3 Signs That Your Therapist Is Actually Toxic For Your Mental Health

Almost immediately after I entered college, my life started falling apart. The flimsy tapes I had used to tape my mental sanity started crumbling down. The small cracks started widening and the hold I had started slipping away. The wounded and unresolved childhood trauma started showing up, taking up the form of mood swings and random crying spells.

Imagine my embarrassment when I started crying in my classroom full of 50 people out of blue, without any reason.

After battling the unconscious internalized shame about mental health and lack of accessibility for years, I decided to take help from the free counseling services available on my college campus. The system worked so that everyone was allocated a counselor based on the availability of slots. All I had to do was to go and fill a form and wait for my appointment mail to come.

After getting a date for the next day, I prepared myself mentally for the appointment. I even jotted down the points I wanted to talk about. I was jittery.

The session began normally. I started speaking about the issues I was having. She nodded and used basic paraphrasing and questioning to nudge me ahead. Within 10 minutes, I found myself crying my eyes out. The process of unloading all the pain in one go was cathartic. I was crying more out of relief than emotional pain.

Then she did the unimagined. She picked up her phone and started looking at the screen. Through my blurry vision, I saw her scroll through her phone for a good minute or two before she kept it down and paid attention to me.

I was stunned. As a trainee psychologist, I was aware that was not acceptable behavior. In particular, checking her mobile while I was in an emotionally vulnerable state made me feel invalidated.

I never went back for another session.

Luckily, the next therapist turned out to be an absolute angel. She helped me discover my anxious attachment style and work through repressed material from my childhood. She follows all the required ethical guidelines and never lets me leave the session with negative feelings. She even seeks my feedback on every session.

Sessions with her have helped me see other red flags that I missed in my session with my first therapist.

1: They invalidate your emotions

In the same session, as I went to narrate a difficult incident from my adolescence, she nodded and said: “isn't this something that happens to every teenager.”

A toxic therapist reacts with a very cool answer when you are going in deep and sharing something personal. Neither they acknowledge your honesty and courage for sharing your vulnerabilities nor validate your strong emotions. They are completely detached from your emotional distress.

According to Dr. Marsha M. Linehan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, validation is seen to be similar to unconditional positive regard and accepting the uniqueness of the individual in therapies.

In the end, you even start questioning your trauma and gaslighting yourself.

My current therapist never questions me for feeling a certain way. She always acknowledges the emotion and then goes on to inquire more about it.

2: They do not care about what you want from the therapy

Instead of asking you want you would like to achieve in the therapy, they develop goals without you.

My toxic therapist ended the session with a summarization of the session, followed by developing the goal without consulting me. Instead of empowering her client, she took the decision by herself without consulting me. Such behavior leads to the creation of an unequal relationship between the client and the therapist.

My current therapist always involves me in the discussion before she adds or formulates a goal in the therapeutic session.

Research has shown the positive impact of collaborative goal setting on the client’s mental health. The researchers found out that goal achievement and the therapeutic alliance with the therapist was positively correlated to personal recovery.

3. You feel extremely uncomfortable after talking to them

It is completely normal to feel uncomfortable after a session. Going to a stranger and exposing your traumas could be a difficult thing to do. However, feeling excessively uncomfortable after every session is a sure sign that your therapist is toxic for you.

Sharon Saline, a clinical psychologist has quoted

“If you find that you are leaving most sessions feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied, unseen or unheard, that’s an indication that there’s not a good fit,”

The same happened to me. When I came home, I remember feeling discomfort in the pit of my stomach. When I self-reflected, I realized that the emotional invalidation and lack of autonomy in the session was the root cause of the negative emotion.

On the other hand, after every session with my current therapist, I feel comfortable. Somedays, after an intense session I have felt exhausted, however it has never turned into a pang of uneasiness.

Final Thoughts

I talked about this experience to several of my friends. Most of them had this opinion that they would have not been able to understand the unethical behavior of the therapist, until too late.

Luckily for me, I am training to be a psychologist and hence could detect the signs and stop going after one session.

Coming to these 3 signs, they are not the only ways of detecting whether a psychologist is good for you or not. Other red flags such as boundary crossing, lack of credentials, excessive self-disclosure are some of the several ways you could figure out whether your therapist is the right fit.

These signs are what I saw in my experience with the toxic therapist.

If you spot red flags in your therapeutic relationship, you have all the right to drop out of therapy and seek a new therapist for yourself. It is always a good idea to open a dialogue with your therapist about your feelings. If you are still not convinced, just say a polite no and move on.