She Doesn’t Trust Her Husband’s Therapist Because His Mental Health Has Only Gotten Worse, And The Therapist Keeps Doing Sessions With Him Out of The Office While Saying It’s “Only Unethical If They Get Caught”
For her entire life, this woman has suffered from anxiety and depression.
In order to cope with her mental health struggles, she has gone to therapy for the majority of her life, with some occasional breaks from therapy in between.
She is a huge advocate of therapy and its benefits since it’s been such a wonderful tool for her.
Three years ago, she tried to get her husband to go to therapy, too. He experimented with online therapy and saw a couple of different therapists in person before he found a therapist who seemed like a good fit.
For the last two years, her husband has been seeing the same therapist.
Not long after her husband found this therapist, she started to feel uneasy about his therapist.
“I work hard not to be judgmental of his journey or how he does the work on his mental health. But I would get frustrated when my husband would say that all they talked about again in session was golf/airplanes/gaming,” she said.
Even though this concerned her, she tried to acknowledge that it can take a while for people to build trust and rapport with their therapist before tackling difficult topics that brought them to therapy in the first place. So, despite having some worries in the back of her head, she didn’t voice anything to her husband.
With her own therapist, she has discussed how she’s doing her best not to form any negative opinions about her husband’s therapist or how he works on his mental health. However, as she and her husband have had struggles together in their marriage, it’s irritated her that while she is getting the most out of her therapy sessions by taking a hard look at what she needs to work through, her husband is in therapy discussing flyer miles with his therapist.
Nejron Photo – stock.adobe.com- illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Throughout the entire time her husband has been attending therapy, she has never pried him for information on what he’s talked about during his sessions. She’s only asked her husband how his therapy session went.
At times, her husband would only say that therapy was “‘Good,'” and sometimes, he would go more in-depth with what they discussed. Consistently, she’s told her husband that he doesn’t have to give her any details about his therapy sessions if he doesn’t feel comfortable doing so.
“A couple of things that happened that made me feel weird about his therapist: They did an in-person therapy session at the driving range. They’ve done sessions at busy restaurants. My husband told me that his therapist said, ‘It’s only unethical if you get caught,’ about doing their sessions in non-private settings,” she explained.
Obviously, knowing that her husband’s therapist has broken some clear boundaries commonly established in therapy, she has felt incredibly uneasy about her husband continuing to see this therapist.
Plus, her husband’s mental health has dramatically worsened since he started seeing this particular therapist.
Now, she no longer just feels uneasy about her husband’s therapist. She strongly believes that he’s deeply unethical and terrible.
As of late, her husband has been experiencing some severe depression.
“He’s expressed to me that he has moments where he is overwhelmed by feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness. The other day, he was having one of those and said, ‘I want to smash dishes.’ I was trying to come up with ways he could do that safely or other anger-releasing ideas (pillow-screaming or punching). I walked away for a second and came back to my husband holding his hands repeatedly against the pot of boiling water and saying, ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch,'” she shared.
Immediately, she rushed over and got her husband to take his hands away from the pot of hot water. When she asked him what made him feel like he wanted to do that, he explained that he wanted to take his mind off of his uncomfortable emotions and express the emotional turmoil he was feeling in a physical way.
Since she has self-harmed in the past as a coping mechanism for panic attacks, she told her husband that she understands how he’s feeling. Then, she tried to teach him some healthier coping skills for when she wants to self-harm.
She also asked her husband to be sure that he talked about his self-harm with his therapist since that was the behavior that he’d just engaged in, and he needed to find other ways to cope with difficult emotions.
While she was concerned that her husband wouldn’t discuss this self-harm episode with his therapist, she wanted to believe him when he told her that he would bring it up because he was aware of how crucial it was for her.
However, even though her husband did, in fact, tell his therapist about what happened, his therapist didn’t find his self-harm to be an issue or anything to be worried about.
Naturally, she was outraged at this. She was mortified that a therapist was seeing his client become more and more depressed over time, to the point that he put his hands on a pot of boiling water and didn’t find this to be a problem.
She is furious, but she acknowledged that she can’t tell her husband outright that his therapist is horrible. However, she believes that she is the only one who is emotionally supporting her husband. From her perspective, it doesn’t seem like her husband’s therapist cares about his emotional well-being or will do anything to help him.
Understandably, she’s terrified because her husband may internalize the idea that self-harm in response to painful emotions isn’t something to worry about. She’s afraid that her husband’s self-harm will get worse and more damaging over time if he continues engaging in the behavior.
What would you do if you were in her shoes?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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