Why is family therapy almost identical to bullying?

Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] 

Aspie1
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Mar 2005
Gender: Male
Posts: 6,749
Location: United States

04 Jan 2022, 8:26 pm

Looking back at my family therapy experience and my stints with school bullying, I realize something: my therapist's actions and my bullies' actions were almost exactly alike! 8O 8O 8O 8O Consider the following.

Therapist's action: rubbing the misery in my face when I talked about being emotionally abused by my family.
Example: "Aww, you felt sad and helpless when you parents yelled at you for 45 minutes and called you names."
Similar to: the taunting, like "Aww, you feel like a weakling when we pick on you, and you can't do anything about it."

Therapist's action: pretending not to understand me when I talked about serious issues, in order to gaslight me into thinking I'm wrong.
Example: (After I mentioned reading in a library book that parents don't always love their kids equally) "You mean don't always love equally or always don't love equally?"
Similar to: bullies trying to convince me that clocks get moved back in spring and forward in fall (autumn) "to compensate for the changing day length" :roll:.

Therapist's action: acting in ways that are completely unexpected or unnerving, god knows why.
Example: cooing "aww" like I just showed her a picture of a pile of puppies, after I told her about my parents grounding me for 2 weeks for a C on a report card.
Similar to: bullies pretending not to believe me when I said Saturn's rings are made of rock and ice, not plastic like they were saying they are.

WTF!? Didn't the therapy-method-makers think ANYTHING through when they came up with these stupid methods? Didn't they realize how similar such methods are to bullying? Or did they do the bullying themselves as kids? Don't they realize such methods are triggers? Or is it all by design, considering how "family" therapy is meant to help the parents make their kids weaker and more compliant, rather than improve the whole "family's" quality of life?

Come to think of it, I vaguely remember reading a library book 25 years ago. It talked about the inner workings of therapy. It said that "family therapy" was originally called "child therapy". The name was changed to make it sound more inclusive and welcoming, or what we now know as "woke". And probably also to hide the real purpose of "family" therapy from the kids/teens taking part in it.