Like any other profession, mental and behavioral health counselors range from excellent to truly awful. Most are somewhere in between, each bringing their own mix of strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and biases.
One thing the mental health industry lacks, besides properly objective oversight, is an agreed standard of competency and ethics that goes beyond just the most basic of basics like keeping confidentiality.
I understand that clients have different needs, and no two people are guaranteed to be a good fit in anything in life, therapy included. But shouldn’t there be some way to at least lessen the frequency of harm? Why are therapists gaslighting their clients at all? Why are they invalidating clients about any of their feelings ever, often repeatedly? When they cause harm, why do they often either not realize it, or do everything except admit to what they did?
Far too many therapists either don’t know how to, or they don’t bother to work on repairing the harm they’ve caused.
Sometimes when a client is harmed it’s difficult for the client to determine whether their therapist is cruel or simply unskilled. In the longterm, neither scenario is healthy and therapeutic for the client.
Clients usually give their therapists the benefit of the doubt. Most will doubt themselves instead of the therapist, at least at first. This is why clients really do need to be better informed and educated about therapy and go into it highly aware of what is best for them and what isn’t. When they’re aware, they’re less likely to be tricked into thinking that they’re to blame for any mistakes the therapist makes and are less likely to stay in a bad fit for too long.
So, do I think Aaron Gleaves is a poser, incompetent, or an abusive MF?
I think Aaron Gleaves being a Licensed Professional Counselor is a few rungs above him playing pretend. I’m not a good swimmer, but let me practice, pass a test, pay a fee, and suddenly I’m wearing a wetsuit and am a Licensed Water Rescue Professional.
After going through the training and passing the test, wouldn’t I be good at it? Not necessarily. I’ll surely be better at swimming and water rescue than before I started, and probably better than people like me who haven’t been trained, but I highly doubt that I’d actually be good. Even if I became really great at certain aspects of it, that doesn’t mean that I’d be good enough at enough of it to be competent. What that should mean is that I shouldn’t be in that role.
For therapists, however, not being good enough at enough of their job usually means they continue to emotionally damage clients to varying degrees and then toss the clients into the Therapist Thrift Bin for a different therapist to find. Like finding a discarded pair of used shoes, that next therapist might have found a good fit. Or they may try them for a while, only to discover that the shoes aren’t as comfortable as they first thought. Possibly, they might like wearing the shoes, but they just don’t go with enough of their wardrobe so aren’t worth keeping. Then the shoes get dropped into the thrift bin again. A key difference here is that the client is the one paying the different therapists to try them out. The client can suffer wear and damage and also be financially worse off from all of it. In every way, the client has more to lose.
So, do I think Aaron Gleaves is a poser, incompetent, or an abusive MF?
I don’t know Aaron Gleaves. I only know the persona he presented to me in our sessions. I believe he truly has empathy and the desire to help people. I think he has a good voice, above average communication skills and intelligence, and gives off a trustworthy vibe. I think he’s good at getting to the heart of what a client is trying to express when they’re overwhelmed and struggling. I think he can sometimes help clients hold on long enough to work themselves out of unhealthy situations and into healthier ones.
However, I think he’s emotionally weak and lacks core confidence. I think he’s sheltered and coddled and smug and doesn’t have enough of enough of the skills required to keep emotional space for the truly deep shit that clients are often mired in, without him getting covered in it too. I think he doesn’t realize that and thus doesn’t realize the situation he’s in until he suddenly does. At that point he abandons the client.
I think he’s a great emotional swimmer, but if a client gets dropped into a lake or—heaven forbid, into the ocean, and Aaron Gleaves is the Licensed Water Rescue Professional sent out to guide the client safely to the shore, one or both of them is going to drown.
Update: This next part was written way before I knew the hand that Stacey had played in everything. I’m going to keep it here because it was useful to write out at the time.
I hold Aaron responsible for his actions. He could’ve respected our work and our therapeutic relationship enough to tell me that he had to terminate me, and that it wasn’t completely his idea and he could’ve reassured me that he wasn’t doing it because he hated me. I think he could’ve been braver and much more honest with me. I can see why he wouldn’t want to disobey his supervisor, but he’s a grown man and he knew to some degree how badly he was hurting me by doing things in the awful and pathetic way that Stacey had instructed.
He owed me a higher level of care than that.
Dear Aaron Gleaves:
Aaron Gleaves – Licensed Professional Counselor – State of Virginia / 0701014491 – Currently Working at Calmed Counseling and Consulting in Blacksburg VA,
I hate you so fucking much.
You aren’t the good guy you pretend to be. It makes me sick to think of how many people you trick into feeling like they’re safe with you, that they can trust you, only for you to decide in a moment one day to throw them out like garbage. The way you threw me out like garbage. But it wasn’t enough to just throw me away, was it, Aaron Gleaves? No, you definitely made it a priority to try to take as much of my power away from me as possible first. Surprising me with a termination, not allowing me to talk about the things that I’d accomplished in therapy, using insider knowledge that I’d trusted you with about how the holidays were difficult for me sometimes because of how I’d been abused and abandoned during that season of the year. How powerful you must have felt knowing that you were using my past to hurt me. What a big strong man you are, Aaron Gleaves, to be able to emotionally harm your clients in ways that only you know it’s going to hurt them the most. What a king you are for making my termination be about you instead of about me. How smug you can be knowing that the leaders of the capitalist therapy machine cult you work for will cloak your sins and protect you no matter who you harm.
Do you get high off the power you feel in the “approximate relationship” you create with your clients? How can you pretend to care about them as people and encourage them to trust you and then suddenly turn on them?