When Therapy Does More Harm Than Good

The main feature about a bad therapist is that they will force their truths into yours. Their psychoanalysis is less a tool of understanding and more of manipulation.

I hated that I felt guilty confessing my struggles and emotional turmoils because my therapist (now ex) would psychoanalyse and dissect, only to arrive at a humiliating and disparaging conclusion. I felt even more depressed coming out of his sessions than when I first arrived.

At first, I liked that he challenged me. Having someone disagree with — or invalidate — me felt more genuine and sincere than having someone agree with me. I was not used to having my perspective validated. But over time, it became apparent that he projected his antifeminist values beyond productive questioning.

I came to him having dealt with a sexual assault that caused me profound distress. He said that the assaulter was “young and stupid” and that “it wasn’t personal”, as if it was supposed to make me feel better.

And he dared say, “The reason why you feel so distressed is because he was unattractive, weak, and not masculine. If he were attractive, you would have let him do what he did willingly, wouldn’t you?” “Yes…” I said, slightly unsure of my answer.

I felt pigeonholed by his question and thought it was stupid to ask. Because, of course, if I found someone attractive, they would not need to use force. Not to mention, the fact that I found this person attractive in the first place means that they are not the type of person to use force.

I do not think my therapist was overtly sexist. Still, he used a lot of terms and phrases that were obvious dog whistles — using words like “high-value” and “low-value” to describe my prospective dating partners instead of compatible or incompatible.

He called men in my life who have traumatised me “weak”, “not masculine”, and “not dominant” instead of the obvious: abusive. “You resent your father because he was weak, didn’t you?” “No, I resent him because he was abusive to his wife and children.” He frames it as a ‘frailty’ problem instead of an ‘aggression’ problem. He frames vulnerability as a pathology instead of a normal facet of the human condition.

Once, I told him that I felt insecure about my intelligence and achievements, which made me stay away from dating — my idea being that I would start dating once I got ‘good enough’.

He responded, Men don’t care about that. Do you think men care about intelligence and achievements?” I stared in silence and private dismay. “You know what they care about.” “What? How I look and sex?” “Yeah, what else?” he laughed. I felt existentially devastated and was about to cry. “I reject that.” “How so?” “I don’t have proof or prior experience. But believing in that makes me depressed. So, I will reject it.”

I reject these sociobiological constructs while he accepts them. The pattern is that whenever I bring up something ‘traditionally feminine’ about me that I want to change and ascend from, he will bring up studies that validate his apriori assumption that such traits are natural and desirable in women (naturalisation).

When I raised my insecurity about feeling weak, subordinate, and not aggressive enough, he asked, “Why is that a problem?” “If I were a man, I know you would tell me to stop being weak,” I answered. “Right,” he said, “but the rules for men and women are different.”

What I hated most about our sessions was that it was a debate where one side could use an unfair amount of ad hominem. He once explained that I did not find my ex-partner attractive because he “wasn’t a good provider.” I said I didn’t know what he was talking about; I would rather sleep on the floor on my property than on comfortable sheets with a high thread count, but that wasn’t mine.

He responded, “That’s interesting. Why do you cling to radical feminism so tightly?” “What do you mean?” “It’s as if you’re digging your claws in and clinging onto it like a lifeline — why?” “You’re framing my ideas and preferences as ‘Other’. You wouldn’t ask me such questions if I was a man, wouldn’t you? You would just take it for granted.” “Of course. But the rules are different, and you know it. Now, onto your attachment with radical feminism…”

I hate having all my problems being interpreted through a lens that validates my therapist’s own patriarchal and heteronormative worldview. “Do you know any women around you who can live up to feminist standards?” he asked. “My mother and grandmothers.” “Are they happy?” “…No.”

Being honest and emotionally vulnerable, as one would with a therapist, put me in a precarious situation where I would lose the argument. I could not debate on equal grounds because he did not see me as a person.

He saw me as a thing to “fix”, as a machine that had inner mechanisms to be taken apart and figured out in such a way that any clever idea I had must necessarily stem from childhood trauma or a neurotic preoccupation, therefore negating the value of anything I believed in.

Eventually, I brought up the Overton window; in my eyes, stuff he considered “liberal” was conservative because his Overton window was much more shifted to the right than mine.

“It’s interesting how you’re so biased,” he responded as if it was an astute analysis. At this moment, I realised that not even therapists are immune to their own biases. He was biased, and it disappointed me how he blamed me without assessing his personal biases.

. . .

One night, my friend said, “I don’t know why you surround yourself with people who hate you. It’s like you keep them around so they debate you and challenge your ideas. You think it makes you grow if you successfully deal with misogyny in poise. But you’ll never win over them. There is no adjudicator in these debates. They’ll never change.”

He gave me the analogy of the murder of Julius Caesar. Indeed, it felt like I was being stabbed on all sides. “Et tu, Brutus?” was how I felt about my therapist.

What drew the line for me was when I told my therapist about having a crush on someone, only for him to misinterpret and denigrate my feelings towards someone who meant a lot to me. “You like him because he’s a masculine guy,” my ex-therapist said, proud of my improvement from having previously dated guys who he concluded felt emasculated in my presence, thus resulting in unhealthy relationships.

However, I didn’t like my crush because he was into combat sports. I liked him because he believed in me when I felt no one else did.

I told my then-crush I wanted to unalive myself because I felt existentially powerless. He responded that nowadays, the only power is money, and then he sent me a podcast of interviews with female entrepreneurs. “There are so many ways to make money. You are not limited as to who you have to be.”

He was a bit of a lifeline when I felt like drowning. I borrowed his spirit for a while before I could find my own. I lived vicariously through him and wanted to be like him. His extremism — swearing to euthanise himself if he didn’t reach his goals by 30 — was the only language I could speak, the only frame of mind I understood.

In “How Not to Kill Yourself”, Clancy Martin wrote that the best thing you can say to a suicidal person is that there is always tomorrow. If you’re going to procrastinate every part of your life, why not do it with suicide, too?

If people or situations make you want to unalive yourself, you can change your reality. I became adamant about proving my therapist wrong. I made a vision board of successful women I wanted to be like. My therapist motivated me to be a better person because he was such a bad therapist.

I thought, “I am going to prove him wrong — or die trying.”

. . .

My core problem entering therapy went beyond not knowing how to live. I didn’t know what to live for, feeling rather undeserving of life. I felt existentially powerless, and my therapists’ words further solidified my fears about the ‘nature’ of reality. It wasn’t ‘nature’, it turns out. It is a social construct — and one we can choose to reject.

When I sent the email asking to quit, he essentially responded, “Sure, good luck!” without any closing session. I felt simultaneously annoyed that he cared so little for me and relieved that it further solidified my decision to quit. My excuse was that I was looking for a female therapist with a similar ethnic background who could understand my experiences with cultural context.

I felt a burden lifted from my shoulders, the same feeling I got when I broke up with a toxic ex. Of course, I felt lonely. The training wheels were off. At first, it felt like the bike was about to fall. But then, as I cycled faster and faster, I realised how much the training wheels had been an obstacle instead of help. Instead of looking down, fixating on my training wheels, I cycled forward, feeling the wind on my skin.

I will define my life. I will fall, scrape my shins, and rise again. That is my reason to live. Self-hatred will always be an existential reality. It is like a ball of glue stuck on your thumb that you can’t flick off.

We can never know the ‘truths’ about the world, especially when it concerns existential matters. I wanted, or desperately needed, to create my reality.

Therapists can present studies on how brains work and how people behave on a population level. But I reject it; I am not going to be another statistic. I believe in the law of truly large numbers: given a large enough data set, it is more unlikely for no unlikely thing to happen than for an unlikely thing to happen.

Instead of overly intellectualising, reflecting, and psychoanalysing, I’ve committed to ‘purposefully mindless’ doing. Studies show that practically distracting yourself from negative feelings, not thinking about them or entertaining them further, can be more beneficial for emotional well-being than taking that feeling too seriously.

I started with Descartes’ “I think, therefore, I am” to arrive at Simone Weil’s “I will, therefore, I am.”

Your ‘will’ is your reason to live. I will prove him wrong.

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This post was previously published on An Injustice!

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