The most incompetent therapist I've ever worked with. Allan means well and isn't malicious, but…read moreeven the most well-intentioned therapist can cause harm.
He uses therapy sessions to deal with his own loneliness after losing his wife. I do understand and empathize with how empty his life must feel losing the love of his life, but it's irresponsible for him, as a professional therapist, to use paying clients who are dealing with their own pain, to fill his time so he can talk about his own life. Quite often he wasted my therapy time to talk about his dog, his children, and his late wife. It's his responsibility to find his own support for his personal issues, outside of therapy sessions where he is the paid therapist.
I came to him with some extremely difficult and sensitive topics. He was not only unhelpful, he caused more harm.
I told him what some of my triggers were. His job as a therapist is to navigate those triggers carefully. Instead, he actually repeated the exact words my horrifically abusive father had used to harm me. Absolutely unacceptable coming from a therapist.
Every time I told him my feelings about something (embarrassed, upset), Allan's response was, "Don't feel embarrassed". There are 100 unskilled people out in the world ready to dismiss my feelings and tell me not to feel them. If that's what I had needed, I would have gone to Reddit. Instead, what I needed was a skilled therapist to help me validate, process, understand, contextualize, accept, and manage my emotions.
Allan wanted me to repress my anger. He kept telling me not to feel angry and told me it was harming me, which is so wildly unhelpful and outright wrong. Anger is a useful and empowering emotion in the face of extreme injustice, which I was witness to. I experienced some of the most heinous acts a person can endure and anger was a vital emotion to get me away from it. How dare a psychologist with a PhD shame me for having appropriate anger, without helping me process it in a healthy way. There are therapy modalities for that and Allan was ignorant of how to help a client recover from abuse and injustice.
I disclosed that I had an eating disorder. Allan's advice? "Don't do that". In the history of eating disorders, telling someone not to have one has worked exactly zero times. If that's what worked, we wouldn't have ED clinics. He wasted half of my session talking all about his daughter and her struggles. It was my session and I went to him for help. I didn't go to him for stories of other people. He didn't address the root cause or anything. He asked me to keep a food diary, which is an absolute no-no for someone who already has obsessive control issues over food. He really had no idea what he was doing.
I set boundaries with him and he repeatedly ignored them. After telling me to set clear boundaries with my family, he ignored my reasonable requests to him. A therapist is supposed to teach clear boundaries, not break them.
When I told him that being estranged from my family was difficult because I don't have family, he said, "What am I? Chopped liver?" What an inept response. First, a therapist is supposed to help a client avoid transference, not encourage it. Viewing a therapist as family is just so inappropriate. To add to that, my following session with Allan, he asked if I thought I was ready to end therapy. So, he wanted me to view him as family, not deal with my feelings towards my actual blood family, and then promptly asked to end our professional relationship, essentially recreating me losing "family" again. Absolutely irresponsible and terrible therapy. Second, that expression is one heavily laden with guilt and a client could easily shift the focus from the issue at hand into feeling bad for making the therapist feel rejected.
Similarly, when I expressed doubts about being able to date, given my upbringing, Allan said something about how he would have dated me.
I would wholeheartedly not recommend him to anyone needing real help.
