May 26, 2025 • 59 mins
Therapy Harm Resistance Project with Natalie Russ
Natalie Russ is a psychologist and psychotherapist, with a background in dialogue and deliberation, training pedagogy, and community organizing. She was harmed in a twelve-year psychodynamic therapy beginning in adolescence, as well as in post-harm therapies with well-meaning therapists who, like most in the mental health industry are not trained to support therapy harm survivors. In addition to content creation, she writes and publishes poetry on her therapy harm and post-abuse therapy experiences. Her particular areas of interest include post-abuse therapies and therapist education on working with therapy harm survivors. (taken from https://www.natalierusspsyd.com/therapy-harm)
Natalie Russ joins us to discuss her recent work establishing the Therapy Harm Resistance Project (THRP), an advocacy and support endeavor to address therapy harm as a disavowed reality in the mental health field. We are creating content and resources for survivors, clients, and therapists, hoping to support a broader and ever-growing therapy harm resistance movement. We seek to join others within the therapy harm resistance space to build conversation and capacity. This movement needs a thriving ecosystem of activism, advocacy, scholarship, training, and victim/survivor support infrastructure.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Jann Arden,
Natalie Russ is a psychologist and psychotherapist, with a background in dialogue and deliberation, training pedagogy, and community organizing. She was harmed in a twelve-year psychodynamic therapy beginning in adolescence, as well as in post-harm therapies with well-meaning therapists who, like most in the mental health industry are not trained to support therapy harm survivors. In addition to content creation, she writes and publishes poetry on her therapy harm and post-abuse therapy experiences. Her particular areas of interest include post-abuse therapies and therapist education on working with therapy harm survivors. (taken from https://www.natalierusspsyd.com/therapy-harm)
Natalie Russ joins us to discuss her recent work establishing the Therapy Harm Resistance Project (THRP), an advocacy and support endeavor to address therapy harm as a disavowed reality in the mental health field. We are creating content and resources for survivors, clients, and therapists, hoping to support a broader and ever-growing therapy harm resistance movement. We seek to join others within the therapy harm resistance space to build conversation and capacity. This movement needs a thriving ecosystem of activism, advocacy, scholarship, training, and victim/survivor support infrastructure.
Music by Shari Ulrich, Jann Arden,
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Vancouver called Radio cfr oh one hundred
point five FM. We're coming to you from the unseated
traditional territories of the Squamish, muscream and sleighway tooth nations
around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernardine Fox, and this
is this show that dares to change how we think
about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We have ever been further No, what the hell I'm
gonna do when I can't see a fine away under over.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver. Call up radio
cfr oh one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
and I'm sitting down virtually, of course, with Natalie Russ,
who is a clinical psychologist that comes to us from Massachusetts.
Say did I say that right? Mask? That's how you
say it. So, Natalie come to me because we're going
(01:05):
to talk about your therapy harm project. Can you tell
me a little bit more about that and how you
come to be doing that work?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Sure? So, I suppose I'll start by saying that I
experienced a twelve year harmful therapy, starting when I was
an adolescent and spanning until I was in training to
be a therapist in my late twenties, and so I've
(01:35):
never been a therapist who wasn't catastrophically harmed by therapy.
So that's how I entered the field. And I think
there was something really galvanizing about being part of this field,
sitting in classes, sitting in consultation groups, sitting in you know,
peer support spaces, and realizing that nobody was talking about
(01:58):
therapy harm. Many people had never even thought about it
or heard about it. It had never come up in training,
and often finding myself the only person in the room
thinking about it, reacting to it, trying to speak to it.
That really led me pretty directly into this work. The
(02:19):
Therapy Harm Resistance Project is a new iteration of that,
but this has been the kind of cornerstone of my
life in the field since I got here.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I would imagine I did try and take psychology. At
one point, I was going to study to become a
counselor and got through. I got through half of the
first course, and then I couldn't do it anymore. I
just literally could not sit there quietly learning about dead
white men's ideas about what mental health was. And of
(02:53):
course I'm talking about young and Freud and those people.
But I'm imagining you was sitting having experienced therapy harm,
and sitting as a young adult in psychology classes and
really having some dissonance about what you experienced as opposed
to what you were being taught.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, I mean quite literally. Sometimes I had come from
harmful therapy sessions, gone in my car, driven to school,
and gone to class to learn about how wonderful we
all are and how much we're helping everybody, and that
contrast was pretty psychologically difficult to tolerate. I would say
(03:37):
that the experience of going through grad school with this
experience running in the background was in its own way,
an additional, just as significant trauma to the actual therapy harm.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I would imagine it would be a little bit crazy
making too. Yes, Yes, can you tell us a little
bit about your therapy harm that you experienced. Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
So I went to boarding school when I was fifteen.
I'm originally from New York, and I came to Massachusetts
for boarding school. And I got into therapy when I
was fifteen with someone in the area near the school.
And I would say that, you know, this is not
(04:23):
an often talked about type of therapy harm. I think
it's not the stereotype that we hear about, but the
maternal kind of dynamic that can form that can be
just as violating in many ways as what's more often
talked about, which is the sexual form. You know, not
in any way to minimize any type of exploitation, but
(04:46):
this took on much more of a you're my child,
You're more like my child than my children, you know,
keeping the therapy very intense, keeping the therapy very freak.
Went a lot of physical contact and not sexual, but
(05:08):
this nurturing kind of the best word for it would
be maternal type of energy that you know, many people
would be longing for that I was longing for and
didn't understand until I was myself training to be a
therapist that it wasn't supposed to be happening.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So would you not, all, Well, I guess what we're
when you say typical, we're talking about a sexual boundary
violation in the therapy. I'm finding that in the work
that I do, because I do I'm a mental health
advocate outside of being a radio host, and a lot
of the abuse that we're hearing about is not always sexual.
(05:51):
And in fact, the fact that the sexual part of
it is criminal and YadA YadA. It makes it harder
for other people to come forward, like you were talking about.
Would you say that what you went through is an
emotional harm?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah, I think of it as psychological emotional. There were
there were physical boundary crossings, just not sexual physical boundary crossings.
But I would say when it ended, I ended up
feeling almost brainwashed. I don't necessarily assign that intention to
(06:27):
her consciously, but certainly that's what happened. It almost felt
as though I was living inside of her, and when
the therapy came a part that I re entered the world.
So it was very all encompassing, incredibly occupying, I would say,
colonizing of myself. And I really was unable to parse it,
(06:54):
you know, until until really the very end twelve years in.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So when you say pars it, what did that mean
for you? I?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
You know, I went to grad school and I was
starting to practice in training sites, you know, internship, and
it was very clear that therapy was actually something quite
different from what was going on in my therapy. And
I had never had any other therapy before, and so
(07:30):
it started to sort of emerge in my thinking. You know,
this is not what I'm being taught to do, This
is not what I'm doing, this is not what anybody
else is doing. And I would bring those questions in
to my therapy because I was under the impression that
I was actually welcome to do that. But the reaction
(07:50):
that I got from her was rejection and hostility, and
that's when all things started to unravel. I think I
was no longer meeting her needs at that point because
I was starting to question the frame and not simply
sort of stay in the role of, you know, adoring
(08:10):
pseudo child that she had.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, and it's so often that it is that point
where somebody is questioning and coming in and saying, hey,
what about you know, or this makes me feel not
so good that the might call them abusive therapists sort
of makes a sort of a direct turn and starts
to be angry and attacking and threatening and all kinds
(08:39):
of things, depending on whatever level of harm that's happening there,
what you went through. I would think and believe and
know that there are many people out there who would
love to be in therapy with somebody who would sort
of absorb them into their emotional sphere and love them
and care for them as if they were their child.
(09:00):
Why is that problematic?
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Well, it's problematic because it's it's based on a fantasy
that is not the truth of what the therapeutic relationship
is and can be in a safe way. It may
feel wonderful, it may meet deep needs for both client
and therapist, but that's not what therapy is, and that's
(09:26):
not what therapy is for, and it's not safe. You know,
it's not safe to go into this fantasy of the
mother child relationship or any other fantasy that can develop
between two people in the therapeutic frame and live inside
of that. It almost almost always, i think, always backfires
catastrophically on the client. The boundaries are for the protection
(09:49):
of the client and in earnest the therapist, but that's
not the point. The boundaries are for the protection of
the client and because they hold up what can be
safely enacted in this relationship, in this type of relationship.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I ask these questions because a lot of folks talk about,
you know, the whole notion of how can therapy be
healing if one person isn't able to be a human
in it? And that's how it's kind of framed, right,
and so to be human, you have to be available
and vulnerable and open and sharing and all of those
(10:31):
things that we know therapists are that those those are
transgressions of boundaries, that those are not things that necessarily
that the therapist should be doing unless it's therapeutic and necessary,
and most times it's not. And it's it's a hard
thing to try to describe to people who are clients,
who are people who've been victimized of people who are
(10:53):
looking for a relationship. Why it's important that your therapist
not be your friend. Why was it important for your
therapist not to become your mother, your pseudo mother?
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Well, any number of reasons. The ones that float to
the top of my mind are, first of all, the
idea that she was my mother was coming from primarily
her fantasy. I actually didn't expect any of that. I
was not thinking, you know, that that could happen. Each
(11:30):
each boundary that she crossed, I was surprised by and
some combination of confused, terrified and delighted. It was not
my expectation. And so each time I would ask, you know,
you're allowed to do this, We're allowed to do this,
and she would give me some explanation about why it
was okay who she'd consulted with, you know that it
(11:54):
was valid and legitimate, but that she was saying directly,
you know, there's something I get from an egoic place
thinking of you as my child that I like, that
I want, and so it was actually theft. So that's
the first problem, right, is that it was theft. It
was her neied, it wasn't your need, correct, And what
(12:16):
it did was prevent me from grappling with truth, with
the realities of my life, my circumstances, the things that
I did and didn't have from people in my life,
the ways that I could and couldn't get my needs met.
She came in with a very strong kind of profit
savior fantasy that in fact I didn't need to grieve
(12:38):
any of those things because she was able, with you know,
her font of love to provide those things for me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So she circumvented your own healing process. Really, is what
you're saying, correct, right? I call that lazy. And I
often talk to people about how you know, if you
are client coming into your therapy session and then saying
I don't feel loved, if the therapist steps in and
says no, no, no, I love you. What happens is
(13:09):
you no longer get to deal with that feeling that
may be historical in your life and very real and
very valid and something that you need to process to
move on and be able to develop loving, caring relationships
in your own life. What happens is the therapist steps
in and stops it cold, because you can no longer
say I feel unloved, because this person in front of
(13:31):
you has done this extraordinary thing of saying I love you,
and what you are saying is so valid, which is
that it's not real. You know, she wasn't your mother.
You had real issues that you needed to deal with
in and so it's the same thing. It's lazy and
it's not real, and it circumvents the processing for people,
(13:51):
which is diabolical on some level, and certainly for you,
having this person sort of step in as your parent
will to ever talk to the people as you were
going through training about what happened, or we're not necessarily
talk about what happened to you, but just sort of
confront them on these things that you were weighing and
(14:14):
juggling as you were going through training.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yes, and in fact, I couldn't stop talking about it
because the project that had been handed to me of
having to figure out if and how to be a
therapist with abusive therapy happening to me, and really only
abusive therapy ever having happened to me as as a
model of my own experience in therapy. The project was
(14:39):
so daunting that I really didn't stop talking. I was
talking to anyone and everyone who would engage me on
the topic in classes and supervision, and you know, with
mixed results, some really thoughtful and interested people, many people
who had never thought about out it, and some people
(15:02):
who are really defensive about it.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
I'm gonna just stop right there, folks, but we're going
to come back and continue that conversation in a minute,
so we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
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(15:33):
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Speaker 5 (15:44):
I am not okay.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
I'm barely getting back.
Speaker 7 (15:50):
I'm losing track.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Of day, lose sleep and I am not okay.
Speaker 6 (16:00):
Ain't on the rails.
Speaker 7 (16:02):
So if I say I'm fine, there's no home.
Speaker 6 (16:05):
I learned to hide.
Speaker 8 (16:06):
It will.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
How No I came be the only one.
Speaker 6 (16:15):
Who's holding off of again line but dying No dy
know when it's all.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
Said at the time, I'm not okay, but it's all
gonna be all right. It's not okay. If we're all
gonna be all right. I wool up to day. I
(16:49):
hormos stayed in me, have the devil one my bad
and voices in my head. Some dzy it ain't a bad.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
Some days it all gets worse.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Some Jesus wear I'm better lean in there dirt.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
I no I kay be the only one who's holding
off of again, But I know.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
I know when it's all said at time, I'm not okay,
but it's all gonna be all right. It's not okay,
But if you're all gonna be all right, gonna be
all right, gonna be off.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
I know one day we'll see the other side the
pain on our survey in a holy wire the tarn.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
And we all gonna be all right.
Speaker 9 (18:10):
Have no hold by chain, by only one.
Speaker 6 (18:17):
Who's holding off of the.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
For God, No, no, when it's all said, and I'm
not okay.
Speaker 7 (18:31):
But it's song gonna be all right.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
It's not okay, but we're all gonna be all right.
I'm not okay, but it's song gonna be all right.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver cap Radios FR
one five of them. I'm Bernadine Fox speaking with Natalie
Russ about therapy Hart. Natalie, you were talking about how
you couldn't stop talking about it as you were being
trained to become a psychologist, and you said there were
mixed responses to it. Can you tell us what those
(19:12):
mixed responses were?
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I think I was lucky enough to be surrounded by
some peers and supervisors who were really open and thoughtful
and humble, and I also met with some defensiveness from
some who I think were primarily very invested in feeling
(19:40):
like therapy is inherently good and therapists are inherently good,
and so hearing a story like mine was a challenge
to that notion. There were some attempts to kind of
frame my story as you know, just some bad apples
as a frame work for understanding therapy harm right, that
(20:01):
therapy is inherently good, but there of course is going
to be some bad ones. And I was, you know,
not satisfied with that framework because it seemed like the
role of the ego was so prominent in what I
was experiencing in the culture of the field coming into
the field that it just didn't seem like a bad
(20:23):
apples framework was sufficient to explain this phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
So to find ego for our audience, oh, I have
absolutely no idea how to do. I kind of threw
all that stuff out. But my sense of it is
is that it is about sense of self. It's about
you know, elevated sense of self. That's how I interpret it.
(20:49):
And I'm probably wrong, and somebody is probably going to
write in and say, no, that's not what it is,
and that's okay. So you know, certainly right in, did
you have anybody tell you that it was okay what
she was doing? Hmm, I had, well, no, it was.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
It was egregious enough in the telling that no one
quite took that tack. But I did get some responses
if I'm remembering, and of course this is a decade ago,
but I did get some responses that sounded like, well,
you know, she probably really loves you and really wants
(21:29):
to you know, like from a legitimizing of her position
and her behavior, so.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
An excuse of what was going on, making it somehow
okay that you should kind of accept what it is.
Did they at the same time ask you how it
was impacting on you or was that something you were
already kind of clear about.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I was often explaining that I was psychologically trauma tized
and pretty pretty much destroyed. You know, it was an
enormous trauma, and I think it was it was palpable
and visible that I was not okay at this point,
and that that was part of why I was talking
about it so much. And you know, I think so
(22:17):
there was some equivocating, you know, there was you know,
of course, she probably doesn't intend this to be so
damaging to you, but it makes sense that it is,
and she's valid or valid all of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Sort of middle of the road threading of the needle. Everybody, Yeah,
you shouldn't think badly of her. You talk about catastrophic
damage and how much it impacted on you. And one
of the things that I've been finding as I talk
about this issue along the way, is that I find
that there is a real dearth of information provided to therapists,
(22:54):
and you might be able to speak to this as well,
that they get trained very clearly, very quickly on the
ethical guidelines are, what the boundaries are, what you are
and are not supposed to do, But there doesn't seem
to be any training on what happens to the client
if you do do those things. And so the absence
of that description of impact implies that there is no impact,
(23:18):
that nothing really happens. That really the only way this
whole issue impacts on anybody is you. If you get caught,
you're going to lose your license, YadA, YadA. You went
through training, were you taught what happens to the client
if people transgress their boundaries?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
And so of course this is the dissonance. You're sitting
there catastrophically damaged on some level and being trained, but
nobody is talking about what happened to you. Can you
talk a little bit here about what happened to you,
how it impacted on you?
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, I can try. Of course, I think with trauma
like this, of course, it all gets very fractured, and
it's hard to feel like you've captured everything right, you know,
one piece here, one piece there. I think the thing
I often feel doesn't get understood as well is the
(24:21):
damage that happens on the inside when a therapist has
been internalized so deeply. I was fifteen when I met her,
and I was away of boarding school, and you know,
I attached myself like a duckling, and in many ways
I made myself out of this person, right, I built
(24:45):
my inner life of her. And so when she rejected me,
when she became hostile, when she you know, turned turned
quote unquote turned bad. Though you know, I understand now
that it's a classic cycle of idealization and discard that
(25:07):
happens in these types of abuse situations. But you know
what my experience of having been you know, her beloved,
adored such and such, and then all of a sudden
being the hated, you know, evil have to throw out object.
When that happened, those pieces of her inside of me corrupted,
(25:28):
and so the real crime scene was on the inside.
I couldn't figure out anything about myself for a period
of time, I didn't understand what was good, what was bad?
Did I even really know what love meant, what it
didn't mean. It turned out that what I had thought
was love was abuse, and I had a lot of
paranoia about that, and it was, you know, generally difficult
(25:52):
to get through the day. It all felt pretty bizarre
and detached, Like what am I even doing walking around
having been blown up on the inside in this way?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And that's the right term, blown up. The real crime
scene was on the inside. You know. All of that
stuff is so kind of standard for what happens to
clients who have been harmed in this way. It and
it's one of the things that the world just does,
Like I said about the training, they just don't seem
to understand the catastrophic damage that happens to a client
(26:31):
who has been turned on by their therapists. Do you
do you see her turning on you? It's sort of
in the same way we see what happens with say, abusers,
spousal abusers who do the same. They have this honeymoon
phase and then you know, they'll then they turn and
(26:52):
and then the abuse happens, and then they go back
to a honeymoon phase. So in that turn it seems
like the same thing. Although I don't see in therapy
harm or therapy abuse, the cycle repeating itself over and over.
Did that happen at all for you?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (27:14):
And one really complicated element was that she was talking
to me about cycles of rupture and repair in healthy therapy,
and then we would go through these cycles, and I
was labeling them as rupture and repair, So rupture being
(27:38):
you know, there's some kind of moment of misattunement or
hurt or harm or something that then needs needs needs
a repair in the relationship, and that in you know,
healthy relationships, a lot of healing and closeness can come
from those repair moments. Looking back now, what I see
(28:01):
is cycles of seduction. That there were moments of abuse
and then I was distressed, and then there were performative apologies,
performative vulnerabilities to bring me back, and that I thought that,
you know, because it mapped onto this idea that she
(28:22):
was explaining to me about psychotherapy, I thought that this
was what rupture and repair was, and it really never
was well.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
And it's also hard to see performative repair. I think
it's how you termed it for what it is unless
you've gone through that as a pattern, and the ultimate
outcome is that the repair never really happens. There's a
promise of repair or a promise of different action, or
a promise of a different behavior, and when that doesn't
(28:49):
come through and doesn't pan out over and over, you
start to get it that it's performative, and so sometimes
it can take a while for that to happen. You
talked about the terms of you don't mean in terms
of a sexual seduction. You talk about is sort of
an more emotional seduction. Why was she doing that? What
was important for her? Do you think in her seducing
(29:13):
you back into the what she called a therapeutic process.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I think what she was feeding off of me for
was adoration and the feelings that she got to have
from me when I would be in a state of
idealizing her, seeing her as good and perfect and wonderful
and special and you know, rather than sort of holding
(29:43):
that as of course untrue, you know, as you know,
rather than sitting in some humility and holding that is
of course untrue, that she was you know, flawed and
you know, wounded like the rest of us. I think
she wanted to use that feeling to feel that it
was the case, and that I was seeing her clearly,
(30:03):
and that I was right about her, unlike her own
children and whoever else who didn't adore her sufficiently for
her own standards. And so I think when I say seduction,
the experience was come back and see me as wonderful,
Come back and be close to me in a way
that makes me feel like I really am as wonderful
(30:29):
and spectacular as you feel I am. In these moments.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
It sounds like she was engaged in some pretty profound
denial about who she was, and that's what I'm picking up.
But of course you and I can't sit here and
decide what she was doing necessarily, So tell me. As
a fifteen year old, that's when you started. You idealized her,
(30:57):
She jumped in as your took care of you. It
sounds like you sort of, or you said, you sort
of modeled yourself after her. By the time you get
to be an adult and you're recognizing that this is
all wrong, What does that do to you as a
person who's done that in such formative years?
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It was incredibly confusing. Of Course, by that time, I
was in training to be a therapist, and so naturally
you know, the question arises pretty organically, what the hell
was I doing in clinical training? Was I there because
I was fashioning myself after my abuse of therapist who
(31:44):
wanted me to be her child and be like her
and aspire to be like her, And so I had
to grapple with that. You know what, I what I
feel most resonates with me.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
I can't, of course deny that there was an element
of that. I suspect that there was. What it feels
more like, though, palpably, is that because I was headed
towards being a therapist, that's part of why she picked
me for this, That there was an element of similarity
to herself in ways maybe her own children were not,
(32:22):
or you know, whatever the case may be, that I
came in with that she saw as an opportunity to
create this kind of fake kinship relationship with me. But
by the time I, as you're describing, sort of came
out the other side of this really long tunnel, I
(32:42):
was in crisis about most of most of myself, most
of myself, most of the things that I thought I
knew because I had based them on things that she knew,
things that she me or secured for me. Or sort
of straps that she had tightened for me in you know,
(33:04):
meaning and self and identity, and it all came into question.
It was all corrupted.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And that's true for lots of people, even if they
weren't fifteen when they when it all started. I think
for you, it's probably was a little bit more intense
just because of that. You really had no prior trauma
experience of adult self. So you are now a therapist.
(33:33):
How has your experience of therapy harm impacted on how
you do therapy.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Enormously. There's just nowhere to go but humility. It was
absolutely nowhere to go because I can't rest on the
idea that therapy is inherently good or that therapists are
inherently good, and being in the field has only sort
(34:02):
of corroborated the fact that those things are not the case.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
This is a system that we have built that is
intended to serve some function, and sometimes it does, and
sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it does catastrophic you know
damage harm, and so much of it is so bad
for so many people, the clients and the therapists. So
(34:26):
there's no you know, there's no format, there's no modality,
there's no type lanthseration tighten. There's nothing about it that
I feel like I get to hold on to and
say and this makes me good, right, this means I'm
a good one. I'm one of the good ones. There
isn't something like that. And so you have to constantly
be asking the question that can't ever be answered, and
(34:48):
because it's irresponsible to answer it. It's irresponsible to decide,
you know what, I'm safe from doing harm. I'm not
ever doing harm.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
No nobody is. And that is the as you said,
that is the humility of being a person, a human being.
We are always sorry.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
They train it right out of us?
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Who trained it right out of us? But clinical what
do they train out of you?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Well, the a it's an indoctrination into an unearned feeling
of power that you're right and you get to decide,
and you you can feel secure in your goodness if
you follow the.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Rules, or if you can make people perceive where you think,
where you are in denial about how you are or
are not following the rules. That's the problem with being
a human right, There's just so many ways we can
trick ourselves into thinking we're doing one thing when we're
actually doing another you're reminding me. At one point way back,
(35:58):
I took a counseling course on how to work with
people who'd been sexually abused and didn't make me a counselor.
It was like a workshop for several weeks, and I
remember case studies coming up and listening in horror as
people were deciding what to do with this person in
the case study, And of course me, I'm like, I
(36:20):
want to ask all these questions, you know, what about
this and how did you feel here? Or what do
you put But they weren't. They were just jumping in
and they were making decisions. And I remember the distinct
feeling of my job dropping to the ground over and
over and over at the audacity of believing that you
could make those decisions for another human being. It's always
(36:43):
stuck with me, and so part of what you're talking
about here reminds me of that. We need to take
another little break, but we'll be right back. Folks, don't
go away.
Speaker 8 (36:51):
He turney up. Qui gate euons queens na, Hi, everybody,
My name is quigate Eywon's I'm a member of the
Squamish Nation and the agalanis Klan of the Hyda Nation.
You're listening to co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point
five FM. We live, work play and broadcast from the
traditional ancestral and unseeded territories of the Muscreham, Squamish, and
(37:13):
Slave Tooth nations.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox.
Rethreading Madness is coming up to its sixth anniversary of
being on air. We produce an air each week out
of cfr O one hundred point five FM on the
unseated traditional territory of the Squamish, Muscream and Slighway Tooth
(37:35):
nations around Vancouver. Bc RTM was one of the first
radio programs to focus on mental health issues here in Canada,
in an area swamped with statements from therapists rooted in
colonial ideas about mental health and trained in the DSM.
RTM works to ensure that the voices of those with
lived experience have agency and opportunity to define who they
(37:59):
are and what is true for them who listens to us.
Beyond those with lived experience, our audience includes their friends
and partners, along with therapists, counselors, and students of psychology.
Since twenty twenty two, all of our programs have been
uploaded to the Mental Health Radio Network and can be
downloaded from all podcast platforms. So if this show was
(38:21):
of interest to you, you might find the rest of
our programs informative as well. You can find them by
searching for Rethreading Madness wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker 6 (38:35):
All you hey, this A.
Speaker 10 (38:37):
Lot of people call this a rock and roll.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Swags.
Speaker 11 (38:44):
This is do be all.
Speaker 6 (38:45):
Let's see with the left hand.
Speaker 11 (38:47):
Yeah, and the right hand fits in with something like this.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, here we go now.
Speaker 12 (38:54):
Yeah, it's called rock and roll and you can hear
all about it on Rock Talk Discover the hidden but
enchanting side of the music, Friday mornings at nine o'clock.
Speaker 6 (39:07):
Oh that isn't exact thing.
Speaker 10 (39:09):
Nothing is.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Go ahead, Jess Dance Go Crazy.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver cup Radio c
FR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernadine Fox speaking
with Natalie Russ about her work. But also we're about
to talk about the Therapy Harm Resistant Project. So Natalie
tell us what that is. This is something you've started.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yes, this is an advocacy and support endeavor to address
therapy harm as a disavowed reality in the mental health field. So,
you know, therapy harm survivors coming out of this catastrophic experience,
you know, I think often find they have absolutely nowhere
to go. You know there is TELL, which has just
(39:59):
done an on believable service for all of us.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Well, let's just stop there and let people know what
TELL is, because not everybody's going to know. So do
you want to describe what TEL is?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Or can I let you describe what TEL is?
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I can TELL is the therapy Exploitation link line. It's
actually been around for forty years, and in full disclosure,
I am one of the volunteers that responds to emails
going in by survivors of therapy abuse and exploitation, and
a right TAEL has done an incredible job. And I
certainly I've only been around for six of those forty years,
(40:34):
and so certainly people who've come before me and are
still there have been doing this work for eons, long
before email, long before websites and able to Google or
use a hashtag or anything. They were working with people
around the globe. I have no idea how But their
website is Therapy abuse dot org and they have a
(40:56):
full stock of resources and pay papers and books and
free books that you can download and access to podcasts
and resources like lists of lawyers, et cetera that can
help you out. So so for survivors of therapy abuse
and exploitation, TELL is sort of, in my opinion, to
go to place to get support and help. And they
(41:19):
do ongoing support for survivors via email as well. So
that's what TELL is. So I'm sorry we've interrupted your flow.
So if you can get back through, that'd be great.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Oh, thank you, thank you man. You know, we just
we need to honor the enormous gift of what they've
given survivors. I mean that's where I turned, you know,
I turned to TELL when I figured out what to
google and I found the website and quite literally there
(41:49):
was nowhere else to go. Well, I just feel like
survivors deserve everything. Survivors deserve social media accounts and groups
and articles and books, anything, everything in any media with
all accessibility, with all kinds of robust supports.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
And so.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
You know, at the Therapy Harm Resistance Project, we're creating
and platforming content and resources for survivors, for clients who
want to understand better how to protect themselves in therapy,
you know, even if they haven't experienced harm yet or
don't know if they have. Also for therapists who might
be trying to support survivors in subsequent therapies, with which
(42:28):
often become very very fraught. Therapists are absolutely not trained
to support survivors of therapy harm in the next therapy
or subsequent therapies.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
No. No, And of course, one of the biggest things
that I find and certainly was the biggest thing for
me coming out of therapy abuse, was that, you know,
intimacy becomes the trigger right you. You can't, you know,
you need to trust your therapists for it to work.
But trusting that therapist and allowing for any kind of
(43:00):
emotional intimacy you know, by you in terms of being
vulnerable to another person, was so triggering that it was
very very hard. And most therapists are coming into it
believing there's clients are just going to trust them, and
that's just simply not true with somebody who's gone through
therapy harm.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
I think, even maybe a step further, I think many
therapists feel defensive if their client doesn't trust them. I
think I think it's actually something that's hard for therapists
to bear to not think of themselves as either trusted
already or inherently trustworthy, such that they're just kind of
(43:45):
waiting for the client to figure out that they're trustworthy
so that they'll trust them. I think it's it's very
emotionally taxing and not taught for therapists to sit in
the chair realizing they may actually not be trustworthy.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Right, But that is kind of what you talked about
them learning in training, right, is that they're inherently good,
that the industry is inherently good. So so the Therapy
Harm Resistance Project provides information and content. How do you
provide that content?
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So it's on Patreon, which means that it's possible to
give financial contribution, but it's absolutely not required. There's no
gatekeeping based on contribution. Everything is accessible for free, and
so it's going to be you know, the hope is
that we can create a compendium of different kinds of resources.
(44:45):
For example, there's a community resources dock up there also
on my instagram, which is Natalie Ressid a community resources
dock which has a bunch of different you know, groups
and podcasts and possible resources where if survivors can hear
other stories and connect with each other, just as a
kind of place to go to look for something to
(45:08):
hold on to, which again is something that I really
needed and didn't find enough of. So'm I feel committed to,
you know, trying to be in coalition with others who
are trying to offer more in this space, including you.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Thank you. Yeah. Part of what you're talking about is
peer support, right, the incredible power of the and benefit
of being in a space with another person that's gone
through what you've gone through and has survived or isn't
necessarily surviving. It's just a matter if you're surviving very
very well. It's about being in the same space and
(45:49):
recognizing yourself in somebody else rather than going through it
alone and trying to figure out whether or not you
are the only person on the planet that has ever
experienced this. Let's talk a little bit about the movement
that's out there right now. You talk about gatekeeping, and
I often talk about it, and that, you know, part
of why I started this radio program was to get
(46:11):
this information out to people, this kind of information because,
as I tried to do that NBC here, it just
seemed like everything I put out fell into a black hole.
It literally didn't bounce off anywhere. And what I got
most of the time is that, no, we can't, we
can't do that because we can't you know, it's confidential,
(46:33):
you can't put you in touch with other clients, or
you know, YadA YadA. And of course gatekeeping has helped
the mental health industry be able to keep a lid
on this kind of harm. And I think maybe, you know,
believing somehow that it wasn't as big as it was,
(46:53):
or somehow it wasn't as real as it was, or
maybe believing that the people who were talking about it
or having experienced it, we're somehow lying or making it up,
or whatever excuse they gave. But that gate is wide open,
it seems to me right now. Can you talk a
little bit about that in terms of the movement that's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, So I connect this back to the idea that
you know, we're in a culture that says, if you're traumatized,
the solution is to go to therapy. But if you're
traumatized by therapy, the solution is still to go to therapy,
and then you might get traumatized again because therapists are
not trained to help people who have been traumatized in therapy.
So guess what, I'll go to therapy again.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
You have to.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
You're continually rerouted back into the mental health system for
the harms created by the mental health system. And of
course people are starting to find each other instead. I
guess I shouldn't say starting to, because I really don't
know when it started.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Well, from Talent started forty years ago, so.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
And yeah, and my my respect also to other movements,
mad liberation and others that are you know, part of
this as well. You know, this is sort of everyone's
story together of you know, who society hurts and then
what society does with those hurt people to cover up
the hurt that it costs. So I think we're, you know,
(48:20):
probably in part because of social media, you know, having
an easier time maybe finding each other or creating platforms
or spaces where we can do some real movement building
and storytelling. And I think I'm even just in this
sort of short time that I've been part of this,
I have felt momentum growing.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Yeah, I think social media platforms open that gate wide
and I often talk about the Reddit platform that has
grown exponentially from fourteen to sixteen thousand members in just
a month or two. Wow. It is, of course, and
(49:01):
it's going to continue being exponential. And it's not just
North America. Those platforms reach all over the globe, and
so we are seeing the same survivors here in North
America going through exactly the same things, and with therapists,
abusive therapists doing the same kind of harm in Norway
(49:22):
and the UK and Mexico, in Romania, in Australia, and
you know, you name it, the same thing is happening.
And I think that it's really not that hard to
understand why you have people who who are professionals with
an enormous amount of power and authority, who are going
(49:42):
to attract people who love power and authority, and who
also can enjoy the fact that they get to define
what's true for their victims. And of course you talk
about you know, somebody is harmed by therapy, that they're
told to go to therapy and if they're harmed by
that therapist, to go back to another therapist. And what
we have is a system where your only your your
(50:05):
harm is only real or what you decide about that
harm or how you define it is only real and
bonafide is another therapist defines it as such, right, And
I think what we're talking about here in terms of
this movement is that survivors are taking that back in
(50:27):
the same way psychiatric survivors took it back, the same
way people in an LGBTQ community took it back, the
right to define themselves. You know, we survivors are taking
back the right to define themselves and not necessarily going
to therapists to find that healing because so many of
them simply cannot do that. M M.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
It's really powerful. It's really powerful to even just for
myself to have found other survivors. You know, therapy harm,
I think for so many of us, happens alone in
a room with the therapist. You're alone in the room,
and in every subsequent therapy you're alone in the room.
(51:16):
And there's something about busting the room open and you know,
or bringing everybody in or whatever the metaphor is, but
not being alone in the room anymore that feels necessary
and vital.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yes, I agree, I absolutely agree. So let's talk about
some of the forms that we know about that are
out there. There's certainly the Therapy Harm Resistance Project and
where can people find that? Again?
Speaker 3 (51:42):
Yeah, thank you. Let me get the link. That would
be patreon dot com slash therapy harm.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Okay, if they google therapy harm, would they eventually find you?
Speaker 3 (51:53):
I'm actually not sure about the search engine operation that
I have accomplished.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
It's okay, but if they search Natalie Russ therapy harmed Patreon,
they would probably find you.
Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yes, and you come to me Instagram. It's linked there too.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Okay, all right, that's great. So the other things are
there are Facebook pages that if you google the hashtag
therapy abuse all one word and Facebook, you will probably
come across those ones as well. There are also at
least two subreddits that I know of. One is Therapy
(52:27):
Critical and therapy Abuse, and I'm sure there are more.
I believe there's another one on Quorra, but I haven't
been there.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
I don't know that I believe there is as well.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Right now, if you just go to Google and google
the hashtag therapy abuse, you will come across more stuff.
And I remember, you know, trying myself trying to find
stuff back in two thousand and nine, I think, and
it was really really hard. I have no idea how
(52:58):
eventually I found Advocate web or tell. I don't know.
I remember stumbling across it at some point and feeling
like my world I finally opened up. But there are
places to find it, and if you can't, if you're
listening to this program and you simply cannot find information
(53:18):
about it, just write us here at Rethreading Madness and
we will point you in the direction of help and
support and more information. So, Natalie, thank you so much
for coming and chatting with me. I feel like this
program went by so fast.
Speaker 3 (53:37):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (53:38):
I can't believe I'm saying that it's we have to go,
but we have to go. So thank you. And full disclosure,
Natalie and I are doing some work together and I'm
really looking forward to continuing that work. It's a very
important work and it's a little bit different than what
we've talked about here, but hopefully it will have a
huge impact on people around the globe.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
So thank you, Natalie, Thank you Bernardine.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Okay, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (54:04):
Folks, the more behind Bay. Everyone this hurts you. He
(54:43):
do them all round, lead them, gain run over.
Speaker 10 (54:59):
No body can stop you. You were never broke. You
were only family.
Speaker 6 (55:12):
But keep your body well, drain get lord.
Speaker 9 (55:34):
Support, ahais lead ahead, don't to wait.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
For nothing.
Speaker 11 (55:57):
Nobody can stop you were never broken, You were only
bold and for a friend.
Speaker 6 (56:32):
To deep deed you stand no b mounted you, Thank
(57:15):
nobody and stop you. You were never book.
Speaker 10 (57:24):
You were always holding out.
Speaker 1 (57:37):
And that's our show. My thanks to Natalie Russ for
chatting with me about therapy harm. Remember if you have
listened to this program and need resources, please do not
hesitate to contact us through our website. Music today was
by Alrich, Jelly Roll and Arden and to you our listeners,
thank you for joining us today. Stay safe out there.
(58:00):
We've just listened to Rethreading Madness, where we dare to
change how we think about mental health. We air live
on Vancouver co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point five
FM every Tuesday at five pm or online at co
opradio dot org. If you have questions or feedback about
this program, we want to share your story or have
something to say to us, We want to hear from you.
(58:22):
You can reach us by email Rethreading Madness at co
opradio dot org. This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back
next week. Until then, when have.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
Ever been further Do what the hell I'm gonna do
when I can't seem to find my way.
Speaker 6 (58:46):
Under over too?
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Just when I'm ready and.
Speaker 6 (58:53):
Give the life. There you are when we turn out
the life said, it's sorry, It's all right. Don't you
really be alright?
Speaker 2 (59:10):
Why do I always be between You're jelly, Everything's gonna
be outright?
Speaker 1 (59:20):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (59:26):
Why don't I wonder how you know?
Speaker 11 (59:31):
Surely you don't have all of the facts.
Speaker 2 (59:36):
You could be just making it up. Why don't I
ever think of that? It's some kind imagine in the
words that you bade saying, baby, take it from me,
it's sorry.
You're listening to Vancouver called Radio cfr oh one hundred
point five FM. We're coming to you from the unseated
traditional territories of the Squamish, muscream and sleighway tooth nations
around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernardine Fox, and this
is this show that dares to change how we think
about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
We have ever been further No, what the hell I'm
gonna do when I can't see a fine away under over.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver. Call up radio
cfr oh one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
and I'm sitting down virtually, of course, with Natalie Russ,
who is a clinical psychologist that comes to us from Massachusetts.
Say did I say that right? Mask? That's how you
say it. So, Natalie come to me because we're going
(01:05):
to talk about your therapy harm project. Can you tell
me a little bit more about that and how you
come to be doing that work?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Sure? So, I suppose I'll start by saying that I
experienced a twelve year harmful therapy, starting when I was
an adolescent and spanning until I was in training to
be a therapist in my late twenties, and so I've
(01:35):
never been a therapist who wasn't catastrophically harmed by therapy.
So that's how I entered the field. And I think
there was something really galvanizing about being part of this field,
sitting in classes, sitting in consultation groups, sitting in you know,
peer support spaces, and realizing that nobody was talking about
(01:58):
therapy harm. Many people had never even thought about it
or heard about it. It had never come up in training,
and often finding myself the only person in the room
thinking about it, reacting to it, trying to speak to it.
That really led me pretty directly into this work. The
(02:19):
Therapy Harm Resistance Project is a new iteration of that,
but this has been the kind of cornerstone of my
life in the field since I got here.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I would imagine I did try and take psychology. At
one point, I was going to study to become a
counselor and got through. I got through half of the
first course, and then I couldn't do it anymore. I
just literally could not sit there quietly learning about dead
white men's ideas about what mental health was. And of
(02:53):
course I'm talking about young and Freud and those people.
But I'm imagining you was sitting having experienced therapy harm,
and sitting as a young adult in psychology classes and
really having some dissonance about what you experienced as opposed
to what you were being taught.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, I mean quite literally. Sometimes I had come from
harmful therapy sessions, gone in my car, driven to school,
and gone to class to learn about how wonderful we
all are and how much we're helping everybody, and that
contrast was pretty psychologically difficult to tolerate. I would say
(03:37):
that the experience of going through grad school with this
experience running in the background was in its own way,
an additional, just as significant trauma to the actual therapy harm.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I would imagine it would be a little bit crazy
making too. Yes, Yes, can you tell us a little
bit about your therapy harm that you experienced. Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
So I went to boarding school when I was fifteen.
I'm originally from New York, and I came to Massachusetts
for boarding school. And I got into therapy when I
was fifteen with someone in the area near the school.
And I would say that, you know, this is not
(04:23):
an often talked about type of therapy harm. I think
it's not the stereotype that we hear about, but the
maternal kind of dynamic that can form that can be
just as violating in many ways as what's more often
talked about, which is the sexual form. You know, not
in any way to minimize any type of exploitation, but
(04:46):
this took on much more of a you're my child,
You're more like my child than my children, you know,
keeping the therapy very intense, keeping the therapy very freak.
Went a lot of physical contact and not sexual, but
(05:08):
this nurturing kind of the best word for it would
be maternal type of energy that you know, many people
would be longing for that I was longing for and
didn't understand until I was myself training to be a
therapist that it wasn't supposed to be happening.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So would you not, all, Well, I guess what we're
when you say typical, we're talking about a sexual boundary
violation in the therapy. I'm finding that in the work
that I do, because I do I'm a mental health
advocate outside of being a radio host, and a lot
of the abuse that we're hearing about is not always sexual.
(05:51):
And in fact, the fact that the sexual part of
it is criminal and YadA YadA. It makes it harder
for other people to come forward, like you were talking about.
Would you say that what you went through is an
emotional harm?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Yeah, I think of it as psychological emotional. There were
there were physical boundary crossings, just not sexual physical boundary crossings.
But I would say when it ended, I ended up
feeling almost brainwashed. I don't necessarily assign that intention to
(06:27):
her consciously, but certainly that's what happened. It almost felt
as though I was living inside of her, and when
the therapy came a part that I re entered the world.
So it was very all encompassing, incredibly occupying, I would say,
colonizing of myself. And I really was unable to parse it,
(06:54):
you know, until until really the very end twelve years in.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So when you say pars it, what did that mean
for you? I?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
You know, I went to grad school and I was
starting to practice in training sites, you know, internship, and
it was very clear that therapy was actually something quite
different from what was going on in my therapy. And
I had never had any other therapy before, and so
(07:30):
it started to sort of emerge in my thinking. You know,
this is not what I'm being taught to do, This
is not what I'm doing, this is not what anybody
else is doing. And I would bring those questions in
to my therapy because I was under the impression that
I was actually welcome to do that. But the reaction
(07:50):
that I got from her was rejection and hostility, and
that's when all things started to unravel. I think I
was no longer meeting her needs at that point because
I was starting to question the frame and not simply
sort of stay in the role of, you know, adoring
(08:10):
pseudo child that she had.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, and it's so often that it is that point
where somebody is questioning and coming in and saying, hey,
what about you know, or this makes me feel not
so good that the might call them abusive therapists sort
of makes a sort of a direct turn and starts
to be angry and attacking and threatening and all kinds
(08:39):
of things, depending on whatever level of harm that's happening there,
what you went through. I would think and believe and
know that there are many people out there who would
love to be in therapy with somebody who would sort
of absorb them into their emotional sphere and love them
and care for them as if they were their child.
(09:00):
Why is that problematic?
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Well, it's problematic because it's it's based on a fantasy
that is not the truth of what the therapeutic relationship
is and can be in a safe way. It may
feel wonderful, it may meet deep needs for both client
and therapist, but that's not what therapy is, and that's
(09:26):
not what therapy is for, and it's not safe. You know,
it's not safe to go into this fantasy of the
mother child relationship or any other fantasy that can develop
between two people in the therapeutic frame and live inside
of that. It almost almost always, i think, always backfires
catastrophically on the client. The boundaries are for the protection
(09:49):
of the client and in earnest the therapist, but that's
not the point. The boundaries are for the protection of
the client and because they hold up what can be
safely enacted in this relationship, in this type of relationship.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I ask these questions because a lot of folks talk about,
you know, the whole notion of how can therapy be
healing if one person isn't able to be a human
in it? And that's how it's kind of framed, right,
and so to be human, you have to be available
and vulnerable and open and sharing and all of those
(10:31):
things that we know therapists are that those those are
transgressions of boundaries, that those are not things that necessarily
that the therapist should be doing unless it's therapeutic and necessary,
and most times it's not. And it's it's a hard
thing to try to describe to people who are clients,
who are people who've been victimized of people who are
(10:53):
looking for a relationship. Why it's important that your therapist
not be your friend. Why was it important for your
therapist not to become your mother, your pseudo mother?
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Well, any number of reasons. The ones that float to
the top of my mind are, first of all, the
idea that she was my mother was coming from primarily
her fantasy. I actually didn't expect any of that. I
was not thinking, you know, that that could happen. Each
(11:30):
each boundary that she crossed, I was surprised by and
some combination of confused, terrified and delighted. It was not
my expectation. And so each time I would ask, you know,
you're allowed to do this, We're allowed to do this,
and she would give me some explanation about why it
was okay who she'd consulted with, you know that it
(11:54):
was valid and legitimate, but that she was saying directly,
you know, there's something I get from an egoic place
thinking of you as my child that I like, that
I want, and so it was actually theft. So that's
the first problem, right, is that it was theft. It
was her neied, it wasn't your need, correct, And what
(12:16):
it did was prevent me from grappling with truth, with
the realities of my life, my circumstances, the things that
I did and didn't have from people in my life,
the ways that I could and couldn't get my needs met.
She came in with a very strong kind of profit
savior fantasy that in fact I didn't need to grieve
(12:38):
any of those things because she was able, with you know,
her font of love to provide those things for me.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So she circumvented your own healing process. Really, is what
you're saying, correct, right? I call that lazy. And I
often talk to people about how you know, if you
are client coming into your therapy session and then saying
I don't feel loved, if the therapist steps in and
says no, no, no, I love you. What happens is
(13:09):
you no longer get to deal with that feeling that
may be historical in your life and very real and
very valid and something that you need to process to
move on and be able to develop loving, caring relationships
in your own life. What happens is the therapist steps
in and stops it cold, because you can no longer
say I feel unloved, because this person in front of
(13:31):
you has done this extraordinary thing of saying I love you,
and what you are saying is so valid, which is
that it's not real. You know, she wasn't your mother.
You had real issues that you needed to deal with
in and so it's the same thing. It's lazy and
it's not real, and it circumvents the processing for people,
(13:51):
which is diabolical on some level, and certainly for you,
having this person sort of step in as your parent
will to ever talk to the people as you were
going through training about what happened, or we're not necessarily
talk about what happened to you, but just sort of
confront them on these things that you were weighing and
(14:14):
juggling as you were going through training.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yes, and in fact, I couldn't stop talking about it
because the project that had been handed to me of
having to figure out if and how to be a
therapist with abusive therapy happening to me, and really only
abusive therapy ever having happened to me as as a
model of my own experience in therapy. The project was
(14:39):
so daunting that I really didn't stop talking. I was
talking to anyone and everyone who would engage me on
the topic in classes and supervision, and you know, with
mixed results, some really thoughtful and interested people, many people
who had never thought about out it, and some people
(15:02):
who are really defensive about it.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
I'm gonna just stop right there, folks, but we're going
to come back and continue that conversation in a minute,
so we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
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(15:33):
or get involved, go to Treecanada dot ca A.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
I am not okay.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
I'm barely getting back.
Speaker 7 (15:50):
I'm losing track.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Of day, lose sleep and I am not okay.
Speaker 6 (16:00):
Ain't on the rails.
Speaker 7 (16:02):
So if I say I'm fine, there's no home.
Speaker 6 (16:05):
I learned to hide.
Speaker 8 (16:06):
It will.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
How No I came be the only one.
Speaker 6 (16:15):
Who's holding off of again line but dying No dy
know when it's all.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
Said at the time, I'm not okay, but it's all
gonna be all right. It's not okay. If we're all
gonna be all right. I wool up to day. I
(16:49):
hormos stayed in me, have the devil one my bad
and voices in my head. Some dzy it ain't a bad.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
Some days it all gets worse.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
Some Jesus wear I'm better lean in there dirt.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
I no I kay be the only one who's holding
off of again, But I know.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
I know when it's all said at time, I'm not okay,
but it's all gonna be all right. It's not okay,
But if you're all gonna be all right, gonna be
all right, gonna be off.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
I know one day we'll see the other side the
pain on our survey in a holy wire the tarn.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
And we all gonna be all right.
Speaker 9 (18:10):
Have no hold by chain, by only one.
Speaker 6 (18:17):
Who's holding off of the.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
For God, No, no, when it's all said, and I'm
not okay.
Speaker 7 (18:31):
But it's song gonna be all right.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
It's not okay, but we're all gonna be all right.
I'm not okay, but it's song gonna be all right.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver cap Radios FR
one five of them. I'm Bernadine Fox speaking with Natalie
Russ about therapy Hart. Natalie, you were talking about how
you couldn't stop talking about it as you were being
trained to become a psychologist, and you said there were
mixed responses to it. Can you tell us what those
(19:12):
mixed responses were?
Speaker 6 (19:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I think I was lucky enough to be surrounded by
some peers and supervisors who were really open and thoughtful
and humble, and I also met with some defensiveness from
some who I think were primarily very invested in feeling
(19:40):
like therapy is inherently good and therapists are inherently good,
and so hearing a story like mine was a challenge
to that notion. There were some attempts to kind of
frame my story as you know, just some bad apples
as a frame work for understanding therapy harm right, that
(20:01):
therapy is inherently good, but there of course is going
to be some bad ones. And I was, you know,
not satisfied with that framework because it seemed like the
role of the ego was so prominent in what I
was experiencing in the culture of the field coming into
the field that it just didn't seem like a bad
(20:23):
apples framework was sufficient to explain this phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
So to find ego for our audience, oh, I have
absolutely no idea how to do. I kind of threw
all that stuff out. But my sense of it is
is that it is about sense of self. It's about
you know, elevated sense of self. That's how I interpret it.
(20:49):
And I'm probably wrong, and somebody is probably going to
write in and say, no, that's not what it is,
and that's okay. So you know, certainly right in, did
you have anybody tell you that it was okay what
she was doing? Hmm, I had, well, no, it was.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
It was egregious enough in the telling that no one
quite took that tack. But I did get some responses
if I'm remembering, and of course this is a decade ago,
but I did get some responses that sounded like, well,
you know, she probably really loves you and really wants
(21:29):
to you know, like from a legitimizing of her position
and her behavior, so.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
An excuse of what was going on, making it somehow
okay that you should kind of accept what it is.
Did they at the same time ask you how it
was impacting on you or was that something you were
already kind of clear about.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I was often explaining that I was psychologically trauma tized
and pretty pretty much destroyed. You know, it was an
enormous trauma, and I think it was it was palpable
and visible that I was not okay at this point,
and that that was part of why I was talking
about it so much. And you know, I think so
(22:17):
there was some equivocating, you know, there was you know,
of course, she probably doesn't intend this to be so
damaging to you, but it makes sense that it is,
and she's valid or valid all of that stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Sort of middle of the road threading of the needle. Everybody, Yeah,
you shouldn't think badly of her. You talk about catastrophic
damage and how much it impacted on you. And one
of the things that I've been finding as I talk
about this issue along the way, is that I find
that there is a real dearth of information provided to therapists,
(22:54):
and you might be able to speak to this as well,
that they get trained very clearly, very quickly on the
ethical guidelines are, what the boundaries are, what you are
and are not supposed to do, But there doesn't seem
to be any training on what happens to the client
if you do do those things. And so the absence
of that description of impact implies that there is no impact,
(23:18):
that nothing really happens. That really the only way this
whole issue impacts on anybody is you. If you get caught,
you're going to lose your license, YadA, YadA. You went
through training, were you taught what happens to the client
if people transgress their boundaries?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
And so of course this is the dissonance. You're sitting
there catastrophically damaged on some level and being trained, but
nobody is talking about what happened to you. Can you
talk a little bit here about what happened to you,
how it impacted on you?
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, I can try. Of course, I think with trauma
like this, of course, it all gets very fractured, and
it's hard to feel like you've captured everything right, you know,
one piece here, one piece there. I think the thing
I often feel doesn't get understood as well is the
(24:21):
damage that happens on the inside when a therapist has
been internalized so deeply. I was fifteen when I met her,
and I was away of boarding school, and you know,
I attached myself like a duckling, and in many ways
I made myself out of this person, right, I built
(24:45):
my inner life of her. And so when she rejected me,
when she became hostile, when she you know, turned turned
quote unquote turned bad. Though you know, I understand now
that it's a classic cycle of idealization and discard that
(25:07):
happens in these types of abuse situations. But you know
what my experience of having been you know, her beloved,
adored such and such, and then all of a sudden
being the hated, you know, evil have to throw out object.
When that happened, those pieces of her inside of me corrupted,
(25:28):
and so the real crime scene was on the inside.
I couldn't figure out anything about myself for a period
of time, I didn't understand what was good, what was bad?
Did I even really know what love meant, what it
didn't mean. It turned out that what I had thought
was love was abuse, and I had a lot of
paranoia about that, and it was, you know, generally difficult
(25:52):
to get through the day. It all felt pretty bizarre
and detached, Like what am I even doing walking around
having been blown up on the inside in this way?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And that's the right term, blown up. The real crime
scene was on the inside. You know. All of that
stuff is so kind of standard for what happens to
clients who have been harmed in this way. It and
it's one of the things that the world just does,
Like I said about the training, they just don't seem
to understand the catastrophic damage that happens to a client
(26:31):
who has been turned on by their therapists. Do you
do you see her turning on you? It's sort of
in the same way we see what happens with say, abusers,
spousal abusers who do the same. They have this honeymoon
phase and then you know, they'll then they turn and
(26:52):
and then the abuse happens, and then they go back
to a honeymoon phase. So in that turn it seems
like the same thing. Although I don't see in therapy
harm or therapy abuse, the cycle repeating itself over and over.
Did that happen at all for you?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (27:14):
And one really complicated element was that she was talking
to me about cycles of rupture and repair in healthy therapy,
and then we would go through these cycles, and I
was labeling them as rupture and repair, So rupture being
(27:38):
you know, there's some kind of moment of misattunement or
hurt or harm or something that then needs needs needs
a repair in the relationship, and that in you know,
healthy relationships, a lot of healing and closeness can come
from those repair moments. Looking back now, what I see
(28:01):
is cycles of seduction. That there were moments of abuse
and then I was distressed, and then there were performative apologies,
performative vulnerabilities to bring me back, and that I thought that,
you know, because it mapped onto this idea that she
(28:22):
was explaining to me about psychotherapy, I thought that this
was what rupture and repair was, and it really never
was well.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
And it's also hard to see performative repair. I think
it's how you termed it for what it is unless
you've gone through that as a pattern, and the ultimate
outcome is that the repair never really happens. There's a
promise of repair or a promise of different action, or
a promise of a different behavior, and when that doesn't
(28:49):
come through and doesn't pan out over and over, you
start to get it that it's performative, and so sometimes
it can take a while for that to happen. You
talked about the terms of you don't mean in terms
of a sexual seduction. You talk about is sort of
an more emotional seduction. Why was she doing that? What
was important for her? Do you think in her seducing
(29:13):
you back into the what she called a therapeutic process.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I think what she was feeding off of me for
was adoration and the feelings that she got to have
from me when I would be in a state of
idealizing her, seeing her as good and perfect and wonderful
and special and you know, rather than sort of holding
(29:43):
that as of course untrue, you know, as you know,
rather than sitting in some humility and holding that is
of course untrue, that she was you know, flawed and
you know, wounded like the rest of us. I think
she wanted to use that feeling to feel that it
was the case, and that I was seeing her clearly,
(30:03):
and that I was right about her, unlike her own
children and whoever else who didn't adore her sufficiently for
her own standards. And so I think when I say seduction,
the experience was come back and see me as wonderful,
Come back and be close to me in a way
that makes me feel like I really am as wonderful
(30:29):
and spectacular as you feel I am. In these moments.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
It sounds like she was engaged in some pretty profound
denial about who she was, and that's what I'm picking up.
But of course you and I can't sit here and
decide what she was doing necessarily, So tell me. As
a fifteen year old, that's when you started. You idealized her,
(30:57):
She jumped in as your took care of you. It
sounds like you sort of, or you said, you sort
of modeled yourself after her. By the time you get
to be an adult and you're recognizing that this is
all wrong, What does that do to you as a
person who's done that in such formative years?
Speaker 3 (31:23):
It was incredibly confusing. Of Course, by that time, I
was in training to be a therapist, and so naturally
you know, the question arises pretty organically, what the hell
was I doing in clinical training? Was I there because
I was fashioning myself after my abuse of therapist who
(31:44):
wanted me to be her child and be like her
and aspire to be like her, And so I had
to grapple with that. You know what, I what I
feel most resonates with me.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
I can't, of course deny that there was an element
of that. I suspect that there was. What it feels
more like, though, palpably, is that because I was headed
towards being a therapist, that's part of why she picked
me for this, That there was an element of similarity
to herself in ways maybe her own children were not,
(32:22):
or you know, whatever the case may be, that I
came in with that she saw as an opportunity to
create this kind of fake kinship relationship with me. But
by the time I, as you're describing, sort of came
out the other side of this really long tunnel, I
(32:42):
was in crisis about most of most of myself, most
of myself, most of the things that I thought I
knew because I had based them on things that she knew,
things that she me or secured for me. Or sort
of straps that she had tightened for me in you know,
(33:04):
meaning and self and identity, and it all came into question.
It was all corrupted.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And that's true for lots of people, even if they
weren't fifteen when they when it all started. I think
for you, it's probably was a little bit more intense
just because of that. You really had no prior trauma
experience of adult self. So you are now a therapist.
(33:33):
How has your experience of therapy harm impacted on how
you do therapy.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Enormously. There's just nowhere to go but humility. It was
absolutely nowhere to go because I can't rest on the
idea that therapy is inherently good or that therapists are
inherently good, and being in the field has only sort
(34:02):
of corroborated the fact that those things are not the case.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
This is a system that we have built that is
intended to serve some function, and sometimes it does, and
sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it does catastrophic you know
damage harm, and so much of it is so bad
for so many people, the clients and the therapists. So
(34:26):
there's no you know, there's no format, there's no modality,
there's no type lanthseration tighten. There's nothing about it that
I feel like I get to hold on to and
say and this makes me good, right, this means I'm
a good one. I'm one of the good ones. There
isn't something like that. And so you have to constantly
be asking the question that can't ever be answered, and
(34:48):
because it's irresponsible to answer it. It's irresponsible to decide,
you know what, I'm safe from doing harm. I'm not
ever doing harm.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
No nobody is. And that is the as you said,
that is the humility of being a person, a human being.
We are always sorry.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
They train it right out of us?
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Who trained it right out of us? But clinical what
do they train out of you?
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Well, the a it's an indoctrination into an unearned feeling
of power that you're right and you get to decide,
and you you can feel secure in your goodness if
you follow the.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Rules, or if you can make people perceive where you think,
where you are in denial about how you are or
are not following the rules. That's the problem with being
a human right, There's just so many ways we can
trick ourselves into thinking we're doing one thing when we're
actually doing another you're reminding me. At one point way back,
(35:58):
I took a counseling course on how to work with
people who'd been sexually abused and didn't make me a counselor.
It was like a workshop for several weeks, and I
remember case studies coming up and listening in horror as
people were deciding what to do with this person in
the case study, And of course me, I'm like, I
(36:20):
want to ask all these questions, you know, what about
this and how did you feel here? Or what do
you put But they weren't. They were just jumping in
and they were making decisions. And I remember the distinct
feeling of my job dropping to the ground over and
over and over at the audacity of believing that you
could make those decisions for another human being. It's always
(36:43):
stuck with me, and so part of what you're talking
about here reminds me of that. We need to take
another little break, but we'll be right back. Folks, don't
go away.
Speaker 8 (36:51):
He turney up. Qui gate euons queens na, Hi, everybody,
My name is quigate Eywon's I'm a member of the
Squamish Nation and the agalanis Klan of the Hyda Nation.
You're listening to co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point
five FM. We live, work play and broadcast from the
traditional ancestral and unseeded territories of the Muscreham, Squamish, and
(37:13):
Slave Tooth nations.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox.
Rethreading Madness is coming up to its sixth anniversary of
being on air. We produce an air each week out
of cfr O one hundred point five FM on the
unseated traditional territory of the Squamish, Muscream and Slighway Tooth
(37:35):
nations around Vancouver. Bc RTM was one of the first
radio programs to focus on mental health issues here in Canada,
in an area swamped with statements from therapists rooted in
colonial ideas about mental health and trained in the DSM.
RTM works to ensure that the voices of those with
lived experience have agency and opportunity to define who they
(37:59):
are and what is true for them who listens to us.
Beyond those with lived experience, our audience includes their friends
and partners, along with therapists, counselors, and students of psychology.
Since twenty twenty two, all of our programs have been
uploaded to the Mental Health Radio Network and can be
downloaded from all podcast platforms. So if this show was
(38:21):
of interest to you, you might find the rest of
our programs informative as well. You can find them by
searching for Rethreading Madness wherever you listen to your podcast.
Speaker 6 (38:35):
All you hey, this A.
Speaker 10 (38:37):
Lot of people call this a rock and roll.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Swags.
Speaker 11 (38:44):
This is do be all.
Speaker 6 (38:45):
Let's see with the left hand.
Speaker 11 (38:47):
Yeah, and the right hand fits in with something like this.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, here we go now.
Speaker 12 (38:54):
Yeah, it's called rock and roll and you can hear
all about it on Rock Talk Discover the hidden but
enchanting side of the music, Friday mornings at nine o'clock.
Speaker 6 (39:07):
Oh that isn't exact thing.
Speaker 10 (39:09):
Nothing is.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Go ahead, Jess Dance Go Crazy.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver cup Radio c
FR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernadine Fox speaking
with Natalie Russ about her work. But also we're about
to talk about the Therapy Harm Resistant Project. So Natalie
tell us what that is. This is something you've started.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yes, this is an advocacy and support endeavor to address
therapy harm as a disavowed reality in the mental health field. So,
you know, therapy harm survivors coming out of this catastrophic experience,
you know, I think often find they have absolutely nowhere
to go. You know there is TELL, which has just
(39:59):
done an on believable service for all of us.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Well, let's just stop there and let people know what
TELL is, because not everybody's going to know. So do
you want to describe what TEL is?
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Or can I let you describe what TEL is?
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I can TELL is the therapy Exploitation link line. It's
actually been around for forty years, and in full disclosure,
I am one of the volunteers that responds to emails
going in by survivors of therapy abuse and exploitation, and
a right TAEL has done an incredible job. And I
certainly I've only been around for six of those forty years,
(40:34):
and so certainly people who've come before me and are
still there have been doing this work for eons, long
before email, long before websites and able to Google or
use a hashtag or anything. They were working with people
around the globe. I have no idea how But their
website is Therapy abuse dot org and they have a
(40:56):
full stock of resources and pay papers and books and
free books that you can download and access to podcasts
and resources like lists of lawyers, et cetera that can
help you out. So so for survivors of therapy abuse
and exploitation, TELL is sort of, in my opinion, to
go to place to get support and help. And they
(41:19):
do ongoing support for survivors via email as well. So
that's what TELL is. So I'm sorry we've interrupted your flow.
So if you can get back through, that'd be great.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Oh, thank you, thank you man. You know, we just
we need to honor the enormous gift of what they've
given survivors. I mean that's where I turned, you know,
I turned to TELL when I figured out what to
google and I found the website and quite literally there
(41:49):
was nowhere else to go. Well, I just feel like
survivors deserve everything. Survivors deserve social media accounts and groups
and articles and books, anything, everything in any media with
all accessibility, with all kinds of robust supports.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
And so.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
You know, at the Therapy Harm Resistance Project, we're creating
and platforming content and resources for survivors, for clients who
want to understand better how to protect themselves in therapy,
you know, even if they haven't experienced harm yet or
don't know if they have. Also for therapists who might
be trying to support survivors in subsequent therapies, with which
(42:28):
often become very very fraught. Therapists are absolutely not trained
to support survivors of therapy harm in the next therapy
or subsequent therapies.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
No. No, And of course, one of the biggest things
that I find and certainly was the biggest thing for
me coming out of therapy abuse, was that, you know,
intimacy becomes the trigger right you. You can't, you know,
you need to trust your therapists for it to work.
But trusting that therapist and allowing for any kind of
(43:00):
emotional intimacy you know, by you in terms of being
vulnerable to another person, was so triggering that it was
very very hard. And most therapists are coming into it
believing there's clients are just going to trust them, and
that's just simply not true with somebody who's gone through
therapy harm.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
I think, even maybe a step further, I think many
therapists feel defensive if their client doesn't trust them. I
think I think it's actually something that's hard for therapists
to bear to not think of themselves as either trusted
already or inherently trustworthy, such that they're just kind of
(43:45):
waiting for the client to figure out that they're trustworthy
so that they'll trust them. I think it's it's very
emotionally taxing and not taught for therapists to sit in
the chair realizing they may actually not be trustworthy.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Right, But that is kind of what you talked about
them learning in training, right, is that they're inherently good,
that the industry is inherently good. So so the Therapy
Harm Resistance Project provides information and content. How do you
provide that content?
Speaker 3 (44:21):
So it's on Patreon, which means that it's possible to
give financial contribution, but it's absolutely not required. There's no
gatekeeping based on contribution. Everything is accessible for free, and
so it's going to be you know, the hope is
that we can create a compendium of different kinds of resources.
(44:45):
For example, there's a community resources dock up there also
on my instagram, which is Natalie Ressid a community resources
dock which has a bunch of different you know, groups
and podcasts and possible resources where if survivors can hear
other stories and connect with each other, just as a
kind of place to go to look for something to
(45:08):
hold on to, which again is something that I really
needed and didn't find enough of. So'm I feel committed to,
you know, trying to be in coalition with others who
are trying to offer more in this space, including you.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Thank you. Yeah. Part of what you're talking about is
peer support, right, the incredible power of the and benefit
of being in a space with another person that's gone
through what you've gone through and has survived or isn't
necessarily surviving. It's just a matter if you're surviving very
very well. It's about being in the same space and
(45:49):
recognizing yourself in somebody else rather than going through it
alone and trying to figure out whether or not you
are the only person on the planet that has ever
experienced this. Let's talk a little bit about the movement
that's out there right now. You talk about gatekeeping, and
I often talk about it, and that, you know, part
of why I started this radio program was to get
(46:11):
this information out to people, this kind of information because,
as I tried to do that NBC here, it just
seemed like everything I put out fell into a black hole.
It literally didn't bounce off anywhere. And what I got
most of the time is that, no, we can't, we
can't do that because we can't you know, it's confidential,
(46:33):
you can't put you in touch with other clients, or
you know, YadA YadA. And of course gatekeeping has helped
the mental health industry be able to keep a lid
on this kind of harm. And I think maybe, you know,
believing somehow that it wasn't as big as it was,
(46:53):
or somehow it wasn't as real as it was, or
maybe believing that the people who were talking about it
or having experienced it, we're somehow lying or making it up,
or whatever excuse they gave. But that gate is wide open,
it seems to me right now. Can you talk a
little bit about that in terms of the movement that's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Yeah, So I connect this back to the idea that
you know, we're in a culture that says, if you're traumatized,
the solution is to go to therapy. But if you're
traumatized by therapy, the solution is still to go to therapy,
and then you might get traumatized again because therapists are
not trained to help people who have been traumatized in therapy.
So guess what, I'll go to therapy again.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
You have to.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
You're continually rerouted back into the mental health system for
the harms created by the mental health system. And of
course people are starting to find each other instead. I
guess I shouldn't say starting to, because I really don't
know when it started.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Well, from Talent started forty years ago, so.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
And yeah, and my my respect also to other movements,
mad liberation and others that are you know, part of
this as well. You know, this is sort of everyone's
story together of you know, who society hurts and then
what society does with those hurt people to cover up
the hurt that it costs. So I think we're, you know,
(48:20):
probably in part because of social media, you know, having
an easier time maybe finding each other or creating platforms
or spaces where we can do some real movement building
and storytelling. And I think I'm even just in this
sort of short time that I've been part of this,
I have felt momentum growing.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
Yeah, I think social media platforms open that gate wide
and I often talk about the Reddit platform that has
grown exponentially from fourteen to sixteen thousand members in just
a month or two. Wow. It is, of course, and
(49:01):
it's going to continue being exponential. And it's not just
North America. Those platforms reach all over the globe, and
so we are seeing the same survivors here in North
America going through exactly the same things, and with therapists,
abusive therapists doing the same kind of harm in Norway
(49:22):
and the UK and Mexico, in Romania, in Australia, and
you know, you name it, the same thing is happening.
And I think that it's really not that hard to
understand why you have people who who are professionals with
an enormous amount of power and authority, who are going
(49:42):
to attract people who love power and authority, and who
also can enjoy the fact that they get to define
what's true for their victims. And of course you talk
about you know, somebody is harmed by therapy, that they're
told to go to therapy and if they're harmed by
that therapist, to go back to another therapist. And what
we have is a system where your only your your
(50:05):
harm is only real or what you decide about that
harm or how you define it is only real and
bonafide is another therapist defines it as such, right, And
I think what we're talking about here in terms of
this movement is that survivors are taking that back in
(50:27):
the same way psychiatric survivors took it back, the same
way people in an LGBTQ community took it back, the
right to define themselves. You know, we survivors are taking
back the right to define themselves and not necessarily going
to therapists to find that healing because so many of
them simply cannot do that. M M.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
It's really powerful. It's really powerful to even just for
myself to have found other survivors. You know, therapy harm,
I think for so many of us, happens alone in
a room with the therapist. You're alone in the room,
and in every subsequent therapy you're alone in the room.
(51:16):
And there's something about busting the room open and you know,
or bringing everybody in or whatever the metaphor is, but
not being alone in the room anymore that feels necessary
and vital.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yes, I agree, I absolutely agree. So let's talk about
some of the forms that we know about that are
out there. There's certainly the Therapy Harm Resistance Project and
where can people find that? Again?
Speaker 3 (51:42):
Yeah, thank you. Let me get the link. That would
be patreon dot com slash therapy harm.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Okay, if they google therapy harm, would they eventually find you?
Speaker 3 (51:53):
I'm actually not sure about the search engine operation that
I have accomplished.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
It's okay, but if they search Natalie Russ therapy harmed Patreon,
they would probably find you.
Speaker 3 (52:04):
Yes, and you come to me Instagram. It's linked there too.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
Okay, all right, that's great. So the other things are
there are Facebook pages that if you google the hashtag
therapy abuse all one word and Facebook, you will probably
come across those ones as well. There are also at
least two subreddits that I know of. One is Therapy
(52:27):
Critical and therapy Abuse, and I'm sure there are more.
I believe there's another one on Quorra, but I haven't
been there.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
I don't know that I believe there is as well.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Right now, if you just go to Google and google
the hashtag therapy abuse, you will come across more stuff.
And I remember, you know, trying myself trying to find
stuff back in two thousand and nine, I think, and
it was really really hard. I have no idea how
(52:58):
eventually I found Advocate web or tell. I don't know.
I remember stumbling across it at some point and feeling
like my world I finally opened up. But there are
places to find it, and if you can't, if you're
listening to this program and you simply cannot find information
(53:18):
about it, just write us here at Rethreading Madness and
we will point you in the direction of help and
support and more information. So, Natalie, thank you so much
for coming and chatting with me. I feel like this
program went by so fast.
Speaker 3 (53:37):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (53:38):
I can't believe I'm saying that it's we have to go,
but we have to go. So thank you. And full disclosure,
Natalie and I are doing some work together and I'm
really looking forward to continuing that work. It's a very
important work and it's a little bit different than what
we've talked about here, but hopefully it will have a
huge impact on people around the globe.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
So thank you, Natalie, Thank you Bernardine.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Okay, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (54:04):
Folks, the more behind Bay. Everyone this hurts you. He
(54:43):
do them all round, lead them, gain run over.
Speaker 10 (54:59):
No body can stop you. You were never broke. You
were only family.
Speaker 6 (55:12):
But keep your body well, drain get lord.
Speaker 9 (55:34):
Support, ahais lead ahead, don't to wait.
Speaker 6 (55:52):
For nothing.
Speaker 11 (55:57):
Nobody can stop you were never broken, You were only
bold and for a friend.
Speaker 6 (56:32):
To deep deed you stand no b mounted you, Thank
(57:15):
nobody and stop you. You were never book.
Speaker 10 (57:24):
You were always holding out.
Speaker 1 (57:37):
And that's our show. My thanks to Natalie Russ for
chatting with me about therapy harm. Remember if you have
listened to this program and need resources, please do not
hesitate to contact us through our website. Music today was
by Alrich, Jelly Roll and Arden and to you our listeners,
thank you for joining us today. Stay safe out there.
(58:00):
We've just listened to Rethreading Madness, where we dare to
change how we think about mental health. We air live
on Vancouver co Op Radio CFRO one hundred point five
FM every Tuesday at five pm or online at co
opradio dot org. If you have questions or feedback about
this program, we want to share your story or have
something to say to us, We want to hear from you.
(58:22):
You can reach us by email Rethreading Madness at co
opradio dot org. This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back
next week. Until then, when have.
Speaker 2 (58:32):
Ever been further Do what the hell I'm gonna do
when I can't seem to find my way.
Speaker 6 (58:46):
Under over too?
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Just when I'm ready and.
Speaker 6 (58:53):
Give the life. There you are when we turn out
the life said, it's sorry, It's all right. Don't you
really be alright?
Speaker 2 (59:10):
Why do I always be between You're jelly, Everything's gonna
be outright?
Speaker 1 (59:20):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (59:26):
Why don't I wonder how you know?
Speaker 11 (59:31):
Surely you don't have all of the facts.
Speaker 2 (59:36):
You could be just making it up. Why don't I
ever think of that? It's some kind imagine in the
words that you bade saying, baby, take it from me,
it's sorry.
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