bad therapy for marital ending

When Rosa's marriage of eighteen years ended she became so upset and out of control that she feared she was losing her mind and, quite naturally, she sought help from her medical practitioner who referred her to a therapist.

"I was very reluctant to see a therapist," explains Rosa. "I didn't want to tell a stranger, even a doctor, the sensitive details of my inner life. I just expected my doctor to give me some pills to calm me down but he insisted I needed professional help. Trusting he had my best interests at heart, I acquiesced to his medical judgment."

"The lady he sent me to see seemed to be very nice," says Rosa, "and as I had gone this far to seek help in getting my life together, I decided to continue seeing her."

"She put me through a series of exercises where I had to keep a journal of everyone I had dealings with and everything I did," says Rosa, "and in doing these exercises I surprised myself in realizing just how crazy my life was. I was dating four guys at the time!"

"She asked about my childhood and marriage and despite my telling her that I had a happy childhood, and seventeen years of happiness in my marriage before my husband went crazy and left me, she maintained that I was kidding myself."

"Hello? She seemed adamant about making me believe that my life up to now had been a lie," says Rosa, "and this just didn't sit well with me because I knew that I had been loved and wanted by my parents and ex husband."

"From the little I knew about therapists they are supposed to be supportive and instrumental in building up self-esteem," says Rosa, "but this lady seemed to be determined to shred me to pieces."

"I started to get suspicious when she talked about another client of hers - a man who had apparently fallen in love with her and was annoying her by calling her at home."

"She suggested that he would make a good friend for me," explains Rosa, "and she kept on asking me to meet with her at a bar where she would arrange to introduce him to me."

"I refused the introduction because frankly I had far too many guys in my life already and I certainly didn't want to get mixed up with someone in therapy - even though I was," explains Rosa. "If anything, I felt I needed to strip people from my life and mix only with reliable and happy people capable of helping me over this period in my life."

"I thought it was very odd and possibly unethical for a therapist to be acting as a matchmaker," adds Rosa. "I wanted to get my life back together so that I could be a good mom for my kids and do well at work, but all this woman was doing was upsetting me more than I was already."

"I may have been out of control and totally scattered when I first saw her," says Rosa, "but after a few weeks of her so-called therapy I was climbing the walls!"

"I guess my displeasure didn't go unnoticed because at the next therapy session I was surprised when the therapist didn't invite me into her office," says Rosa.

"Instead, she sat in the waiting room with me -- actually she sat way across the room from me, rather than next to me -- and proceeded to ask me all the usual questions about what I had been doing since she last saw me."

"I felt terribly uncomfortable and terminated the session early," says Rosa. "I paid her for the hour but decided after that session not to see her again."

"I felt she was playing mind games with me," explains Rosa, "and while that is probably the sort of thing therapists do for a living I didn't feel she was doing it in my best interests."

"Maybe it was all her round about way of getting me to assert myself and face the fact that I deserve better in life than what I had been dished up," says Rosa, "but it all left a bitter taste in my mouth."

"Rather than coming away from a few months of therapy feeling good about myself," explains Rosa, "I ended up feeling absolutely worthless."

"I thought: If a therapist I was paying to help me ended up treating me like dirt, then what hope did I have to get my life together?"

"I spend the rest of the year reading a lot of self-help therapy books and they turned my life around," says Rosa. "Actually, the books helped but it was my own inner guidance that steered me on the right track."

"The therapist actually called me a few times wondering why I hadn't make another appointment," laughs Rosa, "and I told her quite truthfully that I didn't feel the sessions had helped me."

"She told me that I needed to complete the sessions in order to get benefit from them," says Rosa, "but I wasn't going to buy into that nonsense."

"As far as I was concerned she had betrayed my trust and twisted my vulnerable situation to her advantage."

"The self-help books were telling me that I was a beautiful person and deserved a beautiful man and a good life," explains Rosa, "and this was what I needed to hear because it matched what my inner guidance was telling me all along. How silly that I needed someone else to tell me what I knew already!"

"Everything that the therapist had told me was designed to make me feel bad about myself," says Rosa, "and if I had continued with her sessions I would have probably ended up penniless and totally dependent upon her for any sort of worth."

"I suppose therapists have a vested interest in keeping their clients feeling bad about themselves," sighs Rosa, "but I didn't go there feeling bad about myself. I went there feeling bad about the lousy people in my life - and she became just one more lousy person in my life that I needed to get rid of!"

"My childhood had been happy, and my marriage had lasted seventeen happy years before my husband went through the mid-life crisis and went off the rails."

"By robbing me of those memories of happiness -- trying to get me to believe that it was all a lie --that therapist was acting, in my opinion, in an unethical manner."

"I thought about reporting her to the professional body, to safeguard some other poor soul from falling into her clutches" says Rosa, "but I decided against it."

"Let's face it," laughs Rosa, "I was a client, a woman with emotional problems, and who do you think would be more believable - the crazy therapist or me?"

"If problems can be scaled," says Rosa, "then that therapist had far more problems than I had. People in positions of power who use and abuse vulnerable women are sick."

"I'm back on track now and feeling good about myself," confides Rosa. "and the next time I feel ill or upset about anything I'll be turning to self-help books rather than doctors!"

(Rosa's story first appeared as the therapist and is reprinted with permission.)

assertiveness therapy

Charlotte is a lovely 52-year old woman, she has a lot of things going for her, yet her sweet and complaint nature was so horribly manipulated by her now estranged husband and their adult boys that she had to seek therapy.

"When I saw how my boys had grown up to be as abusive towards me as their dad, and had organized the house to suit themselves, I felt like an unpaid housekeeper in a men's domain," says Charlotte. "They never helped me around the house or listened to anything I said. They twisted all my words and made me look a fool."

"I needed to separate, to get away and find myself before I went mad," says Charlotte. "I'm in therapy, learning how to assert myself, and I hope that this new skill will help me find a satisfying job--not involving housework--and a decent new guy."

"Yes," laughs Charlotte. "I want to get married again. Why wouldn't I want to spend my sunset years with a guy who cherishes me?"

One of the first things Charlotte learned in therapy was to be aware of conversational manipulation, which can include something as seemingly innocuous as someone changing the subject. By changing the subject the manipulator prevents her from continuing a line of discussion that is important to her and damaging to the other party.

"If the subject is really important to me," says Charlotte, "then I must refuse to be side-tracked. I must assert myself, and return immediately to the topic I want to discuss. If my husband or the boys persist in changing the subject then I must stop the conversation immediately and advise them that I will put my case in writing and will have no further dealings with them until my issues are addressed."

Another clever conversational screw Charlotte is picking up on is the one where people make you repeat what you say in an attempt to make you look foolish.

"Unless the culprit is really deaf," says Charlotte, "I now recognize this ploy and suggest very sweetly that he or she needs their ears testing. There was a time when I used to fall for this trick time and time again with my husband. Now, I refuse to repeat what I say if I’m reasonably sure that I was heard the first time."

Silence, of course, is an age-old conversational screwing tactic. It is designed to infuriate you, test your limits and see if you will lose your temper. Faced with a stone deaf wall from her husband and boys every time she wanted help around the house, Charlotte often lost her temper. They gained power and she lost it. Given the choice to ignore the silence and chat away merrily - or to decide that these power games are not worth dealing with - Charlotte preferred to walk away and stay away.

A particular conversational screwing problem for Charlotte is her estranged husband’s use of unwarranted emotional outbursts - anger or tears - to unnerve her and distract her from a situation where he was at a disadvantage. Rather than being manipulated into feeling fear or sympathy when he uses anger or tears to unnerve her and distract her from a position of power, Charlotte now sees these ploys for what they are and is learning to ignore them.

"My boys are also particularly good at using anger to manipulate me," sighs Charlotte, "I suppose it’s a trait they learned from their father. I just hope I can teach them to respect women before they get married and start repeating history with their own wives."

Other conversational manipulations Charlotte is learning to deal with are situations where vital information is withheld from her, either allowing her to find out the truth from someone else or deliberately choosing to divulge the truth to her at the worst possible time when she is unable to protect herself. Rather than trusting people, Charlotte now makes a point to ask lots of questions and get things down in writing if necessary.

The main problem Charlotte has with her estranged husband is dealing with his bad language, insults and verbal intimidation. Charlotte has learned that this type of conversational screwing is done by very, very small men who need to build themselves up by putting her down. Nobody can put her down without her permission, and now that Charlotte is seeing things from a different perspective she is learning to laugh at verbal intimidation from him. She is learning to see it as a sort of backhanded compliment.

"If I weren’t the lovely lady that I am," she laughs, "he wouldn’t be attempting to put me down. Right?"

Charlotte is looking for a decent job right now and is doing her best to put her new assertiveness training into practice. Interviews typically place the interviewee in a position of powerlessness, and Charlotte is gaining a lot of confidence from being able to spot a manipulative interviewer from the start. Twice already she has stopped an interview in mid-progress and said that she was no longer interested in the job. She doesn’t want to work for a company that use screwing tactics on prospective employees.

"I put up with too much from my husband to ever want to be put down again," asserts Charlotte, "and now that I’m separated from him I’m becoming a new woman.

"There's a new guy waiting for me - I know it - when I've totally transformed myself into an assertive woman."