Carol is probably the LEAST professional psychotherapist I've been to see, and that's saying a lot…read morebecause we are talking about a rather large sampling -- LOL. Truth be told, I am a bit of a female Woody Allen.
I had three sessions with Carol. The first two were okay, but I found myself repeating details a lot -- people's names, etc. I figured I'd give it some time to see if she had a bad memory or if she'd catch on.
But during the third session the building maintenance people were doing construction in the office next door to Carol's. And it was loud, really loud. During the session, she turns to me and says, "This is going to last for about an hour." Um, um, um. "Do you think that perhaps you could have called me in advance to cancel the session given that neither one of us can hear a word the other saying?"
Clearly she knew about the noise in advance. IMO, a professional therapist would have ended the session there or called the client to cancel. Nope, not Carol. In fact, during the session she was completely distracted and had her body partially turned to the back wall where the noise was coming from. Yet when I complained to her about how unproductive this session was afterward, she completely denied that there was a problem....
Of course she wanted me to come in to pay for another session to talk about MY reaction to the noise.
I decided to give it one more shot and was going through a difficult time. Carol just couldn't get it together to reply to my email requests for an appointment in a timely way. When she finally did reply she said something like "I'd love to talk with you." Okay, great. Good to know after nearly 2 weeks of trying to get in touch. However, she failed to provide a day and time for when that might happen. What therapist agrees to an appointment, then doesn't know to provide a day and time for the appointment? Feeling really annoyed, I sent several emails sequentially just to annoy Carol. Not my finest moment, I admit.
That's when Carol told me (via email mind you) that I need to work on my interpersonal skills. No sh-t. Why does she think I'm going to a therapist to begin with?
At that point she still expected us to talk a few days later. Um, no. Healer: heal thyself.
I told Carol that my lack interpersonal skills still don't change the fact that she was completely unprofessional in her handling of the situation, and that it was really bad form for her to attack me especially via email.
Carol never apologized or acknowledged the problems on her end. Done. Good-bye, lady. I guess now I can only aspire to Carol's finely-honed interpersonal skills which seem to include license to criticize a client via email.
I've often thought psychotherapists go into practice to try to fix themselves. Here is a clear case of that.
(By way of background, I came to Carol through the work she and several colleagues do on weekends involving family constellations (Bert Hellinger). I've done tons of this work with a very gifted facilitator. Carol's colleagues succeed only in spite of themselves. Hellinger's model is that powerful. But their facilitation really kinda sucks. One of her colleagues, Betsy, is perpetually about to end a constellation because she doesn't know where to go with it. The other, Mary, is just grouchy and completely misses key components of how constellations are supposed to be set up.