Do therapists treat you better if you're successful in life?

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Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit: I recently saw a therapist! It was through my employer's EAP program, so it cost me absolutely nothing. So I figured: what have I got to lose?! Scheduling was easy. I e-mailed the HR department, told them I wanted to use their EAP, and they sent me a link to schedule an appointment. I followed the link, and the rest was history.

I'm sure you've seen my posts about a family therapist I used to see as a teen. She was outwardly "nice" (notice the quotes), but treated me like garbage. She mocked me. She gaslighted me. She pretended not to know what I was talking about when I said something that went against her personal agenda and/or loyalty to my parents. I learned to feed her the BS she wanted to hear, and basically keep her appeased for 5 years, until my parents ended the therapy.

My appointment with the current therapist was a complete 180 to that. He asked me sincere pointed questions. He told me things that made me think, without mocking me. He never used the god-awful word "feel/feelings". And since he knew I worked in a technical job, he phrased them in ways I could relate to. Tech workers like myself tend to be very mathematical. So, when I told him about things I was worried about, he used the word "probability" a lot. Namely: "What's the probability of that actually happening? Give me a number." So I did. He said: "You said 40%. That's less than half. It's not high enough to be a looming threat. You can certainly make contingency plans, like talk to a labor lawyer, but unless the number goes above 50%, I don't see it as a good reason to affect your sleep quality and other things." At the end, I sincerely thanked him.

"Numbers." "Probability." It seems like he tried hard to relate to me. And yet, it makes me wonder. Today, I literally have a government job! I work for a nearby city's health department. (I just hope they don't find out about my knowledge of George Soros's involvement in the Biden-19 scamdemic, as they probably took his money.) So when I scheduled with the current therapist, he KNEW he was dealing with a successful government worker. So he tried hard to help me. Because if he didn't, he was supposedly undermining the city lived in. Now, I don't plan to go back to him under the EAP. I want to give my employer the impression that one session was successful. Which it was, for the most part.

By contrast, when I was seeing that family therapist as a teen, I was pathetic, subhuman trash: in her eyes, in my family's, and in my peers'. Heck, I couldn't even get my own family to respect me, because almost EVERY family member, nuclear and extended, emotionally abused me every chance they got. And when I told that therapist about it all, she either mocked me or tried to gaslight me into believing that the abuse wasn't happening.

So... this leads me to ask: Do therapists treat you better if you're successful in life? Just compare my status with the family therapist as a teen vs. with the general therapist today. Back then, I was subhuman trash whose own family hated him! Today, I have a government job! So I can see why this man treated me with respect and tailored his approach to help me. While the woman I saw as a teen did nothing but mock and gaslight me, and the only way I could appease her was to fabricate issues she was OK with working on.

So... Do therapists treat you better if you're successful in life?

I don't know.

I dealt with therapists as a teen back in the 80's/90's. Things were different then. I remember being in both psych hospitals and juvenile facilities as a teen. If there were any kids in those places who hadn't been abused in one way or another (usually multiple ways) I never knew about it. And the really messed up part to me was how therapists and psychiatrists would act like it was the kid's fault. The parent(s) never got any blame or were held accountable. The kids never got any useful help. It was always something like...oh this problem child and those poor families having to live with that kid. They'd pump them full of meds, tell them how to act, and send them off when their time was up, back into the houses that were abusing them, so it could repeat all over again. It used to really piss me off.

Because of my own life experience, my brain jumps to...no, it's not a success thing, it's an age thing. I'm probably biased here. I had a good therapist as an adult, and I was nothing close to successful in life at the time (I'm still not )

Like I said, I'm probably biased here. In all honesty, I have no idea. It might be a success thing. It might not.

All that aside, congrats on finding a decent one. It can be hard to find someone you can talk to who knows how to interact with you, phrase things in such a way that they resonate. From my experience, that's a rare find. All too often they can be stuck with one approach and one alone and that doesn't work for everybody. So, yay to that unicorn. I'm glad you found the session to be useful, helpful.

I have been unemployed most of my life and my therapist treats me very kindly, i never got the impression that she doesn't value me

A lot of people in general treat people better if they are "successful in life," so it's no surprise that at least some therapists would do this too. But I wouldn't make a universal generalization about all therapists.

You might be right. I think "age" is a better descriptor than "success". After all, when you're a minor, your therapist's main loyalty is to YOUR PARENTS. You're basically a subhuman object to be fixed. Even if they're abusing you, as long as it's not physical, your therapist will do everything to back them up and blame YOU, while pretending to be your friend. So that's why ALL family therapists are so pathetically unhelpful to kids and teens.

That said, I did see a few therapists as an adult. And they were all mostly unhelpful. Now, they didn't overtly mock me or gaslight me to my face, like the family therapist did. But they invalidated my beliefs about my current life situation. At that time, I worked in the private sector, in low-level tech jobs. That is, I was at the bottom of my companies' totem poles. They paid decently, and my therapists knew, but still. So they had no real reason to actually respect me; they just showed outward "niceness". Which was still better than the blatant mockery and gaslighting my family therapist engaged in.

Today, I have a government job. Heck, when I went to an illegal party in May 2020 (my state had a quarantine order back then), a woman made out with me that night. God knows how many droplets got exchanged with her! And all people are basically the same evolution-wise. So in the light of that, I can see why my current therapist treated me so well. I didn't mention my politics to him directly, I but I think he figured out I was conservative (and most therapists are liberal).

Maybe ... I dated one for a while.  Does that count?

Exactly. In those situations, the parents are treated as the paying client, ending up with all the say in what the problems are and what needs to be 'fixed'. The child involved dismissed...subhuman. Yeah. I can relate. I'm sorry you get it too. It's not fun, to say the least.

I can appreciate what you're saying about being treated with at least some decency as better than prior experiences, but damn. Outward niceness is useless in therapy situations if the therapist is no good. I've had bad therapists as an adult too. It shouldn't be a thing where you can say that niceness made them better. Niceness and respect should be givens in therapy. Always. It's a shame that it isn't.

I think the main factors are some therapists are better than others and some people are more likely to value parents desires and values over those of their kids even when the kid is the patient.

"Niceness" and respect are two very different things. My family therapist was "nice" to me, at least outwardly, and only when I told her what she wanted to hear. The minute I said something that went against her book training or personal beliefs, like "I don't know" in response to "How did that make you feel?", she became vicious! By contrast, the latest therapist was sincerely respectful to me, even when I veered off on unplanned tangents or got into conservative politics.

Of course, this being the Biden-19 era, we both wore masks in session, even though I removed mine momentarily when I walked into his office, as did he, as an introduction. So, my "wrong" facial expressions during the session, if any, were safely hidden away. Perhaps that made it easier for me to earn his respect, along with the fact that masks are compliant with the liberal politics. Although, I'd attribute his respect mostly to the fact that I got sent to him through my government job's EAP program, which he knew. After all, a patient with a government job can do career damage, as opposed to a pathetic teenager.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 24 Dec 2021, 7:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Most people aren't strongly motivated by how someone else could potentially retaliate against them though.

I can't speak for others on this, but my counsellor treats me well. She works for a charity dedicated to helping autistic people, so if she wasn't good and unconditionally accepting she wouldn't be there.

Is it possible the two therapists treated you differently because they were hired for different purposes?

Was the one that saw you when you were a teen hired by your parents? If so, what specifically might they have hired the therapist to do?

I've never seen a therapist. I could always go and find one. But then it might mean having to admit there's something wrong with me.

Don't do that. We prefer you messed up

Have you seen any kind of medical professional like a psychologist or anything other than a therapist?

No.

I have a feeling that won't be satisfying, though. In the event that it wasn't, let me ask you a question. Are autistic people...? Finish that any way you like, the answer is going to be some version of, "Some of them do, some don't" because we're human beings first and that comes before autism. Same with therapists. I had thirteen therapists over the course of my lifetime, and they've all been some level of incompetent until this last one who I've been with for seven years. She met me at the absolute lowest, least successful point in my life.

I've found that a relationship with a therapist is a lot like a relationship with a romantic partner. I'd rather be alone than with the wrong person.