Today I'm watching Patrick Teahan's video about invaliding therapists, and wow, does it make my stomach hurt (especially with the first one).  I can't stand the idea of a therapist making a narcissistic parent's bad behavior all about the child, as though it's their fault.  I wish all adult children of narcissists could watch this so they can see what a bad therapist looks like, even when they're masking themselves as someone who's giving valid advice, so they could understand that not all therapists are good therapists.  Some will give you extremely harmful information.  We all need to be able to recognize when that happens, so we don't take that advice and think it's valid.  I had a few of these myself, which is why I don't have a therapist anymore.  And the strange part is two of my therapists started out great, but slowly morphed into being annoyed with me and gave me worse and worse therapy as time went on (which is a sign of narcissism) until they just stopped caring at all and I stopped showing up.

But here is the video, please share it with your friends because everyone should be knowledgeable about what an invalidating therapist looks like: 

The third role play cracks me up because one of those two therapists I was talking about above did exactly that.  She was all about EMDR, which I hate, and she could not get over that I hated it, and tried to push it on me all the time.  So near the end of our working relationship, I said okay.  And it gave me one of the worst migraines I'd ever had, and once I told her that, she didn't want much to do with me anymore, so I quit going.  So many more horrible things went wrong with our six-month therapy sessions, she was beyond bonkers and drove me nuts, but near the end, EMDR was all she could talk about.  It was ridiculous.  

And as for the quiet one, the one who doesn't say anything at all, I had two of those, too.  One of them literally only repeated back to me what I said (and she did the same to my husband as well) "So, what I am hearing is (insert what I just said to her here)".  And the other one was a jackass who always hugged me without permission (I do NOT like strangers touching me) and then would rant and rave for the first half of the session about how she hated taking care of her dead sister's children.  And then she'd let me talk and say nothing back to me.  It was awful.  All of these therapists were ones who take our state's Medicaid, so maybe that's why?  The state must be scraping the bottom of the barrel with these shitty ones.  

Especially my last one.  He used to get me mixed up with other patients, give me "homework" he'd never mention again, schedule my visits on his car ride to go get his son from daycare, and he'd never listen to me and give me "therapy" on things I wasn't even talking about.  In the beginning, like them all, he showed promise, but soon after his true colors came out and he became less and less of an actual therapist.  Then, I quit seeing him and wrote a review of him online.  As retaliation, he refused to talk to the Social Security office about my claim for benefits due to my anxiety.  Instead, he called me and made me start seeing him again, and then talked about how he read a review of himself online from a former patient (mine was literally the ONLY one) and how he thought it was wrong and dumb.  And his treatment of me got even worse.  I put off seeing him as much as I could until I could stop.  And now I haven't rewritten my review of him yet, but I will.  Soon.  

The final one I want to talk about was my sexual assault counselor who never once brought up my sexual assault, yet talked about my mother (and genealogy..she was a big genealogy buff) and tried to convince me that my mother was sexually abused as a child and wasn't a narcissist.  I was like how in the hell do you know that?  You don't even know her.  So I stopped seeing her, too.  So irritating.  

But I just wanted to share Patrick's video, because everyone needs to know how to recognize these bad types of therapists.  

Have you ever had a bad therapist?  Did you have one that invalidated you?  If so, let me know below.  And also, PLEASE write a review of your bad therapist online so other patients can know they aren't alone getting bad treatment from those same therapists (and enough reviews will help people pick better therapists).