22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #17-22🦇💩 (13)
Most people can't tell. Here is my no-nonsense guide to recognizing bad therapy, complete with educational cussy words and emojis.
Download the free ebook, which has all 22 signs in one place, here! Share it with that friend who’s on the fence about their therapist whose only supervisor is Jesus.
Rewind to #1-5 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #1-5
Rewind to #6-11 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #6-11
Rewind #12-16 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #12-16
If you struggle with discerning helpful therapy from harmful therapy, this list is for you. In addition to it being published as a series in my substack, I’ve been playing with an ebook platform.
As you can see, I compiled all 22 signs into a free, downloadable ebook, though no donations will be turned away. I’m not 100% sure I set it up correctly so if you can’t download it, let me know.
A final reminder: Everything here is my opinion, based on my experience and education. It doesn’t have to be yours. Here are signs #17-22:
17. EXCESSIVE ISOLATION AND NEGATIVE CHANGES IN RELATIONSHIPS
My abusive therapist isolated me and basically facilitated/forced all my existing relationships to fall away, often destructively. Granted, I am someone who needs a lot of personal downtime, but with her, it was to the extent that she was my only connection for a long time. This was not good.
Incredulously, she made it sound like her sabotaging me was proof that her work was helping me shed skin and improve, bleh bleh bleh. A therapist can assist with shedding skin and creating better relationships at the same time, but my ex-dingbat sucked at relationships of all kinds.
She was critical of everyone in my life, even if I didn’t ask her opinion. Always fault-finding.
If she felt me drifting from her, she often whipped up drama or picked a fight in order to suck me back in. This, in turn, left me feeling like I did something wrong and still needed her help.
One good measure of the effect therapy is having on your life is how your relationships are going. It's true that as we change, so can relationships. Some people are only in your life for a season. Even then, I believe some ways of handling those changes are more effective and emotionally mature than others. If you notice your relationships imploding or exploding, and having fewer and fewer people to talk to and hang out with for longer and longer; if you've become full-on isolated, your therapist is probably evil.
TAKEAWAYS: Therapy shouldn't cut you off from the world and make the therapist your only go-to. Especially not for prolonged periods of time. Your therapist shouldn't want you all to themselves. If they do, bats are delivering the churro twins and your therapist is DoorDash. Run.
18. DISRESPECT, INCLUDING VERBAL ABUSE
There are countless ways my mentally ill former therapist was rude, crude, and disrespectful to me and others. She also modeled disrespectful behavior.
She wasn't respectful of my time and was regularly abusive in a number of ways; she bad-mouthed me, people in my family, other patients, people I knew, people she knew, celebrities, maintenance workers, the grass outside her windows, the ants that crawled around her office, and shoeprints in the carpet. She just loved to suck the air out of the room.
She used diagnoses and other labels disrespectfully, in order to degrade, humiliate, and control me and others. She had Borderline Personality Disorder IMO and often had intense, unpredictable, stormy outbursts of nasty tirades.
She wasn't in supervision or counseling. She didn't respect my therapy, my feelings, my intelligence, my healing, my autonomy, my privacy, my need for space and time, and my money.
She regularly ate lunch in my appointments—not just ate, but called in her order at the beginning and had the delivery interrupt my paid time. In short, she had no respect for me or anyone else. I wish I had never met her. I can't go back in time, but now I won't see a healer who is disrespectful. I don't think you should either.
TAKEAWAYS: One definition I found for "respect" was to hold someone in high regard; to consider them worthy of that esteem. Psycho, batshit crazy therapists by definition can't do that. You're an object to them; nothing more than a means to an end, with no intrinsic worth. Therefore, if your therapist is consistently disrespectful, they're not worth seeing because bats are playing tushy jazz on the porcelain saxophone and your therapist is writing the sheet music.
19. "RULES" THAT MAKE NO SENSE AND NO ONE ELSE HAS THEM
All the "rules” the ex-🦇💩 factory had were in place to control me, cover her ass, and prevent me from exposing her.
Her "rules" were unlike any I'd experienced in other counseling, such as not being able to be friends with any of her other clients, not being able to see other therapists (even for group therapy, including if she was running a group!), and not being able to go to a spiritual center in town without running it by her first. I'm so lucky I didn't need her permission to blink and sneeze!
On one occasion, she even made up a rule that I couldn't create a professional listing for myself on a site where another patient of hers was listed. It's a long story I won't get into, but I realized later this was also to prevent me from exposing her, by eliminating the chance that another patient would see me on it.
She had no right to prevent me from any of that. She backed it up by lying that she can ethically make whatever rules she wants in her practice. Her rules made no sense because they were lies invented to scam me, and I couldn't imagine a therapist doing that.
A therapist shouldn't have rules that restrict and isolate you outside of therapy (beyond what therapists and clients typically agree to, such as how to handle social media and running into each other in public). If they do, they're likely deceiving you and trying to control you for bad reasons.
TAKEAWAYS: You're a free agent. If a therapist creates rules for you that isolate you and control what you do outside their office—if they make no sense, with no rational explanation that you're willing to agree to—they're likely hiding something or want you to hide something. Bats are hosting a TED Talk on the poocapolypse and your therapist is center stage. Make like Forrest Gump and run.
20. THEY'RE NOT GETTING SUPERVISION OR THERAPY (THEY'RE ALWAYS THE EXCEPTION)
The American Counseling Association (ACA) acknowledges that supervision for licensed therapists is an ethical standard of care.
"I answer to a higher power" is not therapy or supervision. That's one of the holier-than-thou, spiritually by-passing blow-offs I'd get if I asked my ex-nutcake of a thief if she was in her own process in any way. The only thing otherworldly about her was her ungodly entitlement.
Another blow-off was her claim that she was an example of someone who was "well." She was a sole practitioner. Her not getting any therapeutic support, while insisting she was the ideal type of "well" to which I should aspire was a gigantic red flag.
In addition to massive entitlement and conceit, it spoke to her lack of ethics and professionalism, laziness, recklessness, negligence, and grandiosity—basically her pathological narcissism—that everyone in the world needed therapy but her. In her case, I'd eventually understand that it was also a sign of her paranoia and inability to have relationships, which were aspects of her unwellness.
TAKEAWAYS: A therapist without any checks is a one-way train to Crazytown just waiting to wreck. If your therapist thinks they're above most everything, including healing that they are supposedly providing; if they only answer to an imaginary friend because they're so imaginarily special, then bats are experiencing close encounters of the turd kind and your therapist is making contact.
21. ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS—THEIRS DON'T MATCH UP
While everyone has blind spots, my previous licensed lunatic lived in a blackout. She smugly presented herself as a compassionate Buddhist, while taking every opportunity to talk about violent acts she wanted to enact against those she hated and proclaiming her superiority to all. Not to mention secretly deceiving and scamming me for years. Clearly, H.H. the Dalai Lama taught her that.
I'm not sure who said it, but I once saw a handy quote on social media. It went something like: "An apology without changed behavior is manipulation". This therapist apologized so many times for unacceptable transgressions and unchanged behavior, yet never sought supervision/therapy to ensure it wouldn't happen again. So it did. A lot. That quote is right, it was all manipulation.
She would make grand promises and not follow through. I remember one of them was this creepy fantasy that if I moved to San Diego, she'd consider moving her practice there, too. Even in the midst of being stuck in her web, I thought that sounded bizarre and knew it would never happen. Some people would call that "future faking". She did versions of that in other ways.
She said she was all about healing families but only added destruction to mine. She said she cared about me (and sometimes she acted that way, to keep me on the hook) but the real her was all kinds of abusive and competed with me. That's not care. That's cruelty.
TAKEAWAYS: If your therapist's behaviors frequently aren't consistent with what they claim to value and believe, there's something wrong. Plus, they're modeling that to you. Hypocrisy and actions not matching words are warning signs that a stadium full of bats have taken the Browns to the Super Bowl and your therapist is their #1 fan.
22. YOU FEEL SOMETHING IS OFF
We live in a conflicted time where everyone wants to believe they're enough, but almost everywhere you turn, you get messages that you're not. Social media and advertising don’t help with that. I believe if you’re a woman of color, you get extra. People who don’t know me start off gaslighting and talking down to me all the time.
You go to a doctor where your knowledge of your own body is often not enough. You try to get help from entities like law enforcement and your suffering is not enough. You can have a book publisher take interest in your manuscript, but they can turn you away because your social media following isn't enough.
These days, you can’t even get basic customer service without answering 44 questions because they already think you’re lying, while being told it’s for your own good. Abusive family members can drill not enoughness into you too, in countless ways.
About the niggling feeling I mentioned at the beginning: Probably my greatest regret, aside from ever meeting my deranged former therapist, was not listening to that feeling. Not stopping to unpack it and suss it out for myself. I work on having compassion for myself that I was under a skilled predator's line of fire and possibly literally under a black witch's spell. In that spirit, I'll call it a lesson learned.
Social decorum has conditioned us to gloss over questionable relational details. All that does is keep the poison circulating. You're "rude" if you call shit out, or being "difficult" or “anti-social" if you challenge things that should be challenged and assert boundaries. If you can’t deviate from the truth, you might be placed on the Autism spectrum.
Meanwhile, in the first 3 quarters of 2024, big drug companies profited $29 billion. There’s a sense that if you contribute to gains like that by working with those companies, if you contribute to the status quo, you’re sane. I don’t think so. Most corporations are toxic and sociopathic. To me, it seems like nearly everything we’ve been conditioned to believe is the opposite of true.
This is also why it's important to look within. If we were taught to do that more, I may never have had the conditioned belief that therapists are to be trusted; that it’s one of the best ways to help, and I may never have tried to work things out, for much too long, with an abuser p.o.s. who was unworthy of my energy.
I look around today and the world looks full-on crazy. Sane people get called crazy for seeing the sickness around them with clarity, and feeling like they have no option but to speak the truth. It's called "scapegoating". My suggestion: Give yourself the respect and trust that you've given to assholes who deserve it far less. Honor your niggling feelings the first time something goes or feels wrong.
You're not crazy, you're wired for truth. In fact, I think that the more sensitive you are, the more likely it is that’s the case.
TAKEAWAYS: You are enough. If you feel something is off, honor it. Pause and check in with yourself. It doesn't necessarily mean terminate with your therapist, but look into your concerns yourself, including getting other professional opinions, if you want. If you keep getting bad feels, you've spoken to your therapist about it, and their actions aren't turning it around, there's a very high probability that bats have dropped the kids off at the pool and your therapist is swimming in it.
Download the free ebook, which has all 22 signs in one place, here! Share it with that friend who’s on the fence about their therapist wanting them to petsit.
Rewind to #1-5 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #1-5
Rewind to #6-11 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #6-11
Rewind #12-16 of the 22 signs, here’s that post: 22 Signs Your Therapist May Be Batsh!t Crazy: #12-16
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