Here is a story about therapy. It is a true story.
When she was in her forties, my sister-in-law, who never was a drinker, met and fell in love with an alcoholic who was in his fifties. At some point, he went back to drinking. To save their relationship, she agreed to counseling. He stopped going. GUESS WHO THE THERAPIST THEN TOLD THE ONE PERSON STILL IN COUNSELING WHERE THE REAL PROBLEM WAS, AND WHAT WAS THE REAL REASON THE FORMER ALCOHOLIC COULD NOT STAY AWAY FROM THE BOOZE?
Yep.
The sister-in-law!
It would have been different had the therapist asked whether she would like to continue therapy for herself. But to blame her for the alcoholic's behaviors?!?
I really like therapy. I want myself back. Anyone who can help me do that is right where I am going to be. But there are some therapists who have not addressed their own issues well enough to handle someone else's. Then, therapy is not only not helpful, but is actually harmful, in the sense that you give over a certain amount of authority, a certain amount of trust, to the therapist.
Another story. When difficult child daughter was 14, acting out, running away, just totally, horribly, shockingly out of reach, husband and I hunted her down. husband took one arm. I took the other. We took her home, that way. That was the day I called for outside help. I was able to get in to see a therapist or, forty-five minutes sooner, to bring difficult child to a dual-diagnostic adolescent crisis center. We picked the crisis center because it was forty five minutes earlier, and we literally did not know how long we would be able to keep difficult child home. Initially? They were not going to keep her. They were just going to send her back home with us! We convinced them to keep her. She was there for two weeks and from there, went into her first treatment.
I don't know how much worse any of this could have been?
But nothing any of these people, treatment centers, or therapists did made a difference for difficult child.
And we are talking years, here.
We are talking, at one point some years later when difficult child had been repeatedly on probation, about special police units able to come into our home any time and stay for as long as they wanted, to go through difficult child's room at will, to check on difficult child, take her out of the home, whatever they needed or recommended to do, to try to make sense of the family dynamic, out of why difficult child was doing what she was doing.
The harm done our family was that the parents were made to feel sort of creepy and wrong without ever a whisper of what was wrong or how to fix it. We had given up our authority (in our own minds, I mean) to people who, though they charged lots of money and pretended to know what they were doing, did nothing at all. We were all floating in this darkness waiting for the magical, all-knowing therapists to tell us what we needed to do to help our child and ourselves.
And that never happened. The most worthwhile aspect of any of this was the special police unit. I liked them. They did what they said they were going to do with no therapeutic fear and awe mumbo jumbo.
I have had good therapists. I can spot a bad one, now. But then, I was innocent and so desperate to know what I'd done, to know how to help my child. It was criminal what those therapists did, really.
The first treatment center we had been told to authorize for difficult child "or she will die" was closed two years after difficult child's three month confinement there. Turns out one of the counselors was dealing cocaine...just like difficult child had told us when she called, crying and begging to come home. I had called and talked to that counselor immediately, of course.
He told me that was the drugs talking; essentially, that my daughter was lying.
He was the one charged with dealing cocaine.
It's been hellish, just hellish. Parents are vulnerable during these times. And, in that we spent so much money you wouldn't believe it, in that we did everything they said and everything else we could think of or learn or read about and nothing, nothing, nothing worked...we and our children are being victimized.
And there is nothing we can do about it. Our children are labeled both victim and villain. We are just expected to pay.
I am still so angry about this.
It is one thing to tell a parent true things for the money. It is another entirely to prey on families in crisis for the money.
Cedar
