Clients, you are only numbers and paychecks to therapists. It’s unfortunate that part of their job is to create a false sense of connection for you, but would you willingly share your problems with a total stranger who didn’t act empathetic? No you wouldn’t.
I think the biggest problem with therapy besides dysfunctional therapists, is that therapy is based on a lie, or pretend if you will, that a total stranger who has no reason at all to care about you, cares about you. Can we clients please grasp how foolish and futile it is for us to buy into that idea? If we stop believing the make believe then we’ll be better off.
A client is a therapist’s job. There are ethical requirements that therapists boast that they live by, but nobody actually enforces those. Those are pretend to create a false sense of safety for you. Think about it. Any time you are vulnerable with another person you are potentially not safe. People can hurt you. Safety isn’t real. But if therapists tell you safety isn’t real, would you be inclined to share with them? No you wouldn’t.
The way to use therapy and get the help and lessen potential hurt is to opt out of the pretend. Stop buying into the lie that your therapist cares. They are taking advantage of your history, in which you most likely weren’t given the care that you needed and deserved. The key is to realize that your therapist will never be that for you. You need to be that for yourself.
I think therapy, or any enlightening deep conversation with someone openminded and intelligent for that matter, can be used correctly if it’s taken for what it is: a way to get the outside point of view of someone who is possibly more trained (they’re much less trained than clients are aware of and the best ones admit that) than most people are on average, and someone who is possibly less biased about you than your dysfunctional, abusive family members are.
Stop expecting more than that. Therapists do not love you and many of them do not respect you beyond the session. They are strangers, why do you expect them to care about you? You talk to them in a mostly one-sided way for an hour a week. When you leave or when they terminate you, you are easily replaced.
If this depresses you, then delve into why. I’m upset because I hate being played and my ex therapist played me. I hate being tricked and humiliated. If he had been respectful to me as a person then it would be fine with me that he didn’t like me.
Your therapist doesn’t matter at all in your life. They are just a temporary stand in for someone you’d want to bounce ideas off of but you don’t have a person to do that with (yet) and that’s all they really are.
The therapy industrial complex taps into your emotional neediness in the same way that any other successful Capitalist marketing taps into consumer needs and desires. It’s just that therapy is promoted as being an intimate thing. It isn’t. It’s bullshit with great marketing. It can be helpful if you see it for what it is and use it wisely, and if you do, you’ll realize that your therapist is nothing but a cardboard standee. They could be anyone. They are anybody and nobody. They are just there holding a mirror, hopefully a better quality mirror than the ones people held up to you when you were a child.
Yes, you are just a number to the therapist, but who cares? If you do the work on yourself for yourself, they are just an extra in your movie.
You, the client, are the star.