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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