This article really hit me hard, as I’ve seen over a dozen therapists and regretted every single one. I despise the popular notion that there are no risks to finding a “good fit” therapist, beyond wasting time and money. A bad one can actively mess up your mental health and make it significantly worse, and there are a LOT of bad ones out there.

In my experience, half of them have been the cookie cutter sympathy types that say “I’m so sorry, that sounds so hard” over and over, then charge you $60 for it. The other half have pushed unsubstantiated, pseudoscientific woo like chakra rebalancing and weird visualizations to release trauma stored in the body. They would get defensive if I asked whether any of it was backed by any studies, and if I admitted it wasn’t helping, they would insist I wasn’t doing it right.

And the worst part of it all was my family and friends who pressured me to keep seeing them, gaslighting me to believe that I was getting worse because it “hurts to work through trauma”, and not just because I had shitty therapists. And as bad as my experiences were, I was lucky that it wasn’t even worse; I know several people who were sexually assaulted by therapists.