" I had a 19 - year - old node distinguish me she was pregnant , did n’t know who the dada was , but had specialise it down to three guys . She was NOT go to stop smoking meth and had no intent of attending her OBGYN appointments . "
Warning : this post remark child ill-treatment , intimate abuse , rape , suicide , and use up disorders .
The stigma surroundingmental healthalready makes it difficult for people to seek help. Despite the progress that has been made in the last decade of trying tonormalize therapy, there are many who still feel as if it’staboo.
Ultimately, a therapist’s job is to listen to their clients without judgment. And it’s an integral aspect of their work to ensure that those seeking therapy can be as vulnerable as possible and do as much digging inside to confront their traumas and heal from them.
However, through this process, therapists can find themselves getting caught off guard. People open up about the most personal and painful aspects of their lives. As much as therapists try to stay neutral and supportive, they’re human, too. Sometimes, they hear things that will stop them in their tracks.
A viral post in ther/AskRedditsub highlighted just that. One userasked,“Therapists of Reddit, what’s been your biggest ‘I know I’m not supposed to judge, but holy sh*t’ moment?” Some answers were just straight-up heartbreaking, while a few others were flat-out outrageous.
Note : these responses have been blue-pencil and distill for clarity .
1.“I evaluated a child and had to testify in family court. During the court session, I learned that the mother had ‘rented’ her oldest daughter to her friends when the daughter was 15-17 years old. The mother told the daughter she ‘had to do it; otherwise, her siblings would be homeless and hungry. Mother used most of the money for drugs. Father paid rent and brought groceries every week because he knew the mother didn’t have money. Custody was 50/50 when this was happening.”
2.“I had a 17-year-old client who had an 18-month-old daughter and was 4 and 1/2 months pregnant when we began working together. After we built enough trust in our relationship, she disclosed that she had been repeatedly raped by her father for the past three years. He had sole custody of her because her mom suffered from drug addiction and had her parental rights terminated.”
" She reported to him to the local police ( low townspeople ) . However , they were well-disposed with her father and did n’t believe her . They told her they would only follow through with a report if she would detail her sexual assaults with her father present tense , stating that if she could not do that , they would know she was lying . Her biggest fears were that her small fry were biologically her begetter ’s . She would not get a DNA exam because she did n’t want to attend at them or do it them differently . I made several reports to several authorities that reject to investigate or remove her from the domicile .
In the last , my supervisory program and I worked our asses off to get her connected with a very thorough and helpful sexual assault agency in another country . My office and the young way split the cost to get her there , settled and safe . She was 18 years old by this time . I still think about her 20 yr afterward and hope she ’s o.k. . "
– u / JadedKitKat
3.“Mom admitted she didn’t love her adult kids. The following week she wondered why her kids were ‘screwed up’ and were ‘so unlikable.'”
4.“I started my first-year practicum at the county behavioral health center, working with foster kids. I shadowed my coworker for a session with a 10-year-old. On the drive back to the office, she told me that the 10-year-old was a victim of repeat CSA and has formed a great bond with her caregivers and wants to stay with them.”
" However , her CPS social worker was actively trying to get her back with her mommy , who was still living with her swain , who sexually assaulted the customer . Her therapist continued to urge for the node to stay with the primary care provider because that ’s what the node wanted as well . I just can not believe that CSA is n’t an immediate ' nope , not getting your kid back ' if that someone is still in striking / lives with the culprit . Or is the perpetrator . "
– atomic number 92 / makishleys
5.“An attorney who specialized in insanity defenses during the sentencing phase of death penalty cases talked about one serial killer she worked with. She said that the most frightening person she ever met was her client’s FATHER.”
" Dad would tie his boy ’s hands to the raftman in their house , then whip his son with electrical telegram . "
– uranium / Rusty_Bicycle
6.“A lovely teen girl was brought to her first appointment with me by her dad. Her mom had, as diplomatically as he could spell it out to me, recently up and left the family to go live some selfish new age lifestyle with a ‘reiki healer.’ Just abandoned him with two kids to raise solo, and he was doing his best for them.”
7.“I worked with a teenager who was struggling with eating disorders to the point that she’d been hospitalized for organ damage a few months before. I went to dinner with the girl and her mother. Her mom spent the entire dinner counting the individual pieces of rice she (the mom) was eating so she could accurately count the calories she consumed. I asked the mom to stop, and she just stared at me and asked why she would do that because she had to watch her figure. I wonder where the 15-year-old got her eating disorder from…”
" Edit : for those of you marvel why I was feed with the kid and the mom , the teen was in an inpatient facility , and the mom was visiting . I was mould as a psych tech , and the kid was n’t earmark to eat unobserved since I had to document her food intake to make trusted she was eating sufficiently as a part of her discourse program , so I joined her and her mom in the cafeteria for the meal . I definitely passed along the information about the mom ’s eating habits for the therapist to follow up in class therapy . "
– u / othybear
8.“When I was an intern in my MSW program, I had a 19-year-old client tell me she was pregnant, didn’t know who the dad was, but had narrowed it down to three guys. She was NOT going to stop smoking meth and had no intention of attending her OBGYN appointments. However, she was going to keep the baby and let her mom raise it as she did with her other children.”
9.“I once had a man who was attending family therapy with his three children admit that his last child (a girl) was an ‘accident we tried to abort — we only wanted boys.’ The sad thing is, the girl didn’t even look bothered; she had heard it all before. They were attending family therapy because the girl was actively suicidal, and they ‘didn’t know why.'”
– u / TheAnxiousPangolin
10.“I had this client tell me they were afraid to move forward in their relationship because they thought their partner might become a secret vampire. They were worried that one day their partner would literally start sucking blood. It took everything in me not to burst out laughing. The things people come up with when they’re feeling stressed. I totally get it; anxiety can make your brain go wild. I helped them sort through it, and they realized they were just projecting fears from an oldhorror movie. Still, that was one of those ‘Did I just hear that right?’ moments for me.”
11.“There’s enough horror in here already, so here’s more of an ‘uhhh what?’ situation. I was sitting in on a psychoeducational evaluation interview during the later years of my training. The client was a high school-aged male who was already known to the practice. Before getting rolling, the client asks for a tissue. Sure, normal stuff; between spring allergies and all the standard reasons you’d need tissues in the course of therapy, we were plenty stocked. Trying to build some rapport as the outsider in the room, I did the, ‘how’s the weather’ equivalent here: ‘Oh, bad allergies?'”
" ' Nah , just need a parachute . '
Kiddo lays out the tissue on a side table , takes out his XR version of his ( prescribed ) minimal brain damage medication , and continue to toss off launch the capsule , empty the medicament onto the center of the tissue , wrap it up like a tiny old - timey bindle bag , and swallow it . My highly veteran supervisor does n’t bat an cilium , but I ’m clearly perplexed , so the client explicate to me that when he does n’t require to consider with the ' extended liberation ' part of his meds . He plainly removes the filename extension mechanics ( the capsule case ) and swallows the med in a ' tissue paper chute , ' which seemingly was pretty standard practice among his peer . I had never hear of it before and have never assure it referenced since . Still , it stood out over the copious freaky tarradiddle about illegitimate drug use I heard work with the juvenile court for assessment because it was so .. normal seeming ! "
– u / Rezornat
12.“All the couples coming in for marital therapy as a result of deciding to become swingers. WTF did you think was going to happen to your relationship?”
13.“I had a patient in a group ask for advice because she was feeling pressured into sex she really didn’t want to have. A ‘friend’ had traveled two hours to see her and gotten a hotel room for them. The group heard her out, asked questions, and the consensus was something to the effect of, ‘yeah, you probably owe it to him.'”
" It rest one of the only times I ’ve dismiss any effort at existential / Socratic inquiring and just flatly secernate people ' absolutely not . ' "
– u / Not_the_tractor
14.“We get some wild consult requests from time to time, like people who fetishize the profession and non-consensually involve us in their kink via email/phone.”
15.“I used to work in an acute child psych ward. I saw a lot of angry preteens/elementary kids (think 8-12-year-olds), mostly boys, and more often than not, parents treated the kid really harshly and were shocked that this only made the kid worse. I also worked in an area where they did NOT want to hear their ‘old school’ parenting could be a problem.”
" I had one dada who said , ' Well , yeah , I will spank him ( 11 - year - former Word ) when he gets angry . Look , I know everyone now does n’t like that , but I was spanked my whole life , and I turned out FINE . ' It take my total power to bite my tongue and not say , ' Sir , you just drive out of prison three months ago after serving five years for a violent felony . ' "
– atomic number 92 / Just - lurking-1122
16.“As an intern, I had a couple where the woman was chastising the man because his mother is in an ‘abusive cult’ (Mormonism). The guy had excommunicated his parents and hasn’t interacted with them for years. She thought this was a good reason not to let him parent his children. Like, he’s not allowed to go out on his own with them because his parents are Mormon. She said she was worried that he would let his mother kidnap her kids and was asking me to support her beliefs. She was also just calling him names; it was weird.”
17.“The dad who told me I had 2.5 sessions to ‘fix’ his daughter. My teenage client, who threatened to assault me while his father just sat there. Another teenage client got a gianttattooof a band she had never heard of. And an extremely abusive (like, I got physically sick reading the reports of what she did to her children) mother who had her children taken by CPS, complaining about the food at the foster home not being fresh enough.”
– uracil / Mission_Muscle812
18.“Mine is way milder than everyone else’s, but when someone brings their child to me and they can’t tell me the child’s date of birth. It gets me every time. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW?”
Dial 988 in the United States to reach theNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline . The 988 Lifeline is useable 24/7/365 . Your conversations are free and secret . Other outside self-annihilation helplines can be found atbefrienders.org . The Trevor Project , which provide help and self-destruction - prevention resources for LGBTQ youth , is 1 - 866 - 488 - 7386 .
If you or someone you do it is in immediate danger as a result of domestic vehemence , call 911 . For anon. , secret help , you could call the 24/7National Domestic Violence Hotlineat 1 - 800 - 799 - 7233 ( SAFE ) or chat with an advocator via the website .
If you or someone you know has experienced intimate violation , you may call theNational Sexual Assault Hotlineat 1 - 800 - 656 - HOPE , which spreadeagle the caller to their good sexual violation service provider . you may also search for your local centerhere .
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1 - 800 - 950 - 6264 ( NAMI ) and provide information and referral services;GoodTherapy.orgis an association of mental health professional person from more than 25 countries who sustain efforts to reduce harm in therapy .
TheNational Eating Disorders Associationhelpline is 1 - 800 - 931 - 2237 ; for 24/7 crisis support , text “ NEDA ” to 741741 .
