Starting Therapy Again After a Bad Experience
How to trust the process after you’ve been burned
For whatever reason, I’ve had the privilege of working with several folks in the past few years who have started working with me after having one or more bad experiences with therapists. From feeling invalidated, misunderstood, or judged in their identities, to working with therapists who straight up re-traumatized them as they were attempting to heal from abusive relationships, it’s an unfortunate reality that there is a wide spectrum in terms of quality mental health care. As much as therapists try to be a safe space for their clients, harm can and does happen, and not every therapist will be adept in the rupture and repair process. For Black and Indigenous folks, for queer people and trans people, and for clients who are coming to therapy with other marginalized identities, including diagnoses such as borderline personality disorder (which is still stigmatized and misunderstood even among mental health professionals), it can be quite difficult to find a clinician who shares your lived experience or can relate to you from a place other than academic study. Relating to a new person cross differences in identity, within the power dynamic of the clinician/client relationship, and against the backdrop of the larger historical context of the mental health industrial complex, is risky…
