After seeing Pam for 4 years, I noticed how pervasively her need to be right affected her work. When I told her things she liked to hear, she was incredibly supportive and confident in my ability to recover. However, when I questioned/challenged her or explained how my views differed from hers, she got incredibly defensive and insecure. I began to notice this a couple years into the relationship, but I would not realize until later how pervasive this quality actually was when I was in her care. I was never quite comfortable going into the depths of my traumatic experiences with her (the roots of the severe depression I experience in my day to day) and I didn't know why until I finally came out to her about my experience with sexual assault. I came to her in an extremely vulnerable state and told her the story. She told me that I was victimizing myself, that I DID in fact have a choice, and that the same thing had happened to her countless times, but that's because "teenage boys are just hungry for sex." I was in complete shock at the idea that a therapist could be so insensitive and say something that so casually communicated the idea that boys will be boys. This is also when I realized she was outright projecting her own feelings onto me. There were also several times when she denied saying things to me that she did in fact say. When she got insecure, she would say countless times "I'm good at my job." I realized she was too controlling when my psychiatrist and I came up with a care plan for me that she disagreed with. My psychiatrist and I had discussed this care plan carefully and agreed upon it together. Pam did not like that care plan, and I remember one session when she blatantly trash talked my psychiatrist, going as far as to say she's really only doing it all for the money. The humorous part is she never got my psychiatrist's name right, not once. Her name was Dr. Rawson, and Pam continuously said "Dr. Rowlanson" or some variation of that, even after communicating with my psychiatrist personally. Finally, I was shocked when she did not know who Masha Linehan was, the creator of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, an incredibly famous and well known kind of therapy. Marsha Linehan was an extremely unstable young woman with borderline personality disorder. She found nothing to help her, so she helped herself by creating this branch of therapy. When my parents explained this to Pam, her response was that no one that unstable could do that for themselves. For those of you that don't know the psychological theories, denouncing Marsha Linehan and her DBT skills is like waking up in the 21st century and exclaiming the earth is flat. She was missing an entire psychological theory. Pam is not as learned as she claims she is. She uses a very old model of CBT, which I have found time and time again to encourage shame. Beware. She comes off as sweet as a cupcake, but underneath that I personally experienced insecurity and a need for control. To be fair, near the end of our relationship she was dealing with family issues. With how bad I experienced her therapy to be by the end of our relationship, I imagine those problems must have been quite serious. I am still not sure what triggered this downfall in her therapy skills, but whatever it was severely affected her. read more
