Comment by PKM MD on 02 May 2009 at 2:15 pm

Hello Karen,

I respect and admire your decision to share your story. As a psychiatrist I would like to know what you believe to be the greatest misconception of the therapy you have received? What would you like others to know? Besides the obvious positives what was one downfall? Would you suggest therapy to another? What if you need more help? Would you re-consider starting therapy again?

Thank you.

P.K.M. MD

Dear Dr PKM,

Thank you for your compliment about me sharing my story. There are many misconceptions about the therapeutic relationship. Too many to write here on my blog. However, one of the greatest misconceptions that can eventually hurt the patient is to let the patient believe they are loved by you.  It’s such a risk for a patient to pour out their heart and soul to a therapist while building trust.  When a broken person, like me, enters into a therapeutic relationship, it takes all the strength they have to let go of the boundaries and walls they’ve built to contain their pain. For me, trust was such a big issue to overcome.  I could not trust until I felt loved. My healing started when I felt Dr. Baer loved me.  I healed out of love, nothing else.

I made Dr. Baer my family.  I could not change the way I felt at the end of the therapeutic relationship.  I couldn’t accept that he didn’t feel the same way after all that we had gone though.  The misconception was that I thought of the therapy more as a friendship than as professional. Dr. Baer was trained to work therapeutically with the relationship, I was not.  I developed feelings. He did not. I felt cared for, and it was his job to care for me, and he did.  But I took my healing personally.  He felt he did his best job, but I was left feeling alone.

Although therapy saved my life and healed me, it can be painful in the end.  It took me so many years to build a good, sound relationship, only to have it end and realize that it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.  It’s been a hard thing for me to overcome.

Hope my answer helps you.

Karen