaning and the predatory, and historically, psychiatry has glorified the therapist and the status quo, and discredited the client and the marginalized.)
Recovery is a group effort. Therapy can't replace getting the hell out of a bad situation, or having a good social network. Therapy can't build up if it's all torn down the moment the client leaves the office. Therapy cannot patch the gaping holes in a world where people are routinely left to die (or actively killed) so that the status quo can endure and the 1% can buy even bigger yachts.
Meanwhile, if we had a world where everyone was fed, sheltered, and treated like people... maybe we would still need therapists. Or some kind of trained mental health specialist. But maybe there wouldn't be such a expectation that therapists will fix everything, something that bad therapists routinely abuse and is just plain unfair to expect at all. Maybe, even if we still need specialists, maybe we wouldn't need them as much, and we can create healthier dynamics with them when we still do.
And psychiatry won't create this better world. The queer, crazy, historically-pathologized people will.
It's a complicated matter. Please do not take this impassioned rant as an order to help everyone you come across - mind your own boundaries. And if you're seeing a therapist and they're helping you, please keep seeing them! The better world is not here yet. And there are edge cases I haven't addressed. Sometimes, a therapist can't fix everything, but they can perform first aid and keep you from bleeding out right then and there. Sometimes, communities are shitty! And sometimes there are people who're content to wallow in their misery, who'll piss away every good opportunity they get and piss on the people who gave them those opportunities.
Nothing is ever simple.
But all of this is a big part of why we're salty about exclusionists and other medical-centralists. It's why after years we've taken off and thrown the DID and traumagenic labels to the ground, because it was not psychiatry that got us out of our pit, it was not clinical literature or therapists, it was community - our fellow queer crazy friends and our own queer crazy internal household. (Even the escape was a collective effort.) The greater plural community, as cult-ridden and hypocritical and goddamn petty as it is, started us on that path. The exclusionists, meanwhile, only succeeded in making us waste money and fight each other.
I feel like I should end this rant with something profound or at least clever, but idk. I've rambled on long enough. Brian David Gilbert makes excellent video shitposts. Go watch some of them.
As context: parents were abusive. (Big shock there.) Withdrew into daydreaming to cope. Kind of drifted along through life, using our Gifted And Talented(tm) abilities to manage until college, when we became utterly dysfunctional due to loss of structure, increased course difficulty, and increased parent abusiveness. (We still maintain that we would have handled the first two better if it weren't for the third.) Became selves-aware, began shakily putting our collective life together. Parents got worse. We crashed, dropped out, fled, and cut contact. Long period of recovery where we continued to put our life back together, helped by friends. Eventually went to a code school and graduated, somehow got a job in Big Tech, continuing to put our life together but with less threat of starvation and homelessness.
Looking back on it all, I think there were three main factors that enabled our recovery:
1) GETTING THE FUCKHELL OUT OF THE BAD SITUATION. This was the single best thing we have EVER done for ourselves. There was no way we could have built a better life for ourselves if our parents were around to keep knocking it down.
2) Getting to a safe living situation with a supportive outer social network. Our friends (a mix of plurals from all over the spectrum and supportive singlets) modelled healthier behavior for us. They taught us how to set our own boundaries and how to respect others'. They said no when they needed to and were assertive, but not aggressive. They helped us freely and never lashed out at us for asking. They even taught us basic adulting things our parents had conveniently neglected, like taxes and cooking. They weren't perfect, but they taught us a lot about how to be functional humans and what functional humans actually looked like.
3) Building internal solidarity. And this was the second best thing we've ever done for ourselves. We're able to reach each other in places that our outside friends can't, able to be present for each other at times that outside friends can't. Before we had our outside friends, we were each other's shelter. We fucked up a lot of things at first because we were stuck with (quoting LB's excellent writing) children's solutions to adult problems, but we kept each other going even then.
(And I want to mention that most of our selves-understanding came from the greater plural community. Not DID research, not therapists, not clinical resources. The plural community.)
Meanwhile, we barely had any interaction with therapy. When we first dropped out, adrift and frantic, we were also panicked over being "fake" and were convinced that we needed to validate ourselves with a Professional Diagnosis before anything else. So we spent hundreds out of our savings to get a very cursory diagnosis from a dissociative specialist, after which a set of us went "this is bullshit, we're spending money we don't have to see someone hours away who gives us the creeps, just because some people on the internet who've never done anything to help us told us we needed to? FUCK THAT." Some of us were still in denial, which escalated into internal fighting and ended only when one of us threatened self-harm and forcibly locked down our body to prove he could do it. That pretty much ended it - even the people in denial had to acknowledge that even if they thought we were crazy and fake it would be in their best interests to play along. From there, we just... wondered if we were fake less and less, until we hardly did it anymore, and the question just became ludicrous to us.
Years later, when we were attending the code school, we tried therapy again. Unfortunately, we hit a financial rough spot and couldn't continue. Then, years later again, after getting employed with Big Tech, we found our current therapist. Both times, though, we didn't learn our major life skills or internal functioning from them. They weren't surrogate parents or saintly figures who held the key to our recovery. Instead, they were more of a sounding board for our own ideas, people to check in with on our goals, and people we could talk to about Current Events and worldsuck when our friends weren't able to manage such topics. (Both therapists were from marginalized groups - the first therapist was a bi lady, and the second was a Jewish trans nonbinary person.)
Which leads us back to our overall thought train on therapy: therapy can be helpful, and even in a better world there will be cases that require trained intervention... but I think therapy is very often trying to monkey-patch bigger issues in the system. It wasn't therapy that drove our recovery - it was a healthy social network, inside and out, and being removed from the bad place and being placed in one where we were fed, sheltered, and generally treated like an actual person with rights and autonomy rather than a cog in someone else's ambitions.
I feel like "go see a therapist" is advice that's given a lot without much thought for the implications. (Hell, I'm guilty of doing that, myself.) And the premise isn't unreasonable - most people don't have the experience or training to render psychological first aid safely. Sometimes you're really, truly out of your depth, and the best thing that you can do is point someone elsewhere to a place that's hopefully more helpful. But I also feel like there's often an unspoken assumption in this recommendation, that if you can just get in touch with a therapist, they will fix everything, they'll be able to singlehandedly right years of trauma from a broken world, just like that.
And that's a hell of an unfair assumption to make. For the person seeking help, and for the person giving it. One person cannot singlehandedly "fix" another person, especially if that person's environment is actively working against their recovery. No amount of training will change this. At best, the therapist and the client will be trapped in limbo, for years. At worst, the therapist becomes drunk on their own authority, and just becomes another abuser.
(Let's face it: a bad therapist is worse than no therapist, and there are a LOT of bad therapists. The field - the very idea of helping people who are vulnerable and struggling - attracts both the well-meaning and the predatory, and historically, psychiatry has glorified the therapist and the status quo, and discredited the client and the marginalized.)
Recovery is a group effort. Therapy can't replace getting the hell out of a bad situation, or having a good social network. Therapy can't build up if it's all torn down the moment the client leaves the office. Therapy cannot patch the gaping holes in a world where people are routinely left to die (or actively killed) so that the status quo can endure and the 1% can buy even bigger yachts.
Meanwhile, if we had a world where everyone was fed, sheltered, and treated like people... maybe we would still need therapists. Or some kind of trained mental health specialist. But maybe there wouldn't be such a expectation that therapists will fix everything, something that bad therapists routinely abuse and is just plain unfair to expect at all. Maybe, even if we still need specialists, maybe we wouldn't need them as much, and we can create healthier dynamics with them when we still do.
And psychiatry won't create this better world. The queer, crazy, historically-pathologized people will.
It's a complicated matter. Please do not take this impassioned rant as an order to help everyone you come across - mind your own boundaries. And if you're seeing a therapist and they're helping you, please keep seeing them! The better world is not here yet. And there are edge cases I haven't addressed. Sometimes, a therapist can't fix everything, but they can perform first aid and keep you from bleeding out right then and there. Sometimes, communities are shitty! And sometimes there are people who're content to wallow in their misery, who'll piss away every good opportunity they get and piss on the people who gave them those opportunities.
Nothing is ever simple.
But all of this is a big part of why we're salty about exclusionists and other medical-centralists. It's why after years we've taken off and thrown the DID and traumagenic labels to the ground, because it was not psychiatry that got us out of our pit, it was not clinical literature or therapists, it was community - our fellow queer crazy friends and our own queer crazy internal household. (Even the escape was a collective effort.) The greater plural community, as cult-ridden and hypocritical and goddamn petty as it is, started us on that path. The exclusionists, meanwhile, only succeeded in making us waste money and fight each other.
I feel like I should end this rant with something profound or at least clever, but idk. I've rambled on long enough. Brian David Gilbert makes excellent video shitposts. Go watch some of them.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-15 05:07 am (UTC)It stuck with us, because she was a unicorn and we'd probably still be seeing her today if not for moving to California.
Thank you so much for writing this. It was beautiful.
Brian David Gilbert, eh? (Goes to click on shitposts) Also, Zefrank makes good ones too, only they're about science, but some involve shit.)
Harlow