Anyone bullied or abused by a therapist?

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I was brutally today. As a result I am no longer allowed at the facility. It was so therapeutic for me to be there but because this therapist is so evil, she totally lied to the director about me and got me kicked out of the program because I called out her lies and controlling attitude. I am devastated. That program would have been so perfect for me. This is not the first time I have been kicked out of disability or Autism programs because I exposed their abuse when they psychologically bullied and abused me. I can't help it because I have no social awareness so I just answer them honestly and my honest answers to their dishonest questions end up catching their lies and then I get punished for it. I am so devastated.

I had a major breakdown once, when I was denied services somewhere due to my sensory issues not allowing me to follow their protocol. I was going mad at that time. Before that I had chopped off a piece of my hair in a fit of rage. I cried the whole ride home. I screamed. It felt as if I was so attached to my own body that I was trapped inside. It's hard to describe, but it felt like hell. My mom was yelling at me the entire time, and acting like I had done something wrong.
They didn't even let me get evaluated, and at this time I was even considering attempting suicide and hoping it would fail, just so I could get help. But I never got any help, at all. I had to scream my way through those miserable months, all alone.
Sorry for venting. But I feel you. I wanted to share my experiences to show that I could relate. Nothing like this should ever happen. I'm so sorry.

Sorry to hear.

Just reaffirms the message that I get from nts every single day. I deserve to be abused and bullied. I don't care how much they try to convince me otherwise with their platitudes, their actions and words tell the truth. I am so sick and tired of people telling me that they care about me and want to help me and do what is best for me while they are bullying and abusing me. I cannot tolerate it anymore.

I can absolutely relate to this. A former therapist got pushy with me over the course of only two years we were seeing each other, he got to the point where I stopped seeing him without an explanation. He was an absolute prick and someone who should have got his license to practice revoked.

As of last year, a new therapist and I have been making sure I stay focused on what accomplishments I still need to achieve in order to find my personal place in the world

On another note, I have been trying to get my mom to sit in on an appointment (because as I've mentioned before, my mom has anger issues), but she's not going to do so.

Example: "There is nothing wrong with me."

I'm very sorry to hear that skibum. I hope there's some recourse you can find to self-advocate and explain what happened. It's so painful to be mistreated by those we entrust for our emotional care.

I was upset by a few therapists over the years.

1) A new PTSD therapist I was meeting for the first time. I hadn't realised he worked in a building which is connected to my trauma, and caused a panic attack upon my arrival. I had a very difficult time forcing myself to work through the trigger and go upstairs to the appointment. The waiting room had a news show playing on a television on the wall. It was news coverage of a brutal assault / murder of a young woman. By the time I met the doctor I was pretty much hysterical. I explained about my trauma related to that building, and I mentioned the news show being entirely inappropriate especially for a trauma therapist's wait room. This doctor was condescending to me about my trauma triggers and told me to "grow up" and act like a big girl. Then he said he wouldn't be able to see me again for a year because of scheduling conflicts, but he tried to prescribe me an antidepressant without followup care.

2) My first psychiatrist lost his licence for sleeping with multiple patients in illicit affairs which were eventually documented on the public registry for doctors. He was married and it was also a breach of his power. He didn't harass me, but it gives me the creeps and really freaked me out to think a mental health doctor could abuse or compromise patients' trust in that way.

3) I worked with a speech-language pathologist for a few months last year because of my mutism. Our goal was that I'd learn to self-advocate and express myself verbally. On one session she advised me quite abruptly that she would start using a visual signal to let me know when / if I had talked too much in our appointment. She held her hand up in my face to signify "STOP" --- to cut me off from talking, or expressing myself.

She treated me like a child. A hand in my face? "Talk to the hand?", from a speech-therapist treating mutism?!



So much for speech therapy.

I've had a lot of difficulty getting employment, and in fact the only reason I'm employed now is because my parents started a family business and hired me. But before that, we looked into employment skills training for autistic adults, and got me into a program.

At first, it felt like just basically a waste of my time. Occasionally they'd teach me something useful, but most of the program seemed geared towards someone who also has cognitive impairments, so it wasn't very helpful. I didn't find it unpleasant, though, and figured that just going to the same place and doing what they told me to do until I finished the task to their specifications was probably helping me learn what having a job was like, even if the tasks were menial.

Where it went wrong was when the program was finishing up and I was talking about other programs of theirs I'd like to try. They had a cooking class coming up, and I like cooking, so I found the idea exciting. Until they mentioned that they required people to make what they were told to make and eat everything they made.

I have a bunch of sensory sensitivities, and some of them affect food. There are some foods that most people are willing to eat that seem about as palatable to me as an old dry cat turd. (The least gross kind of turd I know, but it's still s**t.) Also, at this point I'd had enough experience being treated like an adult that I'd figured out that "you must eat everything we tell you to" is normally only something children have to put up with (not that they should - it's not appropriate for any age), and most people don't make a big deal out of an adult choosing for themselves what they do and don't eat.

So I started arguing with them, and they presented me with this ridiculous personal definition of "can't eat" that focused solely on the physical ability to get the food into your stomach no matter the consequences. And I ended up crying, and then they told me off for crying, which lead to me self-harming, and they decided to deal with that by just completely pretending that I didn't exist. At some point I managed to call my parents to come get me, but it was a two hour drive from home to this place, and I was spiralling badly. And these people were quite literally acting like I was completely invisible. I'd heard of this when I researched ABA therapy, it's called extinction, but it's another thing to actually experience it. I'd honestly rather be getting physically assaulted than be treated like I don't exist at all. It's a haunting experience. It doesn't sound that bad when it's being described in therapy manuals, but trust me, it is worse than physical assault in terms of what it does to your mind.

So, naturally, I wasn't getting any better. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I tried to kill myself, would they finally stop ignoring me? This thought scared me, especially with how strong the urge was to actually do it. I threatened to do it, hoping they'd stop me, and they continued ignoring me. So I ended up calling a suicide hotline, because that was the only way I could keep myself from causing myself serious bodily harm. I ended up talking to the hotline for the rest of the wait for my parents to get me.

So, they got me, I went home to recover, and a few days later we had a meeting with these people to talk about what needed to change to make sure this never happened again. Unfortunately, we had very different ideas from what they did. During this meeting, some of the things they proposed were that I had to start wearing a bra and we should work on that (firstly, I can't wear a bra for sensory reasons, and secondly, this is totally off topic of the far bigger issue of having suicidal ideation at their program!). My Dad found this especially ironic coming from a woman in a low-cut blouse and yoga pants, because as a heterosexual man he found that outfit way more distracting than a woman in a T-shirt with baggy pants and no bra.

Secondly, if I had another meltdown like that, they wanted my parents to say that they could kick me out to take the bus back home (what I would usually do if things hadn't gone horribly wrong), which my parents and I found totally unacceptable. (I mean, putting a sobbing, suicidal girl on a bus in a rough neighborhood to travel by herself? Seriously?)

They had no intention of actually acknowledging their part in causing and exacerbating my meltdown, or that I was a person with actual emotions and not just misbehaving. In fact, they wanted to double down and do even more of the behaviour that caused me to spiral so badly. So, we quit the program. And their mailing list continued to spam me with advertising for several years despite my efforts to block them.