Amethyst:
During that time of therapy, I felt raw, vulnerable and even crazy. My therapist kept telling me that I was sane and I was finally able on a deep emotional level to understand what my family was about.
Amethyst, I think you were really lucky to have a therapist who could honor your feelings, and let you make contact with your emotions. During this time for me, my own therapist raped me (not sexually, but emotionally) and I was so trusting that I could not tell, for years and years, what was happening.
Marta
(((Marta))) I was fortunate to have "Uzi Suzi"...she was tough as nails, never let me stay in any kind of denial, and absolutely believed that I was a strong, sane, and loving person who could work through all this. She gave me faith in myself. I also have had some other terrific therapists. They are out there. If you give yourself the power to disagree with the therapist and they react toxicly, you know you are in the wrong place with the wrong person. I am so sorry that happened to you.
There are also quacks and abusers and people who have not healed their own stuff. About 10 years ago, my husband and I had some issues that we needed to resolve, so we decided to see a highly recommended marriage counselor, a guy I'll call Joe. Joe was heavy. Now "Uzi Suzi" had told me that every ten extra pounds indicates ten pounds of anger and unresolved issues, so I was a little concerned that maybe Joe had some baggage that he hadn't dealt with. He was also a devout Catholic. He was somewhat helpful and gave us some good tools to work with, but during our last session he told us that to feel anger was always inappropriate and was "bad," that it should always be suppressed. I said,"Whoa! Joe! Wrong! Anger is a symptom that usually covers fear of loss! It means that we need to look at what is going on under the anger and deal with it. It's an emotion, like any other emotion. It's "bad" when people start acting out the anger, but the anger itself is just a warning signal." He said,"There you go again! You are always giving your opinion. You are very outspoken. Anger is bad." (He sounded quite angry. I guess he felt I should just be a subservient female, too.
) I said,"Look Joe. I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood as a non-Catholic. My friends told me that according to their Catechism lessons, even to feel anger was a cardinal sin. I am in AA and I know quite a few "recovering Catholics" who say that this was one teaching that they had to jettison because their anger was not being dealt with and was always coming out sideways. Or they were burying it and it was turning into resentment, which can lead to getting it on with the bottle again. I'm not telling you what to do, but I can't accept what you are saying." My hubby also said,"I have to back Amethyst up on this. She is right. If we start stuffing our anger, which is going to arise naturally out of the fact that we are two people in a relationship that sometimes has bumps in the road, conflicting goals and occasional difficulties in communication, we are going to be in deep S**T!" He fired us and we fired him at the same time.
Afterwards, when my hubby and I processed what happened, my hubby said he had felt confused, which I think goes back to the discussion about evil. Here was a fat therapist with a ton of buried anger telling us something that was a lie, which was evil...he was promoting his own agenda and trying to get us to swallow his unresolved stuff. I think my hubby and I handled it pretty well.
