Why do family therapists condone and enable emotional abuse?

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There are 2 ways to think about these situations:

1. My parents didn't like me, they emotionally abused me, etc. I'm a victim. They're the cause of all my problems.

2. No one is perfect. My parents had mental problems so I shouldn't take what they said about me seriously. They treated me the way they did, not because they were bad people deliberately trying to abuse me, but because they were mentally ill.

#1 will make someone feel like a perpetual victim, feeling helpless, passive, and powerless to change the situation. #2 will make it easier to get over it and be a better person.



It's not motivational bs. Knowing that regardless of what happened to me, that I was responsible and in charge of my own actions and feelings is what helped me get over past traumas. Telling people their feelings are valid and they're a victim keeps people down, contributes to helplessness, and makes it more likely they will never get better. I'll agree AspieOne was probably a victim of bad parenting and that his feelings are valid but AspieOne doesn't need to remain a victim forever or need people to continuously validate his feelings.



I never said anyone should deny what they felt. I agree people should express their feelings. I used to tell people I was depressed because no one liked me, thought that I was a victim of people rejecting me because I was different, and blamed everyone else for my problems. People telling me they felt bad for me wasn't helpful since it didn't improve my situation.

Learning that everyone causes their own emotions by choosing how to think about things was some of the best advice I was ever given. When I heard it, I got angry and accused that person of being insensitive and blaming me for my problems but I've since learned he was right and I feel much better now. Knowing that my emotions are caused by my own beliefs and that no one else is responsible for how I feel has made me much happier because I know I can choose to think about things differently so I can feel better. When people treat me poorly, I think I'm not perfect, maybe I did something wrong or was misunderstood. If that doesn't seem to be the case, I tell myself they're probably just having a bad day or acting that way due to stress or a mental problem. There are people who experienced major trauma (such as Jews in concentration camps and victims of horrible crimes) who were able to move on and enjoy their life by thinking about what happened in the past and the present in a mentally healthy way. No one needs to be a helpless victim forever.

My own experience, again. I'm definitely on the #2, though I don't think it was my choice, it's just the way things are about me.
Still, you can't skip the stage of realising how much you have suffered and how it has harmed you. For old wounds to heal, you need to open them and look into them, otherwise they will rot under the surface of "everything is okay". I've really been there.

One of the first meaningful things I learned in psychology: You are not responsible for your emotions. You are responsible for your actions. Emotions happen to you.
What you describe looks quite CBT. It works great on some and it's a disaster for some others. Depending on one's temperament, I suppose. In my case, it proved harmful - reinforcing my "keep my face up no matter what and pretend you're not insane inside" attitude.


That may be true if one's emotions are indeed caused by false beliefs.
However, in my case, most of my "insane" emotions turned out to be natural reactions to the reality I experienced, led by sensory problems and systematic denial. They didn't go away until actual problems in my environment got adressed - and I assure you, I tried a lot of positive thinking and belief control, got quite successful and mentally ill.

Spare me the motivational BS! You sound like my therapist that way, actually. I wanted to STOP being a victim even back then. So given her psychology training, I thought she'd teach me some assertiveness techniques I could use on my family. That's why I told her about the abuse. Heck, if she had a Master's degree, surely she must have known those techniques. Like, rehearse using a assertive tone of voice (abusers only abuse the weak, after all), or give me comebacks I can use.

She didn't teach me any of them. She just mocked me, gaslighted me, and/or pretended not to know what I'm talking about. All of which perpetuated the abuse I was going through. "But why didn't you just ask her to teach you?", you might say. The first time I told her about the abuse, she mocked me to my face, with cooing noises and such. So I figured out she was on their side, and knew better than to ask her.

Being assertive is great but even if she taught you assertiveness techniques, there's a good chance that your parents wouldn't have changed. One thing I learned that helped me that I was trying to convey to you is this - You can't change people but you can change how you think about it. How you think affects how you feel.

I used to be a highly sensitive person who was easily offended and frequently got upset after people criticized me. Now, there is nothing anyone can say that will make me feel worse because I learned how to think differently so that I can feel good no matter what happens to me. For example, if my house burnt down tonight, I would be sad but I'd think positively and be thankful I survived. If you want to know how I did it, you can go to https://autismcbt.wordpress.com to see what helped me.

I agree. I have no way of knowing whether the OP is processing this for the first time or has been seeking validation for many years.



The most important thing I learned is that I am responsible for my own emotions. If emotions just happened, then CBT would never work for anyone yet studies show CBT is the most effective treatment for depression and anxiety. Pretending is never a good idea. With CBT, you're supposed to change beliefs that you've been shown and know are wrong, not beliefs that are true.

Of course, emotions aren't caused solely by your own beliefs. Things like stress, unmet needs, and conditioned emotional responses (which probably plays the biggest role in most people diagnosed with autism) are also important. If you felt worse after something happened (such as being criticized for being yourself) enough times, your mind will associate that event with those emotions which will cause you to automatically feel those emotions without you thinking anything about it. That's what made me sensitive to criticism and afraid to be myself. The information on https://autismcbt.wordpress.com/sensiti ... criticism/ helped me eliminate my sensitivity to criticism so I can be myself and not feel worse no matter what happens to me.




Negative life experiences can make life more stressful. Stress has been shown to alter brain function so that people focus on the negatives and assume the worst while minimizing the positive things in their life. Correcting those problems probably reduced your stress which improved your thinking.

Changing the way you think can help even when your emotions are caused by true beliefs. Some Jews in concentration camps feel apart while other remained mentally stable despite all of them being treated horribly. Studies show the way people think about what happens to them makes a big difference in how they feel which is very helpful to know if you can't change your situation.

I think that CBT for depression and anxiety is successful not because it's changing what you feel, but just how you deal with and act upon those feelings. It can be helpful especially when there is no rational reason to be feeling depressed and anxious (i.e. mental illness), but trauma is different.

No one gets to choose their emotions. You do get to choose how you respond to them but you have to feel them first.

In my experience trauma lasts a lifetime. Especially when it's throughout childhood. No matter what perspective you take on it afterwards there are always going to be little things or new triggers that pop up unexpectedly. You're not wrong about thinking patterns affecting recovery but before those new patterns can be made, learning how to actually feel and acknowledge those feelings should come first.

When you spend so long being a victim someone has to teach you how to be a human again. What happened wasn't your fault and you didn't deserve it. I think this is the first stage of healing after coming out of an abusive situation. Healing doesn't begin until at least you're removed from the situation.

Then I honestly think it's kind of like the five stages of grief. It sounds like Aspie1 is in the anger stage which like is totally valid cause that stuff sounds messed up.

That's it!
I had to purposely learn to experience my own emotions in my early thirties because in the "normal" time for learning them, I was too busy surviving.
I suspect CBT takes experiencing one's own emotions for granted. For some of us, that may not be the case, even in case of apparently very "high functioning" individuals.

I see it similarily. It's natural. It's healthy. It's processing a lot of stuff that needs to be processed.

I went through the exact same thing, but with personal wishes and interests, rather than emotions. The whole time I was growing up, until the day I moved out at age 24, my entire family sent me a very firm message: "Aspie1's own feelings, wishes, and interests don't matter, because he barely qualifies as a person, so why does he even try?". I also was told I wasn't supposed to feel certain things, like being angry at my teacher. This was further reinforced my by therapist, when she cooed at me, mocked me, or gaslighted me; she effectively took the side of everyone but me, and perpetuated the emotional abuse. From what I read, the vast majority of family therapists are like this, because in therapy-speak, "family" means "parents".

A MAJOR turning point happened for me at age 29, when I took a cruise by myself. I was responsible for planning the whole thing, from reservation to debarkation, and also flights into Florida and ground transportation to the port. But I had full control over the whole thing as well. Anything I wanted (within legal bounds and human respect), I could get, be it from the cruise line or the people I met. Tear up the dance floor salsa dancing? Sure! Partake in the trivia challenge? OK! Take a silly picture when 3 girls jumped into a photo with me? Hell yeah! The people I met and made friends with thought I was cool and fun, and actually respected my wishes; I also picked my battles and compromised, when something I wanted wasn't that important to me. For the first time in my life, I actually mattered! This cruise gave me an existential crisis that took me 8 months to get over, when I finally able to integrate my "new life" into my mind. I did briefly see another therapist during this time (just 6 weekly sessions). But while he was respectful of my boundaries and reacted like a normal person when I talked, he didn't teach me anything I didn't already know.

As for "emotions", that's exactly why I hated my therapist I saw as a teen. She laser-focused on my emotions, while doing absolutely nothing to help the bad emotions go away, as well as doing nothing to help me live a better life. She tried to explain all that away by saying "it's more important to feel better in the long run, not the short run", but the jig was up: I figured out she wasn't on my side. I stopped listening to anything she said, and focused on keeping her from retraumatizing me, while sneaking my parents' whiskey at home.

Yeah, I guess it's important that as I slowly learned to identify my emotions, my therapist was teaching me to see unadressed needs those emotions were indicating. Yours seems not only to have neglected it but apparently she actively (or passively) denied it

I'm glad you're figuring it out on your own. That cruise was quite recently, wasn't it? I remember you writing about it on WP.

The cruise that ended up being life-changing was back in 2012. It was the first time in my life where I felt like I actually mattered, despite the messages my family (and the family therapist) sent me. I went on anther cruise in 2013, which felt almost the same as in 2012. My wishes were respected, and people I met seemed to like me. It was even out of the same port, but different ship and destinations.

The "recent" cruise you may be thinking of was last year, in 2019; it was even out of California instead of Florida. By then, I already learned to fight for my wishes successfully, including with family. Its "shock factor" was people acting respectful and even deferential to me from the get-go, rather than later, out of niceness. Women were inordinately physically affectionate with me (hugs, hand-grabs, etc.) and men did small favors for me, like bringing me my drink order from a bar.

I smell a new therapy method in the making. (Well, after Scamdemic-2020 goes away.) It'll work like this:
1. Give an aspie a short, rigorous course on social skills, particularly in party-type situations.
2. Send them on a short cruise they pick out themselves, with a $200 alcohol credit.
3. After returning, have them meet with the course trainer 3 times, to debrief.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 23 Aug 2020, 11:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

For us, as autists, I think the therapists have no idea how to approach us and/or how to help. My experience with therapists has been exceedingly traumatic and I don't care to spend the 10 pages in order to explain it all. I knew it was wrong, what my parents and therapist did to me, but the experience has colored my liftefor decades in ways I am hardly aware of. I have had, over the years, several times to explain it to people and they were so horrified at what my parents did not me, it was quite validating to me and eventually it experience has drifted into the depths of memory.

Everyone takes a different path through life. What worked for one person may not work for another. I can only share my experience with psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists, and that experience is that they are mostly useless at best and are extremely damaging at the worst, especially when one is still in minor and your parents have legal control over you.


Some people benefit from therapy and I am not discounting Magz or others experiences. One of my therapists who actually did teach me good functional coping skills, but ended up taking up 10 years of my life as he essentially stalked me, followed me to another state and moved in with me. Thank God I had the sense not to marry him.

So, I get it aspie1. Your experiences were accurate, your therapist and parents were wrong. You are a real person with real resources for living your own life and making yourself independent and moving forward with your life. The cruise sounds like great fun. May you have many more.

I'm not a cruise type, my elements are wilderness and extreme sports, but I think I get your main point:
The experience of being a valid human being, treated with friendliness and respect, is what a lot of us desperately need.

CBT definitely changed how I felt. I used to get upset when people criticized me (due to a low self-esteem caused by distorted beliefs about myself) but now I like being criticized because it helps me become a better person. Criticism doesn't cause any unwanted emotions whatsoever anymore. That taught me that my feelings were caused by beliefs and thoughts that were wrong. Although I was too arrogant and stubborn to see it for most of my life, I've since realized that everyone was right that criticism isn't a big deal and that I shouldn't have gotten upset when I was criticized. I learned that the first step to recovery was to humble myself, stop blaming other people for my emotions, acknowledge that I was the problem, and accept personal responsibility for my emotions. I now accept that I am fully responsible for all of my emotions which has made a big difference.



It's not the trauma itself that causes problems but how you think about it and deal with it that is the problem. Everyone has suffered from trauma but most people quickly get over it. Only a few people end up feeling like a victim for life. I agree that suppressing emotions is part of the problem and that it's important to feel and process those emotions. I read a big textbook on PTSD written by experts and a big part of recovery is learning how to think about what happened differently, accept responsibility for your role in your suffering, and taking steps to reduce those triggers (which are called conditioned emotional responses) which can be done by correcting your thinking and gradual exposure therapy (facing your fears by gradually exposing yourself to those triggers while thinking about it in a mentally healthy way so you don't feel worse).

You keep saying "emotions". Well, the problem is that family therapists delight in dredging up dark, unpleasant emotions in kids and teens, without teaching them to make those emotions go away. All for the patient's own good, of course, under the pretext of "it's more important to feel better in the long run". So the patient is left with double trauma: the original incident(s) and the emotions dredged up by the therapist. I was smart enough to know that alcohol numbs bad emotions, even at age 12; other minors might not be so lucky.

"Exposure therapy" is something I hold in high regard. For example, if a patient has an irrational fear of dogs, there's no better way to start out than watching cute newborn puppy videos, before gradually working their way up to petting a gentle giant like an adult St. Bernard. And even with exposure therapy, a patient may reach an impassable step, and may never become comfortable around certain dog breeds. Which is OK. But family therapy is equivalent to locking that patient in a cage with angry Pit Bulls.

The most effective way to make unwanted emotions go away, according to scientific studies, is to change the way you think about things because your own beliefs are what is causing your emotions. Nothing anyone says or does can make you feel worse. The reason people react differently to the same trauma is because they think about it differently.

Suppose two people who frequently complained were given the nickname "Sir Whines-A-Lot." One person responds by thinking other people are mean, insensitive, and invalidating his feelings. The second person thinks maybe I do complain too much. I can see how that annoys people. Maybe I should lighten up and learn to be content. The first person will feel worse, blame other people for his problems, and see himself as a victim. The second person may laugh at the nickname, realize there's some truth in it, understand that people are just saying what they observe, make an effort to be better, and go back to enjoying his life.


You wrote, "family therapists delight in dredging up dark, unpleasant emotions in kids and teens." A skilled therapist would have you evaluate those kind of statements to see whether they are accurate. They may ask, how many family therapists did you see who treated you that way? 5, 10, 20? Have you seen enough family therapists to arrive at that conclusion? It's not uncommon for people to have bad experiences with only 3 or 4 people and overgeneralize that to everyone. That kind of thinking is often the result of chronic stress affecting the brain, not any kind of brain disease or disorder.

Then, they'd have you re-evaluate the statements you heard. People generally choose careers as therapists because they want to help people although a lifetime of negative life experiences may cause you to think negatively and think people become family therapists to hurt children. If you mentioned what you said before your therapist responded with "awwwwww!" or "that's so cute!" most people would probably tell you they interpret those statements differently than you did. I took a class in counseling strategies and some of the things you mentioned are what I was taught to do to build empathy and help understand the patient. I was specifically taught to respond with "you feel ______ because ________" and "so you're saying this means _______" to make sure the therapist understood the patient correctly.




Exposure therapy can also be used to overcome sensitivity to criticism, a fear of being yourself, and feeling invalidated. You could practice telling people things where they are likely to respond by saying, "Get over it", "Quit crying about it", "Lighten up!", "It's not a big deal", etc. to practice thinking about it in a way that won't make you feel worse. Instead of feeling invalided, you could think things like, "I know my feelings are valid. I don't need anyone to validate them. They're right. It isn't a bid deal. I can get over this and enjoy my life." I know it works because that's what I did and it really helped me. I went from being very sensitive and getting upset easily to not being bothered by anything anyone says. If you try it, do it when you have the least amount of stress as possible since stress will affect your thinking and make it more difficult to not feel worse afterward.

I think you're forgetting that trauma affects the brain in a way that makes those thought patterns and reactions impossible. Like literally physically not possible. Especially when it's emotional abuse taking place over a long span of time. Just as you are defending the therapist and saying Aspie 1 misunderstood something, I think you are also missunderstanding something here.

No one is disagreeing or arguing with you about the importance or effectiveness of these tools. CBT and your mindset in general change the way that you experience something happening to you in that moment thus affecting the emotions that you feel. You are right in saying that you can 'choose' your emotions but it is not that simple either, and even when you do achieve a healthy way of thinking about things, certain things will happen that will not feel good. It's as simple as that. When someone you love hurts you over and over again it's going to make you sad. You can't just decide for it not to. You cannot choose your emotions. You can choose a way of thinking that will influence them and create a better chance of feeling more positive ones. Except for this strategy only works when you are talking about events that either are currently happening in that mindset or future ones that will happen.

People respond to trauma differently not because of the mindset they adopt afterwards but because of the mindset they had going into it.

If someone is quite versed with abuse and knows how to handle it (they've probably already adopted at least some of that healthy mind we were talking about) then when it's over it's not going to affect them as much. Then there's someone who's never experienced this before and therefore hasn't had the opportunity or need to have this kind of mindset ready to support them through this. This of course is the most true of a child. They know nothing of the world except the things their parents teach them (at least at first). If you grow up being taught you're a piece of sh*t then it's not going to be undone with a little CBT or exposure therapy. I think this is part of what Aspie1 is getting at, is that he was a kid and went to an outside person who then also taught him that what his parents were teaching him is the 'correct' way to be treated. Therefore the therapist further drilled in an extremely unhealthy view of the world and perpetuated what are often long-lasting beliefs about how he should feel about himself and others. Again, this is not his fault. He was a victim. These events cannot be erased and so he always will be in some way a victim. However, that does not need to affect the present. You can have been a victim without continuing to act or think like one. The key difference that you don't realize is that until these hammered in mindsets are no longer a part of him, he is still in a way a victim. The abuse is still ongoing but inside his head and it is not his fault for being taught to think this way.

I don't know what trauma you have experienced and I don't want to make assumptions about you but right now I'm finding it very difficult to believe that you have personally experienced trauma of this kind at this magnitude and if you have you've clearly forgotten about some key parts of it. I say this because at times you are coming off as insensitive and I'm not sure if you are aware or not.