Table of Contents
Can your therapist manipulate you?
Good therapists won’t try to control or manipulate you to get you to do what they think you should do or what they want you to do. Good therapists don’t provide care without informed consent. This means they need to make sure you understand what you’re signing up for from the beginning. When a therapist becomes dismissive, defensive, disrespectful, or argumentative when you question what they say, they are bad. Therapists must model healthy relationships and objectively listen to what is being said to them. Dismissive behaviors cause people to question themselves and can lower self esteem. If your therapist denies or twists reality, he or she is gaslighting you. Gaslighting is a method used by abusive people to avoid accountability. You can be sure that if your therapist is gaslighting you, that you are a victim of abuse. The process of therapy may cause you to experience uncomfortable or painful feelings, such as sadness, guilt, anxiety, anger, or frustration. Counseling may bring up painful memories. It might disrupt relationships.
Can a therapist cause damage?
A therapist might hold certain biases or assumptions and impose those on the client. While there are times where therapists knowingly exploit or harm their patients, such cases are thankfully quite rare. What is more common is for well-intended therapists to inadvertently cause harm without even realizing it. Some types of unethical behavior seen in the therapy space are: Violating confidentiality. Abandoning you as a client. Contacting you outside of office hours. A manipulator will actively lie to you, make excuses, blame you, or strategically share facts about them and withhold other truths. In doing this, they feel they are gaining power over you and gaining intellectual superiority. Manipulators are experts in exaggeration and generalization. Certain mental health conditions such as narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder lend themselves to gaslighting as those illnesses give people a distorted view of themselves and others and a propensity toward manipulating others for their own ends by any means necessary, as well as never …