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Information for People in Therapy

Welcome to this site! By visiting this site, you have demonstrated that you have an open mind and are committed to being an informed, educated, empowered consumer in control of your own life. Please feel free to read the entire site and all of its resources. You can visit this site and read and use its pages in complete privacy. This site would never try to determine your identity, and even if it did, the security features of web browsers make sure that it can't. You can visit here as often as you wish as we post new information. The Internet is a great way to learn in complete privacy.

By entering therapy, you demonstrated the courage to acknowledge issues in your life and the commitment to deal with them instead of ignoring them. It takes courage to admit that not everything in life is the way you might wish, and it takes courage to work to change that.

Unfortunately, just as in other professions, not every therapist is knowledgeable, responsible,  competent, or even sane. Even compassionate, well-meaning therapists can be ignorant or make mistakes. There's also no guaranteed way to determine in advance the competence of a particular therapist.

Do you have doubts about your therapy or your therapist? If you do, please take a look at this site's private, confidential, anonymous online list of questions for evaluating therapy. (Even if your therapy is going well, you might consider reading the list just to be safe!) This list was written by Terence Campbell, Ph.D., who is a family therapist in Sterling Heights, Michigan and the author of Beware the Talking Cure, a book about some common problems in therapy.

If you have doubts about your therapy or your therapist, you might also consider reading some of these books:

  • Beware the Talking Cure, which explains common problems of certain kinds of therapy and some warning signs of a well-meaning but ignorant or misguided therapist
  • Suggestions of Abuse, which explains the results of a large-scale survey of therapists, demonstrates that many well-meaning therapists are unfortunately ignorant of basic research findings about memory and hypnosis, and discusses the risk that a well-meaning therapist can accidentally (and without even realizing it) suggest things to a client which may cause the client to distort, misinterpret, or inaccurately reinterpret his or her memories
  • Victims of Memory, which discusses the risks of memory recovery therapy and contains interviews with therapists, people in therapy, retractors (people who believed they had recovered memories and then realized they were mistaken), and family members of people in therapy

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