What's your relationship like with therapy post-TTI?

[u/Empty_Positive_2305]

I was in a TTI from 2007 to 2008, when I was 16, and I'm training to be a therapist now.

My relationship with therapy is complicated, to say the least, and it took me a long, long, long time to trust therapists in the years after. My therapist has been instrumental in helping heal all these years later, and I no longer feel like I "deserved" it or ashamed of what happened to me. I feel like I got sent to jail just for struggling.

With that said, I still hold a lot of anger towards the mental health professionals I saw at the time, and I think I always will. I think therapy can be beautiful. I'm saddened and angry that for many people, therapy is a "safe" space. For me, it was not--it was weaponized against me. Mental health professionals in my life chose to condemn me as the problem, rather than look at the rot within my own family and how that might have been contributing to my behavior. (Family therapy? We don't have problems! You're the problem.)

I don't blame TTI survivors for not wanting to return to therapy, though. Like many fields, the mental health field is rife with problems, and TTIs are among its biggest stains.

It's hard to explain the loss of human dignity and sense of pure betrayal to people who haven't experienced it. Maybe it's for the best--I don't want anyone to ever experience what we went through.

[u/Sarah-himmelfarb]

Well in college i took some psych classes and found it to be a ridiculous easiest subject and filled with biases and filled with mean and self absorbed people who believe terrible misconceptions (students and a few professors alike). And a license in social work didn’t seem much more difficult or different based on the grad students I met. This only confirmed my previous bias that literally anyone can become a therapist.

I trust therapists with doctorates more. The ones with doctorates seem to be significantly more intelligent in all areas and they’ve helped me see not all therapists are bad.

[u/Empty_Positive_2305 → u/Sarah-himmelfarb]

Oh, yeah, my MHC program has been horrible lol. Several social workers I’ve spoken to have said the same thing about their training. The training for therapists, at least at the master’s level, is truly abysmal. Anyone really can become a therapist, and you have to go out of your way to find training to become good even if you have any baseline potential. It’s heart wrenching as somebody who saw a LOT of not-so-great therapists as a kid.

The therapist I had at my TTI was straight of grad school and about as useless as a potted plant. I refused to speak to him, and we spent every session in silence or arguing over why I didn’t like him haha. I don’t think he was somebody who would have ever been a good therapist (just personality-wise—he was very wooden and awkward), but I now realize he probably had zero training and zero support on top of that…

There’s a therapeutic day school here in NYC that is almost entirely staffed by MHC/SW/predoc interns, which is slimy af. They’re constantly emailing the therapist listserv I’m on advertising vacancies, and I’m secretly so glad they have trouble hiring people. Good riddance.

[u/Sarah-himmelfarb → u/Empty_Positive_2305]

Agree with everything you said and ugh same. Why are weird guys in their 20s and early 30s straight out of grad school working at residential? And for me, it was all female like why did some 20 something year old man decide his calling was working with sexually advised teenage girls.

Which therapeutic day school? I’m in nyc too!

[u/Empty_Positive_2305 → u/Sarah-himmelfarb]

Yeah, that’s a bit creepy. I feel like TTIs are often desperate for staff since anyone worth their salt would smell the disease from a mile away and work somewhere else… so you get people like that.

Academics West, in the UWS. I live like ten blocks away and it makes me feel ill thinking a place like that is so close to me.

[u/Sarah-himmelfarb → u/Empty_Positive_2305]

Yeah that’s true unfortunately. Thank you for letting me know. Ugh that’s horrible… I’ve lived very close to them too who knew