“You Are Not Special”: 30 Times People Got Viciously Truth-Bombed By Their Therapist
Price can be a significant barrier to our mental well-being. For example, according to Verywell Mind's 2022 Cost of Therapy Survey, 40% of Americans require financial support to afford professional care.
The researchers also found the average cost of a therapy session to be $178 per month. Considering that working on ourselves usually takes a fair amount of time, that figure can quickly add up.
The good news is that people are also increasingly open to discussing their mental health and sharing their experiences. This is also illustrated in a recent Reddit thread started by platform user AnonyMiss0018 asking, "What is a little bombshell your therapist dropped in one of your sessions that completely changed your outlook?" Here are some of the most popular answers.
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"stop trying to get everyone to agree - when you need everyone to agree the least agreeable person has all the power"
Really changed my outlook on planning family events.
“You always talk about not wanting to do to your daughters what your mom did to you. You worry about it so much in every interaction you have ever had with them. But your children are 19 and 21 now. They are happy and healthy and they trust you because you’ve never abused them in any way. So I just want to validate for you that you really have broken that cycle of violence. You did that. And you should be proud of it. I’m proud of you for it.”
We managed to get in touch with the author of the post, and the Redditor agreed to have a little chat with us about it.
"I was making plans with my difficult family for the holidays but had just been looking at another post on Reddit when the idea for the post came to me," Anonymiss0018 told Bored Panda. "I was thinking about my own therapy and how it has improved my life dramatically."
After going through the discussion, they said that "a lot of [the recurring] themes I noted were that people want love and acceptance, and they're trying to take responsibility for their own mental health."
"There's a lot of generational trauma, and people have a lot of heartbreaking stories. But they're putting in a lot of hard work to better themselves and heal."
If you literally laid down and let people walk all over you, someone would complain that you're not flat enough.
I don't work as a therapist. I'm an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Japan. But my classes are one-on-one, so I do spend a lot of time on consultation and personal conversations. Something I said to a client once seemed to really change his outlook.
A lot of my company's clients are focused on learning English for international business, and this man, as many of them are, was concerned about making mistakes and looking like a fool. I asked him if the English-speakers he works with sometimes try to speak Japanese, and he said that they do. I asked him if they ever make mistakes, and he said that they do. I asked him to name one, and he couldn't. And I told him that his mistakes will be forgotten, too.
My counselor said to imagine myself as an orange. Then, consider that not all people like oranges. That doesn't mean that the orange is flawed in any way, not rotten, just that everyone has preferences. That helped ease my insecurities and need for people pleasing dramatically.
In 2021, 42 million American adults sought mental health care of one form or another, up from 27 million in 2002.
Increasingly, people have been buying into the idea that therapy is one way they can significantly better their lives.
That conviction gained momentum in 1977, when the psychologists Mary Lee Smith and Gene V. Glass published the most statistically sophisticated analysis on the subject until that time. In their meta-analysis, they looked at some 400 studies and found that among the "neurotics" and "psychotics" who had undergone various kinds of talk therapy, the typical patient fared better than 75 percent of those with similar diagnoses who went untreated.
Since then, the notion that therapy has real benefits has been replicated numerous times in analyses applied to patients with anxiety, depression, and other prevalent disorders.
“Don’t think of the relationship as over. Think of it as complete.”
Fundamentally changed how I was processing a tough breakup. So helpful.
Also: some friendships have an experation date. Maybe just just matched while you were in a certain phase in your life. That's ok. They don't have to be forever to have worth.
"Your mom is never going to be the parent you want or need, so stop expecting her to be and being mad that she isn't."
Also:
"People who are addicts tend to get frozen at the time they started abusing drugs or alcohol, because their focus is their addiction and not developing as a person. So a person who started drinking heavily at 13 and quit at 30 would behave a lot like a 13-year old."
You can't control other people's crazy, but you can control your proximity to their circus.
“I think the evidence is fairly clear that psychotherapy is remarkably effective,” said Bruce Wampold, a prominent researcher in the field who is an emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To him, the power of such a low-tech treatment is nothing short of a miracle, especially given that studies typically follow patients for 20 sessions or fewer. "The fact that you can just go talk to another human being — I mean, it’s more than just talking — and get effect sizes that are measurable, and remarkably large?"
He said, “Claim the right to your space in the world.”
My self-esteem and self-worth was nonexistent. I didn’t believe I deserved the oxygen I was breathing. He was saying that being a person, being born, gives you the right to exist. You don’t have to earn it. You’re here; claim your space.
"You are not special"
I was having some very strong anxiety at the time, specially in regards to other people, I felt like I was judged everywhere, like, I couldn't go to the store, take the bus or even go to a walk because I felt people were judging my every move, how I dressed, how was my hair, how I talked, even how I walked.
Every stranger was thinking bad of me. It was scary as hell.
I was telling her about this, and how I started avoiding going out, which was a problem because I had to go to college soon. And she looked me straight in the eyes and told me "(name), I'm telling you this with all the care of the world, but you are not special, there is nothing that would make me think twice if we crossed in the street"
Is harsh, and is exactly what I needed, all the anxiety didn’t let me see that until she said it, ofc she helped me some other ways but this really really changed my life when she said it, I could go to college and be out because of it.
As a struggler with social anxiety and all these exact fears--THIS. When you spend so much time being nitpicked and judged and berated for your appearance or mannerisms, etc, at home, it conditions you to think this is how everyone sees you, not just your home. It took years actively reminding myself I didn't think twice about people at the store or on the street and therefore they likely didn't think of me to re-condition that part of my brain. Still have social anxiety, but it's so much more manageable now.
“You know too much to go back, you’re too scared to go forward, and you’re in too much pain to stand still”
Chris Blattman, a professor of economics and political science at the University of Chicago, agrees.
"I think of [cognitive behavioral therapy] as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century,” Blattman, who's tested CBT as a therapy for young men in Liberia with criminal backgrounds, said.
"A lot of CBT is just habits for overcoming automatic thoughts and behaviors that we all would love to avoid, everyday anxiety or anger or stress. We can all learn something from that."
“Will worrying about it change the outcome? If the answer is yes, go ahead and worry about it.” I suddenly realized that I couldn’t think of a situation where the answer to that question was ever yes. Really short circuited the worry cycle for me.
For context I had a major TBI, seizures, strokes, and all around not a fun brain time when I was 28. "you have to grieve the loss of yourself" Most people wanted me to go back to how I was. The f***ed up truth is that part of my brain is dead. The person everyone (including myself) knew died. I needed to grieve the loss of myself.
I was talking about the day I fell ill, it was very dramatic, one day I was out running twice a day, the next day my life changed. Usually when people ask me about it, I say, “the day I got sick/ill etc” but yesterday for some reason I said “the day I died” and I guess part of me did die that day, I just didn’t know it. But the only thing that keeps me going is that I might be able to get back to that?
Also, “Your partner should enhance what you like most about yourself”.
It made dating so much easier! No need to settle for less than that.
AnonyMiss0018 too thinks that therapy can be amazing. "I'm in awe of what some therapists can accomplish ... I'm thankful for my therapist so often!"
"However, it is really traumatic to read ... stories of therapists who said really insensitive things [to their patients]," the Redditor added.
True, while anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of people who go to therapy report some benefit, around 5 to 15 percent of clients get worse as a result of treatment, and for members of marginalized groups, harmful outcomes may be even more common. Plenty of would-be clients go once and, feeling alienated, never return.
So finding the right therapist is crucial.
We judge ourselves by our intentions, and everyone else by their actions.
“Is it your anxiety, or hers?” 🎤 drop!
Background: I have an overbearing mother who needs to know as much as she can about what I’m doing on my own time to sleep well at night (according to her). She basically treats me like a rebellious kid in a teen movie from the 90s, when I’m an independent, grown ass woman approaching my mid-30s.
At the time my therapist said this, I was 28ish and panicking about an upcoming business trip. Not the trip itself, but her reaction to me leaving the state for a few days. As I was going down the list of texts I knew she’d bombard me with, my therapist dropped this 💎 .
She gave me permission to opt-out of managing her fears like I had been doing for years.
End result: I went on the trip without telling her a thing and have established a few more sanity-preserving boundaries since : )
This is what helicopter parents are doing to their children. They ruin not only their children's childhood and teen years they even keep this up into adulthood.
You are not responsible for your parents' emotional wellbeing. They are independent adults who have been on this earth for many more years than you.
Some people take this to mean: "Don't give a s**t for how your parents feel" which is also wrong.
After I beat up my middle school bully, my therapist congratulated me for standing up for myself. I thought she would chastise me like every other adult in my life, but she was encouraging. Obviously, she told me that violence like that wasn't the best way to handle it, but that making a stand was important either way. No one had ever told me that it was okay. I always got a lecture about not acknowledging bullies and telling the teacher instead, but we all know that never works. Having an adult validate me, even if I wasn't entirely right, was a huge boost.
“How was anger expressed in your household growing up? Were you allowed to show anger?” At which point I realized I wasn’t allowed to show any negative emotions whatsoever, especially not in reaction to negative emotions from my parents.
My narcissistic father would get VERY angry anytime I had the audacity to have a reasonable response to his abuse. He told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn't ALLOWED to be hurt/angry at him.
I've never really had friends. I've had colleagues and classmates and housemates and people who have hung out with me, but I never really felt close to any of them. And I did that thing you see on here sometimes - I stopped reaching out to see if I would be reached out to, and I wasn't, which I took as confirmation that they didn't really want me around, or at the very least, that they wouldn't mind my absence. I was talking to my therapist about people I'd been close to in college, and she told me to pick one and talk about him. So I did. And after I shared some basic stuff like his name and his major etc., and a couple anecdotes, she asked me what else I knew about him. And I couldn't answer. It wasn't really a broadly-applicable bombshell, but she said "what else" and I started crying because I realized that for as simple as the question was, my inability to answer spoke volumes. I've never had good friends because I've never been a good friend. I'm withdrawn and reserved and I always made others do the work to drag me out, without ever extending my own friendship in a meaningful way in return. If I wanted to have meaningful relationships with other people, I would have to build them. I'm still working on this, but I'm trying to make more offers and extend more friendliness to others in my daily life.
Being curious about people is the best way to make friends. Sincere curiousity. Not as a tool to make friends but just to discover the many interesting things that other people are.
My therapist traced me on a big piece of paper, so I could see how big/small I was. I thought him and I were about the same size. I got him to lay on top of the paper, and “I” disappeared. Seeing my size that way made my brain begin to think differently. It helped me realize I was not fat. At 5’2 and 110 pds…I needed to realize that! Years of bullying f***s with ones brain!
"Your urge to self harm is perhaps a desire to tell those around you something that you don't know how to articulate."
Your mother was an absentee mother, so why would you think she would be anything other than an absentee grandmother to your child?
It made me lower expectations of the type of relationship my child would have with my mom. So now she’s the fun grandma on FaceTime who sends presents but never shows up, and I’m perfectly okay with that.
“I don’t want to take meds because I don’t want to rely on drugs to feel ok.”
“Don’t you already do that?”
My therapist in the session before I finally saw a psychiatrist and got officially diagnosed with bipolar 2. I was heavily self medicating at the time but of course didn’t see it that way because it wasn’t a prescription.
"I don't want to rely on medication for the rest of my life" is a common one. Change the word "medication" to "food" and see how ridiculous it looks.
Emotions are not bad, even the unpleasant ones. They all have an appropriate place.
My husband had to drop a therapist once because she'd ask him how he was doing, he'd respond explaining everything and she would constantly cut him off and say "no negative things please!" Well that's good for focusing on positivity but she wouldn't even let him talk at ALL about his cousin who just passed unexpectedly! Horrible therapist.
It was so simple, yet something I hadn't heard before.
"You didn't deserve that."
I had a golden childhood, was talking to a friend who had a neglected/abusive childhood. She suddenly yelled at me, what did you do to deserve that! I said, nothing, and you didn't do anything to deserve yours either.
That my job/career is just a way to make money, it's not my life or identity. Took a lot of pressure off me.
“Why do you make people more comfortable when you are uncomfortable”
When talking about people pleasing and fawning
“There’s nothing wrong with you, you are just picking the wrong people to be friends with” I got some new friends and my life changed pretty dramatically after that.
I have a few! "If one of your loved-ones had this problem, what would you tell them?" Boom! Self-compassion unlocked! Another one is regarding buried traumatic memories. "If you buried some s**t in the yard, then later thought 'oh I wonder what that was' and dig it up, all you're going to find is some s**t."
Note: this post originally had 55 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
I have one! Read it on a random Insta post. Instead of saying "sorry", say "thank you". For example when you're late, don't say sorry but say "thank you for waiting". This turns a negative into a positive for both involved. Of course this doesn't apply to all situations but I'm trying it out and it seems to work.
Oooh yeah we use this in my household & it's great. "Thank you for listening" instead of "sorry for talking so much." Things like that
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Wow! As a clinical psychologist myself, I thought most of these were absolutely great! It is always wonderful to hear what people actually take out of their therapy sessions.
One thing my therapist told me that changed my relationships, "If someone apologizes, you should thank them. Apologies, even insincere ones, take effort." Now, when someone says, "I am sorry this got messed up." I say, "thank you for that, and let's fix it together."
I have one! Read it on a random Insta post. Instead of saying "sorry", say "thank you". For example when you're late, don't say sorry but say "thank you for waiting". This turns a negative into a positive for both involved. Of course this doesn't apply to all situations but I'm trying it out and it seems to work.
Oooh yeah we use this in my household & it's great. "Thank you for listening" instead of "sorry for talking so much." Things like that
Load More Replies... Wow! As a clinical psychologist myself, I thought most of these were absolutely great! It is always wonderful to hear what people actually take out of their therapy sessions.
One thing my therapist told me that changed my relationships, "If someone apologizes, you should thank them. Apologies, even insincere ones, take effort." Now, when someone says, "I am sorry this got messed up." I say, "thank you for that, and let's fix it together."
