Colleen Kempner was very unhelpful and unprofessional, with zero willingness to adapt to anyone's needs but her own. I think she may have confused affability with flexibility, or maybe she's just generally incompetent.
She claimed repeatedly that she wanted to engage in the therapy that I had approached her about, but needed more background info, which seemed reasonable. But after this extended intake process had stretched into hours of my time and hundreds of dollars, she finally admitted (not intentionally out of a sense of ethical obligation, but because I pressed her) that she was unwilling to address my actual life unless we first worked through some stuff she'd made up that appealed to her more. It was simplistic, easy drivel that wouldn't require much effort, ripped straight from a text book and not relatable to anything I've experienced myself.
Of course I let her go after that, and as I left her office she suddenly spat at me that I was leaving out of fear because I have no human emotions except when magic Colleen is in the room. Yet another theory she had never bothered to communicate, and just SUCH a mature response to being fired for doing a terrible job. Apparently I'm an emotionless robot except when I'm paying someone to sit in the corner like a vegetable, contributing nothing. Oddly, no one else has ever noticed this about me. In fact, this same Colleen had previously freaked out on me for BEING emotionally open, which is actually really, really normal.
Even after all that, I still considered returning because I'd made an investment in this person and didn't want to start all over elsewhere. So eventually I tentatively contacted her about some of her milder bizarre behavior, and got an instant, pat, PR response implying that she is open to neither listening nor thinking, and has no interest in learning from her failures. Not the attitude of someone who will ever be anything but an incapable hot mess. read more
