Why do family therapists condone and enable emotional abuse?

Post Reply New Topic

This thread was partially inspired by the "Does Child Abuse Lead To Asperger's?" thread. (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=136048) Like many aspies, I was emotionally abused by my family as a child, by parents in particular but a few extended relatives too. I was also seeing a therapist whose job title said "family therapist". EVERY TIME I told her about how I was being emotionally abused or treated as subhuman (which is basically the same thing), her reactions was ALWAYS one or more of the following:
* (cooing noise, like I just showed her a cute puppy)
* (silently staring at me and smiling)
* "awwwwww!"
* (repeating nearly verbatim what I just told her)
* nonsequiturs, like "that's so cute!"
* mocking me to my face, like "you feel sad when they do that".
* justifying their actions somehow, like "it's because they love you"
* gaslighting me, like "so you're saying this means they don't love you"

Clearly, she was trying to convince me that emotional abuse within families is OK, as well as getting me to stop whining to her. Otherwise, she would have taught me to assert myself, or talked to my parents and stood up for me. But she did not. So I did what she wanted: I stopped telling her anything that happened in the family, including some nasty stuff. After all, only physical abuse meets the "mandated reporting" criteria. Emotional abuse does not. She'd also lose the income from her "Tuesday night whiner" if my parents pulled me out of therapy after she undermined their power over me.

WHY? Other than money, why do family therapists condone and enable emotional abuse? Or does the word family apply in their job title only to parents and not children, with children (read: minors) being "not full family members" (equivalent to pets) or even "not really people"? Or do they automatically side with the parents, other than in cases of physical abuse, due to being closer in age?

It seems like it's only family therapists who do this. When I saw therapists, as an adult, who DID NOT have the word "family" in their job title, they seemed sympathetic to the unpleasant time I had while growing up.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 15 Aug 2020, 11:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

Emotional abuse is hard to prove. No one can understand it and not even a therapist if they don't know anything about narcissism. To them it all looks like normal behavior so the patient gets gaslighted and they start thinking everything that happens to them is normal and they are just being too sensitive, just over reacting and they think they have something seriously wrong with them if this is all normal and somehow it's affecting them.

Unless a therapist knows about narcissism abuse, they will always side with the parents. Abusers use therapists as weapons against their child. If that doesn't work out, they stop taking the kid to them and go to another therapist, someone they can manipulate.

check out raisedbynarcissists on Reddit. You will find similar stories there. That has been seen as a whiny sub because the outside world thinks they are complaining about normal stuff and being entitled brats.

Not anymore, or at least not to the same extent it used to. Both laymen and professionals became much more aware and knowledgeable on the subject (at least where I live): Of course, some people still do it but it's not as common or hard to prove as it used to be by a far stretch, because the vast majority of people here know you shouldn't scream or insult your children, shame them in front of others or tell them you wish they weren't born. While in the fairly recent past such things weren't seen as a big deal.

signs of emotional and mental abuse

There are plenty of adults around who still get very defensive about parenting and will side with other parents by default, many of them either because they were treated this way themselves or because that's how they treat their children.

In the OP's case, the arbitrary restriction of water with the sole purpose of asserting control and dominance would actually be taken very seriously (here) as it could have significantly endangered his health.

But yeah, dude, check out raisedbynarcissists*, maybe it can help you move forward. As long as you're stuck obsessing about the past, it will be very hard to find closure.

Also, this might help you get more insight into the type of abuse enabling you're talking about:

Don't rock the boat

*Edit: also the Out Of The Fog website: they have some really good resources there, not just the forum.

Last edited by BenderRodriguez on 15 Aug 2020, 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This raises the question: Why wasn't my therapist more honest about not helping me? Something like "Sorry, kid. I'm here only for your parents. I can't waste time on a loser who can't get his own family to respect him." Why the cooing, the mockery, and the nonsequiturs? Those things condone and enable emotional abuse just the same, but a little honesty wouldn't hurt.

Maybe in their mind, they thought they were helping you. If they believe the parents over you, how are they going to know they are being duped? Their goal would be to get and help you get along with your parents, see from their perspective and being a better child to them.

I know a person who is a therapist. She says that a lot of their job involves validating people because most therapy clients just want to be heard and a standard way to validate people is by doing things like repeating back what the client just told them or saying aww and stuff like that. i think that sounds ridiculous, not at all helpful and even condescending. Apparently it is what a lot of people want and need though. I'm just like, why? There's no solutions, no suggestions, no actual help. But that's what tons of people want from a therapist. Go figure.

I've been told by a different therapist (one who helped me with some asd related issues as well as trauma) that approaches like that are not generally helpful to autistic clients because we can often (not always, but often) view that therapy style as what I mentioned above. she believes a more direct approach is beneficial with asd clients because the other way is seen as insincere, fake. She was 'real' with her her asd clients. She was a no bs kind of person and I appreciated and respected that.

I'm saying a lot to say, it might have been unintentional crappiness on the part of your old therapist. They might have been using a method that works well on others but failed miserably in your case. Some therapists only have one tool in the tool box unfortunately.

I didn't have this type of therapy when I was in high school. In fact I thought my therapist was always siding against me and always creating these double standards for me. It's okay for other kids to be blunt but not me but I think I understand now what he was saying. He was saying they are blunt because they have to be with me, not that they are blunt that way in general, only to me because I didn't read subtle hints or cues. He never implied it's okay for them to be blunt but not me.

IMO it is not rude to be blunt if someone is not getting hints and not reading social cues.

I also think that sort of therapy you described can be very dangerous because people are then just going to be validated only to be told they are right with their actions, everyone else sucks bla bla bla and there is no change. Friends tend to do this. Friends will always side with their friends even if they are in the wrong. I though the point of therapy is to change or learn to cope with stuff or learn to deal with your feelings or find healthy coping mechanisms.

It just sounds like a bad therapist to me.

I totally understand where you're coming from on the therapist thing. Luckily, not on the abuse part. Therefore, my encounters may be a little different. I wasn't diagnosed an aspy till recently and I'm in my 30's. The reason for this, when my mom took me to a medical doctor and a therapist they both told her I was a spoiled brat and she should ignore me and not placate me when I was flipping out . They told her tough love approach and tell me to suck it up.

Thankfully, I was blessed with a mother who truly loved me and did her best to try to understand me even without resources or knowledge of what was going on with me. She did a good job considering she was battling her own demons with just being diagnosed bipolar.

I tried to see several therapist over the years and I had the same experiences as you. Terrible, waste of time. Then I got tested, we found out I was on the spectrum and I started seeing an pyscologist. Not a therapist an actual PhD doctor. She has been amazing. I talked with her about my experiences with therapist. Her response was, well they can be useful and are needed by some in society. Some can be very helpful, but many are there just to be good listeners and for some that's all they need. But when you need actual brainstorming sessions and intricate emotional problem solving, its best to see someone who is trained to actually delve deep and root out causes etc. I wish I had known this a decade ago. She has given me practical solutions for things, she even gives me homework and things I have to research on my own. And she doesn't pull punches, she's very direct when I do something she believes is detrimental to myself. I suggest finding someone like this who you feel at ease with. If it takes talking to 5 different docs till you find the right one, then do that.

Hope this helps.

Psychopaths in such jobs are not unheard of. Can share examples inc one of someobe elsebut too doggone tired

Those responses make me think the therapist is trying to gently tell you that you were misinterpreting your parents' actions as emotional abuse. Misunderstandings are very common so it's not uncommon for people to think they're being emotionally abused when they're just misunderstanding the situation. People who suffered from chronic stress or had many negative interactions with people are more likely to misinterpret people's words in a negative way. It's very common for autistic people to misinterpret harmless teasing as bullying or abuse.



That's not mocking or gaslighting. Since misunderstandings are common, therapists are trained to restate what their clients say to make sure they understood what you felt and why you felt that way.

Exactly! None of those things are even remotely "validating". The only thing they "validate" is that emotionally abusing a child is OK, because she basically told me "you can't do anything about it, and I'm not going to help you, loser!" And if she needed to "understand" why I felt said from emotional abuse, then she should be stocking shelves at Walmart, not "helping" vulnerable kids.

You know what's validating?
* Saying "That's disgusting; I'm sorry you had to go through that" in a calm, concerned tone.
* Offering "Is there anything I can do or teach you to make your situation better?"
* (In group therapy, by another patient) "No way, I was abused just like this."
* Giving me the phone number for Child Protective Services.
* Suggesting books on coping with emotional abuse.

I got more "validation" from watching "Clarissa Explains It All" than I did from listening to my therapist. One thing I found intriguing is that she had a platonic opposite-sex friend, a concept far ahead of the time the show was filmed.

Something I want to add. The problem with this therapy method---the cooing, the "aww!', and the repeating back---is that it creates the very thing therapy in general is supposed to eliminate: learned helplessness.

In other words, when a child tells a therapist about being emotionally abused by his parents, and he/she mocks him in response, it sends a dark message. It tells the child pretty much this: "Look at yourself! You're a loser! Your own family doesn't respect you! Do you have idea how pathetic that is? What makes you think I'm gonna help you? That's right; I won't. You're on your own! If you can turn to alcohol or self-harm, that's on you! I'm still not gonna stand up for you. In fact, watching you feeling miserable is kind of fun." Mind you, all that is done with a single word that's not even a main part of speech, but a mere interjection: "aww!" I ended up doing just that: abusing alcohol at age 12. I drink heavily to this day, 25 years later.

So clearly, we need a better therapy method for helping victims of emotional abuse, especially when those victims are minors living with their parents. Otherwise, family therapists do nothing but condone and enable that very emotional abuse, and therefore do more harm than good.

Agreed. I don't see how it's validating or helpful at all. Helpful, to me, would be giving a child help by way of things like teaching coping skills that they could apply to life, or even removing the child from the household if it was appropriate.

On the flip side, I've seen adults who have that kind of cooing therapy approach do what someone else in this thread mention, take the therapist response like they agree with them and it enables them to keep doing whatever they were doing without making changes for the better. Like they play the victim or something. I dunno.

It sucks what bad therapy can do to us as human beings. You go to someone in a time of need and instead of getting help, you end up worse off than before. It can shatter trust, make problems worse... it can do a lot, and how the hell does someone undo damage like that once it's done? It's not easy that's for sure. I ended up coping through drugs and alcohol as a child. I'm not sure how much of it was bad therapy though, I had already started doing that stuff before my parents ever made me go see one. My dysfunctional coping mechanisms came from bad parenting.

Therapy is so tricky though. What works for one person won't work for another. Ideally when a person goes to therapy, the first few sessions should be about figuring out if the therapist and client are good matches. One therapist might do talk therapy, for example, and another does CBT. Very different approaches, both equally effective or not so much, depending on who you are as a person. Unfortunately, children don't really have a choice since the parents get to decide where their child goes or who they see.

Eh. The short of I think is, yeah, the mental health system is messed up and needs an overhaul. My opinion anyway.

This.
An example of a validating sentence from my psychologist: "What they are doing to you is insane and no wonder you're pissed off. They are violating you, so being angry at them is perfectly okay. They are the ones who have a problem here."

To me, your therapist seems simply dumb. I've come across dumb psychologists, they can do a lot of harm, even with best intentions.

There's no way that was the message your therapist was trying to send. I think she was probably young, inexperienced, and doing the best she could to help. I think you clearly misinterpreted your therapist's responses which suggests you probably misinterpreted your parent's treatment of you as well. If your parents had other children, I recommend asking your siblings if they felt your parents were emotionally abusive. I'd bet money they'll say they weren't.

Regardless of whether you were or weren't emotionally abused, it's been 25 YEARS, so it's time to man up and accept responsibility for your own actions. The first step to recovering from your problems is to stop blaming others and admit that you are the problem. You are in control of your own actions. No one else is responsible. I'm sorry you felt worse but I want you to know that it wasn't your parents or therapists that made you feel worse (I'm sure your therapist's other patients got better after therapy). It was your own thinking that made you feel worse. You can't control what other people say or how they treat you, but you can chose how you want to think about it. If you chose to interpret everything in the most negative way possible, you're going to feel worse. If you chose to learn how to think more rationally and positively, you won't feel worse when people say things you don't want to hear.

Before you misinterpret my post, I'm not judging you or criticizing you. You aren't a loser. There's nothing wrong with you. You're a normal person with problems like everyone else who felt you had a bad childhood like many other people. I replied to let you know you have 2 choices. You can continue to be a victim for the rest of your life, blaming everyone else for your problems, seeking sympathy and validation from other people or you can accept that the world isn't perfect, that you're not perfect, that life's not fair, and make the best of it despite what happened in the past. Stop worrying about what other people said to you and know that you're just as good as everyone else. Try to look for the good in situations and find something positive to think about. If someone criticizes you, think of it as an opportunity to practice handling criticism. If it's true, accept that you're not perfect and try to be better. If it's not true, then just ignore it. It's not what happens to you that determines how you feel but how you think about it and respond to it.

I suspect you might be right about the therapist but about Aspie1's parents - they had crazy ideas like forcibly limiting the amount of water he could drink. Whatever was wrong with them, it was wrong with them.

Being told to "man up" is very unhelpful in processing past traumas. Really.
Please, don't repeat this motivational bs. Whatever your intention is, it sounds invalidating and makes healing harder, not easier.

From my own experience - making sense of something that happened 30 years earlier, when I was a toddler, finally expressing the emotions that I was never allowed to express and naming things that I was never allowed to name - including patterns of abuse in my family - that was what finally made the painful memories fade and let me start living in the present. Denying what I felt made it only worse.