Choosing the wrong people to help you heal from childhood trauma is ironically a very
traumatized person thing to do a bad therapist or coach or just one who's
not a fit for you can take you down the road to reactivating your trauma and even making it worse
and meanwhile nothing in your life is getting better you've maybe been through this
where you show up every week and you work really hard but you're wondering the whole time like why
do I still feel sad and stuck why is nothing getting better I'm Anna Runkle also known as
the crappy childhood fairy and this week on ask the fairy I want to read to you a letter from
a woman who I'll call carmen and I picked her letter because I think there are a lot of people
out there who just like her have stuck it out with therapists who just weren't helping them all right
so here's her letter hi I've been in therapy the past year with a counselor who I believed would be
helping me with progression to become healthy however some red flags have come up and I've
noticed that they've been setbacks some comments that she made have included saying I would miss
her until the next session or complimenting me on my dress and saying that I wore it for her
now she's invited me to a session of going running while doing emdr four question marks she's usually
friendly but she seemed disturbed on our last visit and I asked if everything was okay and it's
understandable that she wouldn't want to spill her personal issues on me as a client but she seemed
mentally preoccupied and as she talked to me she peered out the window and was distant and not
personable which was how she'd always been before I felt like all the times my mom was upset with
me when I was seven years old and I didn't know why afraid not accepted confused and my trust was
shaken I understand how transference and counter transference can affect the therapeutic alliance
but a therapist should understand how this can be harmful and make adjustments or refer out I don't
feel safe now because her compliments seem odd I overlooked them in the past but together with her
other behaviors she seems moody and unstable to me I feel like I need to find another therapist
what are your thoughts and she says p.s I'm going to grad school to become a therapist and work in
behavioral health I would never behave the way she does because I understand ethical boundaries
and I want to be psychologically fit before I become a professional helper please help all
right thank you carmen this is a great letter and a great opportunity for us to talk about crap fit
now for those of you who don't know my word crap fit this is a word I made up for the way that
those of us who grew up with abuse and neglect as kids sometimes become too good at fitting
ourselves to a person or a situation that's completely unacceptable and the clue for me is
that as a student you feel there are ethical boundaries and that she's not keeping them
and so I would just say that if your therapist has lost trust lost your trust because of ethical
boundary violations it actually is time to go it could be time to report somebody I'm not really
sure if any of this is reportable stuff it's just stuff that made you feel weird and uncomfortable
and you yourself said you feel like you need to change so I just wanted to get that out
up front yeah this does not sound like a good fit but I also want to talk about for the benefit of
all of us how do you know when somebody's not a good fit what are some of the signs right now
I'm a little bit biased I'm not somebody who has benefited from professional therapy in the past
I tried a lot of it it didn't tend to go anywhere with me but I know that for a lot of people they
have found a really good fit for what they're working on and what the therapist can provide and
anybody who does therapy really should seek that type of connection where it does work you do feel
like it's helping you and not just like on some promise of like a year from now but like you start
feeling better a little bit each time you see them right and that you have actionable steps so let's
talk about some of the things that you can use as an indicator that this is not a good fit all
right number one they seem disinterested in you or they can't remember the details of your life
or what you even talked about last week this is kind of a no-brainer what you're paying for in
therapy is to get assistance from somebody who pays attention to who you are and what
the struggle is right now and if they're too busy or too burdened or too distracted to do that that
really would be a pretty easy criteria to say you haven't found a fit all right number two they make
you feel dependent on them sort of like a child is dependent on a parent or probably more accurately
they allow you to attach to them in this manner and it makes you feel increasingly helpless I
think there is a such thing as an attachment that feels like child parent that can be constructive
but constructive means it feels healthy you're not stuck in that role you can kind of come in
and out you can observe when you're sort of feeling like you're in a child role with them
call it what you will transference counter transference if it's making you feel helpless
and stuck in your therapy it's probably not a fit all right
the third reason a therapist might not be a fit is they feed your anger instead of showing you
the path of progress now anger feels like healing at first self-pity feels like that at first too
and this is sometimes a strategy employed by people who don't actually know how to help
someone to get free of trauma it is easy to help someone somebody get angry and upset and I think
sometimes you can over romanticize those states of emotion as so therapeutic but just being angry
just expressing a bunch of anger does not have a very good track record of helping people get
all the way healed it can be a way to get up from depression
you know you have depression down here up here is anger right maybe maybe depression self-pity anger
and that anger it feels very powerful it feels like a lot is happening and it might be important
to get in touch but but to really heal you have to go up from there and not everybody knows how to
help somebody actually get free a lot of people know how to help you get angry hardly anybody
knows how to help you get free so hold out for that hold out for people who can actually help you
process and integrate that and get free of it so that you can move on and and not be angry
anymore and start to be more fulfilled and pursuing the things that you want to do in
your life that really needs to be the goal number four is they try to convince you that the reason
when you feel worse and worse instead of better after a whole series of visits is because they say
it's going to take a really long time to feel better all right a lot of people will
say that and it's true that there's a such thing as long-term healing but actually for
any kind of therapy or treatment to be sustainable it needs to give you a bit of relief like every
time you do it it needs to feel good it needs to feel uh like there's hope and progress
from what from the work that you're doing if you're doing something and it's just upsetting
you and tearing you down and tearing you down it's probably not a good fit no matter what they say
about it so look for a therapist who actually has both long-term strategies and short-term tactics
to help you stay strong keep your chin up keep functioning in your life
while you go through the therapy process number five is they push ideas about how healing works
that simply feel wrong to you now different people have different ideas about how that is
you need to remain sovereign to your healing so that you can decide you know what when you're
when somebody's trying to help you and you're sitting there and you're like this doesn't feel
right I don't feel good about this this feels stupid unsafe um like a bad idea manipulative
if you're feeling that even if they're actually perfectly good therapists it may not be a fit
it it's so important that you have trust right there all right number six they get up into your
sad story like it's so interesting all right like it's like your past with all the trauma in it is
fascinating and you get the sense that they're feeding off of your story and suffering like
well it's something that I call forgive me it's vulgar but I call it trauma porn you know and then
this happened and you wouldn't believe what my parents did then and then blah blah blah so when
you feel encouraged and rewarded when you find yet more and more awful stories of the past just so
that you can get attention or feel like you are getting to something substantial in the session
it's not a good path not all healing depends on getting into terrible stories the terrible
stories there's a time and a place when they need to be told but the healing part that follows that
is about the good stories about the positive vision of where you're going about what is going
to work for you to calm your symptoms and make progress from day to day all right number seven
a red flag is as a result of the direction that you're going with a given therapy more than one of
your friends express the fact that they're worried about you all right has this ever happened to you
and you find yourself hiding what you're actually doing now occasionally people get mixed up with
cults very negative or exploited of individuals and what that would look like is when you talk
about what you're doing first people would say oh that sounds great but as they hear more details
about what you're doing they express concern now I know that some friends and family members
it's one of the ways of sabotaging other people that they just express concern about everything I
call it care shaming so you need discernment about this but when you've gotten mixed up in something
that's negative or unhealthy for you that is one of the signs is that people will tell you
that they're concerned and you will find yourself wanting to um not mention it or
even lie about what you're actually doing because you're afraid of their judgment
that is a red flag to look at all right another thing is when you feel like your therapist is
labeling or misdiagnosing you that is something to take seriously there is such a thing as
misdiagnosis and while there is also such a thing as somebody who's in denial about their condition
if you're going to be sovereign over your own healing it's time for you to do your own research
and try to look accurately like what is this label or diagnosis they're laying on me why or why not
you can ask questions about that why do you say that what criteria do you have for that get a
second opinion if you don't trust it something to keep in mind about diagnosis is that large-scale
studies have shown that the way that professionals diagnose mental health problems is so uneven
different people will diagnose differently and when it gets to the point when they then
recommend treatment then it's so different as to almost be meaningless and so there's great value
to be gotten from working with professionals but you've got to keep your thinking cap you've got
to stay senior to the whole situation so that you can determine if you think that someone is
going down a bad road with you somebody just asked me about this the other day they were
working with a therapist who insisted they had dissociative identity disorder and said and they
said I don't and the person who contacted me said I don't think so you know I certainly don't have
any sense of there being like alters they call them alters like alter egos alter personalities
I don't have that and the therapist promised they would show up soon okay big red flag big red flag
if somebody's sort of like speculating based on no evidence at all so that would be something to
either simply get out or get a second opinion if you need help around that another thing to watch
out for is if it's all talk and they don't seem to have any knowledge or advice on what to actually
do and that's not all that uncommon when you need help solving life's problems it's part talk
and very much action and so look for people who have proposed actions to suggest to you finally
the overarching criteria for deciding if a therapist is a fit for you is just to
ask yourself do you feel they get you now you know what it's like with people in your life
many people don't get you at all some only kind of get you and maybe one or two three
people like really really get you so a therapist who's pretty close to on the getting you scale
is going to be the best one for you if you're going there every week and you're just feeling
like oh they don't get it they don't understand they're projecting on me they're labeling their
me they're misdiagnosing yeah it's it's time to move on don't give up on your healing
but keep looking for somebody who's right for you and that's the thing about cptsd we just turn
around and blame ourselves for things but listen to yourself on this one it's so important that you
feel understood heard and safe with a therapist so those are some tips you can use now if you're
in the market for therapy I partner with an online therapy organization I have a link
down below in this video and I also have a video about what to look for to find
a therapist who's really good with cptsd you can watch it right here and I will see you very soon.