PASS is a charity supporting victims of any type of psychological therapy mistreatment and abuse by providing:
- Mediation
- An opportunity to find out if your therapist has been abusing other victims
- An online forum for peer support
- Articles and writings offering insight, hope and courage.
- A possible referral to therapists experienced dealing with psychotherapy abuse.
The founder and director of this charity is Maja Farrell a psychoanalytic, psychodynamic therapist.
Moderators of the online forum are psychotherapy clients who have also been abused by therapists in the past.
We all have been on the receiving end of therapy abuse and therefore know how important it is to have support in those stressful and often traumatic times.
PASS aims to explore the negative encounters within - and breakdowns of- therapeutic relationships. In our articles we hope to explore each therapeutic relationship in more depth, at times linking traumatic 'therapeutic' ruptures to the early infant-maternal caregiver relationship which, although long gone and "forgotten", can evoke strong unconscious forces within both participants leading to a breakdown that cannot be thought about and understood at the time, instead needs to be got rid of and forgotten.
Holding the belief that early relationships with maternal caregivers (male or female) will be re-created and acted out within the therapeutic space, a space created by the meeting of the client's and practitioner's mind, a simple blaming of client or counsellor alike when therapy breaks down, is not always helpful and certainly not rectified with a slap on the wrist or a ban from practise; as a matter of fact, the breakdown and all following actions can be a reflection of the client's (and/or therapist's) past and internal world needing to be thought about and understood. The dilemma, however, is the very person, the therapist, who is needed and used as a tool to re-create the past in order to understand it, may feel abused himself by the client (Projective Identification) and terminate therapy prematurely.
When such a rupture happens it most likely leaves both parties in an internal reality, meaning, client and therapist may become stuck in the re-created past of the client (and of the therapist, depending on the therapist's unworked early defences).
Depending on the strength of unconscious projections that were thrown to and fro between client and therapist during their time together, after the breakdown both may carry on life separately but still very much entangled psychologically. An example of this is the therapist who, after introjecting and acting out (becoming) the client's projections renews his profile from " counsellor" to "very experienced counsellor"; or suddenly increasing his fee drastically, both done to boost his self worth and esteem. He may still be caught in the client's projections of e.g. worthlessness. If the therapist stays in these projections he may be more likely to "re-abuse" again.
The client on the other hand is left with the painful sense of being helpless; even if s/he complains, a desperate move to regain self worth and esteem, or within the infant part of our mind a desperate act to "get mother back and repair what has been damaged" , it will not help free her/him from the projections that are internally attacking and hurting.
The infant part within the client may look for reparation but unable to find it with the counsellor turns to another therapist in the Hope s/he can offer such relief by helping her make sense of what is happening. Unfortunately, her anger, rage, helplessness, hopelessness and despair may have gained in strength after the previous therapy breakdown so that the next therapist may experience unconscious forces coming from the client that will frighten him, causing another mindless re-action rather than well-thought-about/of action, which may lead him to withdraw emotionally in order to withstand the projections and beta elements (Bion) or terminate the therapy prematurely. The vicious circle of rejection continues for the client and compounds rage, anger and despair, creating hatred and an unconscious need to annihilate the rejecting Other (Fairbairn).
Those clients, unless meeting a very grounded and robust Other, will be stuck in an internal world that is hostile, barren and unforgiving; unable to free themselves of the projections that were once forced into them as infants/children.
This next paragraph is taken from
The Perversion of the Professional Caring Relationship
This professionally endorsed process of ‘projective identification’ in a vulnerable self works as long as the patient acts his or her prescribed part and the doctor/therapist can feel sufficiently successful and potent. However, it does also imply that some doctors will tend to become emotionally dependent on their patients. Being needed has indeed been found to be one of doctors’ greatest sources of satisfaction, probably to maintain what Kohut would describe as a ‘grandiose’ sense of self and, at a more basic level, to satisfy a need to be loved. However, such a dependency can also generate feelings of anger in these same physicians (Johnson, 1991).
It is unfortunate that, as in medicine, many of those who choose to train in psychotherapy have themselves suffered from deprivation and/or abuse and that they will tend to deal with their own needs by projecting them and attending to them in their patients unless this possibility is worked upon in their personal therapy.
These potential ‘compulsive carers’, as John Bowlby used to call them, require a personal therapeutic experience which addresses the reality of their traumatic past if they are to avoid both denying and recreating their patient’s own traumatic experience within the therapeutic setting. Otherwise, there can either be an unconscious collusion with the patient’s own traumatic re-enactment, as happens sometimes with abused victims, or the therapist can unconsciously impose his or her own traumatic experience, re-enacted in this professional context from the point of view of the victimizer rather than the victim. The latter is particularly common with sexually abused women, whose tendency to sexualize their relationships with intimate others puts them at risk of being further abused by the very people who should be protecting them (Kluft, 1990; Fahy & Fisher, 1992).
In my view, this tendency on the part of therapists to re-enact their patient’s abuse is due partly to a denial of the importance of psychological trauma and, in some cases, to the persistent belief in the overriding importance of the internal phantasy world of the patient. What is not consciously recognized can so easily be unconsciously re-enacted, especially if, in addition, the psychotherapist is also unaware of the potential impact of his or her own personal history of abuse. Another way to minimize the damage that can occur between therapist and patient is to make it a professional requirement that all therapists have some degree of peer group supervision where they can share their work, however skilled they may be. Finally, I am encouraging more and more the use of tape recordings of sessions for the patient’s benefit, mainly in order to deal with their dissociative amnesia and any difficult moments they experience in therapy.