22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #12-16🦇💩 (11)
A no-nonsense guide to recognizing bad therapy, complete with educational cussy words and emojis.
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Rewind to signs #1-5: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #1-5
Rewind to signs #6-11: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #6-11
Fast Forward to signs #17-22: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy
Hello there, without further ado, here are signs #12-16. Always remember: This is all my opinion, based on my experience and education. It doesn’t have to be yours.
12. THEY KEEP BRINGING UP ISSUES THAT REQUIRE MORE THERAPY AND THEY'RE NOT COMING FROM YOU
Your drive for healing is what brought you in. You didn’t need a therapist for that drive and your therapist shouldn’t be the driving force that tethers you to them, or therapy with them. The impetus for therapy ideally comes from clients. They get to determine their own goals. If your therapist continually offers or manufactures reasons for you to come back, and those reasons aren’t coming from you, they're probably motivated by greed or some other ulterior motive.
Especially if they present themselves as the only one who can help you. They're not. In my opinion, this lie is one of the biggest red flags that something's wrong with your therapist (any healer, actually). There's a good chance they're making themselves your only option so they can be the sole beneficiary of your income.
Everyone has blind spots. A therapist may help you see them, but the desire to work on them ideally comes from you. They shouldn’t pressure you. There are skillful ways to help people see things about themselves that don't involve controlling their decision-making.
If you find yourself becoming passive in your healing process; if therapy consistently feels heavy; if your therapist keep rehashing old material, finding new issues in it, and then says they’re available to help you and they're the only one who can (or they won’t let you see someone else); if you’re getting the message that your inner work is endless and you’ll be damned to a life of repetition compulsion unless you make sure no stone is left unturned (and other fear-tactics), then your therapist's playlist is titled "Looney Tunes". Don't buy into fear tactics. You're not getting a used car.
A good therapist wants to see you fulfilled, independent, and empowered—in your life and healing process. They don't exploit your psychology in order to increase their profit margin. They aren't threatened when you see other professionals.
TAKEAWAYS: You are not a walking ATM. You have agency in therapy. If your therapist makes you feel like you don’t, consider that a sign to leave. You decide what you want to talk about in therapy. A therapist can provide insights; they can suggest and guide, but if they keep pulling out more reasons for you to keep seeing them, regardless of what you want, and things aren’t changing for the better; if they’re giving doomsday consequences if you don't follow through with them, they’re overstepping and probably going to scam you. Why? Because bats are unleashing the trouser tyrant and your therapist is the pants.
13. YOU'RE SPENDING TOO MUCH MONEY (AND NOT SEEING HELPFUL RESULTS)
"The sordid topic of coin.” (That’s a line from the movie “Death Becomes Her”. I recommend it.)
If you’ve given your work with your therapist a reasonable amount of time to see effects, but you’re feeling consistently worse or the same, and they keep deflecting accountability and pinning it on you (it couldn’t be their incompetence; it has to be that you haven’t worked through your blah blah blah), your therapist is probably a psycho. Especially if they tell you that the only way to get out of the hole they just dug for you, is to do more work with them. They can’t be your protector and your scapegoater at the same time.
I used this analogy before, but can you imagine telling your doctor that the medicine they prescribed is making you sick and their only intervention is to increase the dose and tell you you’re taking it wrong? You’d think that bats were AirDropping brown files to this doctor’s hard drive.
In this world, money is a necessity. I’m not a financial expert, but you spend your valuable life hours accumulating it; time you’ll never get back. I think that what you spend it on should reflect what you value. A lying, greedy, exploitative, crazy therapist is not valuable or worth anything.
If you’re spending more than you realistically can, not seeing results, getting blamed for it, and your therapist won’t work with you despite you being committed, there’s a good chance they’re stringing you along. Why? Because there are all these bats making deposits at the porcelain bank and your therapist is the branch manager.
TAKEAWAYS: You’re not paying therapists to be blaming and greedy. A therapist who is endlessly willing to take your money, while failing to acknowledge and have accountability that their guidance may not be helping, cares more about money than you. Someone like that is not worth listening to. Go where your commitment to healing is appreciated and you experience helpful results. Keeping a therapy journal that includes costs can be helpful, too.
14. HIJACKING YOUR GOOD QUALITIES AND MANIPULATING THEM VIA VICTIMY EXCUSES OR PATIENT BLAMING
One of the most devastating aspects of malignant narcissist therapist abuse is having your best qualities hijacked and used to control and exploit you. For example, my ex-crackpot tried to stop me from leaving her practice once by pointing out that I'm loyal, and suggesting I was giving up and abandoning her.
That's a messed-up low-blow, to manipulate someone with their own sense of loyalty and relational integrity. Exploiting your best qualities to control you is emotional abuse (sign #6). What's more, if you're in counseling because you struggle with codependency (which a lot of people do), they're exploiting that as well.
Another way my crazy ex-therapist hijacked and exploited good qualities was by manipulating my kindness and empathetic nature, so that I continually overlooked unacceptable behaviors and continued to bankroll her. She did this by conjuring up whiny excuses for her repeated, verbally abusive tirades and other insanely unprofessional lapses of sanity. She’d blame her “bad day” or another drama in her life, while crying and offering a free session to make up for the abusive one I had paid for. She would cry on cue. I used to quip that she could win an award for her ability to act the part.
There are plenty of people who don’t take their “bad day” out on others. It’s not an excuse for abusive behavior, especially when it’s ongoing. I had this reinforced when the shooter of a mass shooting event in Atlanta said he did it because (you guessed it) he was having a ”bad day.” That’s not a bad day, that’s a bad person. That excuse might give context to smaller transgressions once in a while, because we all have those moments, but not a shooting spree or ongoing abuse.
The whacko ex-therapist was always a victim. There was always an excuse, and I was always expected to understand. I fell for it countless times.
A more subtle manipulation was the excuse that her job as a therapist was so hard. As if she hadn't chosen it. As if she wanted me to feel sorry for her that my mere existence was part of her burden—the one forcing her to act like a tyrant? It was all a crazymaking manipulation. What kind of person lies solely to make others feel guilty for their decisions? A wackadoodle.
A major consequence of narcissists hijacking your wonderful qualities and weaponizing you against yourself is that it creates a war inside of you. They wired you for self-distrust. You often end up blaming (misattributing, really) some of the most lovable parts of yourself and doubting if you should even try to restore them. Sometimes you even end up hating them and rejecting them. They would be fodder for another narcissistic abuse experience.
You devalue yourself, thinking that if you hadn’t been loyal and compassionate, this never would’ve happened. It is truly anger and hatred turned inwards. I stuggled with this for a long time and sometimes still do. It isn't mine to bear—it's the perpetrator's. Still, it’s excruciating. This is one of the greatest tragedies and hurdles in healing from narcissistic abuse.
One thing that helps me put the shame back with its rightful owner, the narcissist, and unfuse my best qualities from a perpetrator-therapist's dark projections, is remembering that they envied me and wanted to destroy my best qualities for that very reason—because they're the best qualities and I'm awesome. There was no way for me to see the abuse coming. I didn’t hold a gun to their head and make them lie to me over and over and over. They chose that.
If I buy into hating myself like they hated me and wanted me to hate myself, I’m doing exactly what they want. Not today satan! I don’t understand being that depraved, but it's obviously a sign that bats are playing "Total Eclipse of the Fart" and your therapist is covering for Bonnie Tyler.
TAKEAWAYS: If your therapist is using your qualities as a reason to tolerate or accept abuse, or stay in therapy that you feel is harming you, leave. Just because you’re loyal, kind, or compassionate doesn’t mean you owe them that. They’re supposed to be that way with you. Above all, be those things to yourself first. Besides, you’re also capable of being disloyal, firm, and detached when someone treats you disrespectfully; that’s good, too.
15. ONE-UPPING AND OBSESSION WITH WINNING
A psycho's ego is a jealous mistress. There are so many bizarre, egoic things they do that I'll never fully understand (and don't care to) because, thankfully, my brain came complete with a conscience function and isn’t batshit crazy.
My former therapist perpetually needed to appear as if she had the upper hand. "Appear" is the operative term because even if she didn't, she just needed to appear like she did, if only to herself. She wanted to give the impression that she left her enemies in the dust and had the last word. She was into dominance posturing, a.k.a. seeming "alpha," which was also an extension of her pathological envy and power-hungry, weak pettiness.
I don’t know about you but I don’t see the world as a chessboard, where everyone else is a pawn to be used, a queen to be toppled, and a king to be checked. I find hierarchies violent and cagey. It’s crazy that society breeds that kind of thinking, like with shows such as “Survivor.” There’s a reason they call it “programming.”
There were countless ways the cuckoo tried to seem one-up. She regularly commented that she was always one step ahead of her patients, which is an obnoxious thing to say to a patient's face. She told me her IQ was higher than mine, unprompted by me and without any actual testing—which, ironically, only showcases that she lacked the intelligence to know how IQ is actually assessed. It doesn’t happen like throwing darts at the tooth fairy.
She was desperate to impress upon me that she was more knowledgeable than other therapists. It kept up her scam, belittled me, and made her feel like she was in control. If we disagreed on something, she often lashed out and then needed to speak the last sentence, no matter how pointless it was, just to make a point of having it.
Once, in her waiting room, I showed her a book that I was excited to read. She gave no questions or comments about my excitement aside from a haughty "Yeah, yeah, I've read that," as she walked past me to the water cooler. She was competing with me.
Another time, we both attended a public event. She asked a question at the end (stood up, took a mic, asked it in front of the crowd). When I saw her next, she made it a point to tell me that she’d asked what she did in order to “stick it” to someone she knew in the audience. It was really comforting having a therapist who had the emotional maturity of a dinner plate.
TAKEAWAYS: Obsessively needing to one-up and win are characteristics of pathological narcissism. If someone is one-up, someone else has to be one-down. A therapist who needs you to be down so they can be up is missing a few fries from their Happy Meal; they're aggrandizing themselves at your expense. They see you as competition and an object to be controlled and mined. They do not have your best interests at heart, because bats are panning for brown nuggets and have struck gold in your therapist. The real win here is leaving.
16. BAD-MOUTHING OTHERS (ESPECIALLY IF ELICITING PITY/ NARCISSISTIC SUPPLY)
Toxic positivity is not for me. There are times when unpleasant truths need to be stated. That's not what my ex-therapist would do when she took up time in my paid appointments to advance her fraudulent agendas.
Whenever she could, she became a veritable fountain of character assassination. Sometimes she was the victim in her faux dramas (ones in which she had actually victimized others), other times she simply ripped whoever a new one for reasons I wouldn’t understand until later.
She was not only lying through her bat fangs, but also providing clues about what was in store for me. She ended up targeting me in a very public smear campaign and I'm pretty sure she still bad-mouths me to whoever will listen, desperately trying to control her false narrative.
How do I know she bad-mouthed people to cover her own ass and flipped the victim narrative when she’d actually been the perp? I met someone she bad-mouthed incessantly in our appointments, unprompted by me. Everything she’d said about him turned out to be a lie and, of course, she conveniently failed to mention that she had destroyed his livelihood—to the extent that she got his therapist license revoked. It was heartbreaking to meet this victim of hers. He never fully recovered and spiritually bypassed himself into oblivion.
It's a long story, but one reason she did this with me was that she was long-term setting me up. For example, she would often cast people I knew in a terrible light—even if I didn't ask her opinion. This included my family of origin. She was in my bidness and over-involving herself.
It truly is hard to get my head around, but she was basically seeking to blow up and destroy my life from the inside out. Baiting me to feel against this and that person, while also making me that much more dependent on her, since she was the only one who “truly” had my back. It also gave her "narcissistic supply"—she fed off my sympathy while nudging me all the more under her satanic cloak.
Because I trusted her completely after a point, it made me look at and interact with those people differently. In a small town, that can have big consequences. It was also covertly threatening, as if to say, "You want to stay on my good side, or you're up next."
But it was all lies, intended to either make me have disregard for certain people, discredit them to cover her ass, or make me afraid of the world so I would come running back to her, give her all my money, and then have no one to tell, because she'd isolated me from them all. Fear tactics are a BIG red flag.
It was also unprofessional of her, especially the way she bad-mouthed people. She’d go on and on about wanting to set people and places on fire, use hateful, degrading speech, and digress to a level of communication that confirmed she truly was from the gutter. At some point, because she encouraged me, I noticed myself talking more like her. I needed to make a concerted effort to undo that. It’s deeply disturbing to think that part of the reason she did that was to ruin me. It would alienate me from other people and she would have me all to herself, so she could steal more money from me.
TAKEAWAYS: If your therapist frequently shades people in your life, especially if you never asked their opinion, and/or they generally bad-mouth people too much, then they are, at the very least, unprofessional and setting a bad example; or at the very worst, seeking to isolate and exploit you. They have poor boundaries; they shouldn't be that gossipy and intrusive into your life.
It might be helpful to ask yourself if the effect of what your therapist is doing helps you become who you want to be; if it makes you more or less independent, and what their motives could be. Especially if fear tactics are involved.
I’ll say it one more time: Fear tactics are a big, red flag. You can proceed with your life regardless of their opinions (assuming that's what you want to do) and note their reaction. If they have a fit (which my crazy ex-therapist would, if I didn’t fall in line with her), put on your running shoes because bats are uploading to the sewer cloud and your therapist is running out of GBs.
Next set will be our last, with signs #17-22.
Download the free ebook, which has all 22 signs in one place, here! Share it with that relative who is on the fence about their therapist saying they can read everyone’s mind.
Rewind to signs #1-5: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #1-5
Rewind to signs #6-11: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #6-11
Fast Forward to signs #17-22: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy
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