Therapist Reacts: Reddit's AITA

If you don't trust someone with their opinion about a horror movie franchise, then why would you trust them with your deep dark thoughts about trauma or your anxiety or your mental illness, right? Okay, hi everybody. Thanks for coming back. For those of you who are new here, my name is Nikki, I'm a therapist and we talk about therapisty things on this channel. If you are new here, you should subscribe because we talk about mental health stuff a lot and I think it would be fun if you liked that, you liked it here. So, for those of you who are not new here, you will recognize that this, this is new, this is different. That's because I'm working from home more now and we had to rearrange, which is not an exciting explanation, but the exciting thing is this very conspicuous bald spot that's happening over here. Do you see this? See how it looks like there should be art here, but there's not here? That's because there should be art there, but there's not. We're going to do a live stream so that I can make more shitty art for you guys so we can put it there. So, I talked about this on the community tab. We're going to do a live stream on Saturday, July 17th, where I'm going to paint some more shitty artwork with you guys. We're also going to do a tour of all of the art that I already have. I know that there are a lot of questions about what some of them mean and like, you know, just questions about them generally. So we're going to take a tour and I'm going to talk about all of them and then we're going to make some new ones and we're going to fill up this little hole here. So if you would like to hang out with me and do some self care and some art with me and also learn more about all my shitty paintings, be there or be square. I'm going to be posting something on the community tab and on my Instagram. If you don't follow me on Instagram, by the way, you should go follow me on Instagram so that we can all decide on a time together because last time I picked a time that was convenient for me, but unfortunately that was like the middle of the goddamn night for some of you. So I'm going to put up a couple different options and then we will decide on a time together. So today is Saturday, July 17th. The time is a little bit to be determined. So keep an eye on the community tab and my Instagram and then I will try and keep you guys updated on when the time will be. But live stream, don't forget. Anyways. Okay. Anyways, let's talk about today's video. This is something that I have seen requested a couple of times, a video about the Am I the Asshole subreddit. If you don't know what Reddit is, it's a social media platform, but the subreddit is centered around asking questions anonymously and having the subreddit weigh in on whether you're the asshole or not. There are sometimes mental health and therapy related questions on there and I thought it would be fun for us to talk about that and kind of unpack that from a therapy and mental health perspective. So that's what we're doing today. So let's just jump into it. So the format of these is a little bit tricky because they are kind of long and for accessibility reasons I want to make sure that I'm reading them out loud. So bear with me. If you guys have suggestions about how to make this more appealing in the comments, very open to your guys's opinions. But for now, I'm just going to read you this and then we'll talk about it. So I, a 17-year-old female, have attended therapy for several years due to depression and anxiety. In the last, intimate past, I've made comments to my mom about how I talked about a certain show with my therapist and explained the whole plot. My mom seemed upset and argued that I should be using therapy for actually helping my mental health and talking about important things. In the past year, I have attended therapy online. My mom has often barged in on my therapy in the basement to do laundry or something. I pretended to stop talking because I'm saying something private, but I just don't want her to know that I'm talking about the plot of a horror movie franchise. I rarely actually talk about my feelings in therapy, but mostly just random things I'm interested in. Am I wasting my parents' money by not properly utilizing therapy? I've also been very busy with AP exams and extracurriculars and my mom has suggested that I cancel therapy if I don't have time for something like walking the dogs. Am I the asshole? So, I wanted to talk about this because I think a lot of times there is this perception that if you are in therapy, you have to utilize every single second of those sessions to talk about something that is explicitly mental health related. That's not necessarily true. Sometimes it's clinically appropriate in therapy to talk about a horror movie franchise or your interests or things that are not specifically related to your mental health. This is for a number of reasons, but the first of which is that oftentimes therapy is best served when it feels conversational. I actually had a conversation with my therapist about this the other day. The way that we can be most effective as clinicians is when we're just talking to people. She told me that one of the most memorable moments that she had in grad school was when a professor told her, like, just talk to people. Just have a conversation with people. Because when we get on people's level and we communicate with them like human beings, people start to change. And when they feel trusted and they feel seen and heard, that's when we can really start to get into the things that matter. It's really difficult to talk about, like, nitty gritty bullshit if you're not comfortable talking about the, like, surface level cliches, you know? If you don't trust someone with their opinion about a horror movie franchise, then why would you trust them with your deep, dark thoughts about trauma or your anxiety or your mental illness, right? So, I think it's important for us to normalize that and to honor the need for people to take baby steps in therapy and, you know, especially for that to be an ongoing process. This has also happened for me where I have had clients show up to therapy and say, like, not today. I don't have time or space to do the thing, especially if the therapy modality that we're using is, like, especially regimented or, like, list oriented. You know, I don't have space to do the steps or the checklist today, like, I just need to have a conversation or I just need a place to cry or to be and that's totally okay. It's very normal and very human for us to sometimes have off days and just need a place to have face time with another human. So, that's very much okay and does not make someone an asshole and it certainly does not mean that you're wasting money in therapy. That being said, if you are in therapy for an extended amount of time and you're not ever getting into nitty gritty bullshit, we might be running into an issue. Your therapist is not supposed to be your friend. As much as I enjoy the time that I have with my clients and I have a fondness for my clients, I can't be their friend. It's not allowed. It's not appropriate. It is counterintuitive to their growth and, again, as much as we can connect on that human level and have conversations about normal everyday things, it is important that as a therapist, we're providing people with a service. You wouldn't go to a doctor's office or to a dentist and leave without having that service provided to you and, granted, this is different because there's a certain level of trust that we have to develop before we can provide the service and because the service is kind of amorphous in that, like, if you don't get your ******* teeth cleaned, it's very clear that you didn't get your teeth cleaned. This is like a little bit different in that it's hard to suss out when it's happening or when it's not. But, again, if you're going to therapy for an extended amount of time and you're not talking about mental health or therapy-related things, then we might have an issue. The thing about this, though, is that, as the client, that's not your job to keep an eye on. That's on the therapist. You, as the client, should not have to keep an active watch on whether you're accomplishing your therapy goals or not or whether you're appropriately utilizing the service or not because, A, your job is to heal. Your job is to worry about your ---- and, like, be yourself, but, B, because the therapist is the one who is supposed to be behaving ethically and they're the one who has the ethical and moral responsibility to be providing the service, you know? They're also the one who's wasting their own goddamn time if they're taking on clients without doing any kind of meaningful work and they're behaving unethically by taking their money and not providing you with the service that's been mutually agreed upon. Therapy is actually kind of like a contractual agreement. For those of you who don't know, there's something you have to sign to get started in therapy called an informed consent that is a contract. There are certain roles and responsibilities and rights that clients and therapists each possess and so it's important for everyone to uphold those. So if your therapist is not keeping an eye on whether or not you're making progress and actually talking about those things, they're not upholding their responsibility as the professional in the room and so, again, that's the therapist's job. So, in my opinion, no, this person is not the asshole because whatever way you look at it, they're not wasting money, they're not doing anything wrong, it's not their ******* job in the first place to make sure that they're utilizing the service appropriately and it doesn't sound like they're doing anything wrong in the first place. I think there's also a conversation to be had about setting appropriate boundaries. If you are a parent watching this, I really want to encourage you to kind of like mind your own ******* business about your kid's therapy because a watch pot never boils and if you are sticking your nose in your kid's therapy and like really overanalyzing the minutia of what's going on there, you might be doing more harm than good and a lot of times people make change when they feel safe and comfortable and not when they are feeling overanalyzed. So, I think mom barging into the basement and like asking all these questions might be counterintuitive to the goal that mom seems to want to accomplish here. That's neither here nor there. Again, I want to just make it clear that as a client, it's not your job to make sure that you're making progress but also it is okay for you to talk about normal stuff. You don't have to come to therapy with like mental health things to talk about every single time. My buddy's asleep. So, this one says, am I the asshole for not wanting to go to therapy? I, male 28, and my girlfriend, female 28, have been arguing a lot about this and it got to the point where my girlfriend went to her best friend's for the night. Some backstory. Our daughter, female 9, who we will refer to as C from here, has recently been diagnosed with anorexia and diabetes and has been hospitalized for it. Girlfriend got advice for her to go to therapy and for me to go to therapy as well as they suspect we are not over our own eating disorders. I will not go because it brings back bad memories. I think that girlfriend is overreacting due to pregnancy hormones and stress over C. So, I told her that and she gave me two options. Either go to therapy or sleep on the couch. So, I slept on the couch for the first night thinking that she would back down the next day but she didn't and eventually slept over at her best friend's house. I think I might be the asshole because girlfriend offered to go with me. And then there's also an edit on here that says, I got some advice from someone saying to find a teletherapist and once I'm comfortable with the therapist to start going in person. So, I've messaged my girlfriend to find one. So, she is finding some possible ones for me that do that and are close and I'm also doing some research on how to help C. So, the reason that I picked this one and wanted to talk about this is because if you are a person who is noticing issues in your relationships and especially if you are the person who is noticing that all of your issues, familial, romantic, platonic, friendship, coworkers, acquaintances all seem to have issues related to the same topics and it seems like it's everybody else, sometimes it's worth doing some introspection about what we're bringing to the table and how we're influencing the outcome of those relationships. It's not to say that every single time this is true that you're the problem but like I said it can be worth doing the introspection because we have very limited control over other people. We can't influence other people's actions and we can't force people to do things. What we can control is ourselves and so if there are issues showing up in relationships it might be worthwhile for us to do the work and to invest the time and energy to work on ourselves. In this case, I think especially with a child involved, it begs the question where the issues came from in the first place. Again, if you are a parent watching this and you are struggling to understand where your child's issues are coming from, it might be worth doing some reflection about the things that you're bringing to the table. Are there unresolved issues that you have? Are there things that you could work on in therapy that you might accidentally be exposing your child to that are causing those issues to come up for your kid? This was one of the reasons that I decided early, early in my career that I did not want to work with kids because oftentimes the adults are the people who also need a lot of work and it's really frustrating to work with kids who have parents who refuse to work on their stuff because then you try to help the kid but they come back and it's, oh god, it's terrible. Not that I'm the authority on child therapy by the way, I don't know a lot about it. So this is why I say that doing that reflection and reflecting on what we're bringing to the table can be useful because again, we can't control other people and we can't control for the stuff that other people are bringing into the relationship but you can control you and you can work on yourself. I think it also is an interesting topic to discuss about whether you're the asshole or not if your partner requests that you go to therapy and you refuse to go because this can get kind of sketchy, you know? I could very much see this being a manipulation tactic that an abuser could use to control their partner, like that could be very dangerous and very scary but it could also sort of work in the reverse, that there could be a partner who is abusive or who is behaving in a way that's very hurtful and refuses to go to therapy and work on their stuff because, you know, they don't want to deal with it or whatever and I think that issue is very much up for individual interpretation but I have said this before and I will continue to say it until the end of time, everybody has ---- that they can work on. Everyone has something that they can work on in therapy and if you think that you don't, that's your ----. You're either in denial or you're a ******* liar so go to therapy and work on your ----. Everyone is an imperfect person, none of us are free of childhood wounds or relationship wounds or self-esteem issues or anxieties or fears or sadness. We all have weird ----, especially after last year, you cannot convince me that we don't all have some underlying level of existential dread so I think if your partner makes the request or observation that like, hey, I'm noticing there's some stuff coming up in our relationship and I really want you to work on it. If you're ready, if that's an option for you, it might be worth considering. I think it's important to meet people where they're at and honor our limits, you know, like if we're not ready to go, you can't force someone to be ready but like I said, if you're ready and it feels like a feasible option for you, we all stand to gain something from therapy and so even if you go for a couple sessions, one, two, three, it can be a good experience and it can be helpful if only from the standpoint of learning, you know, what does it look like to go to therapy. Maybe I'm not ready to make change right now but at least I know what to expect so when I'm ready, I can go back another time. I think the comment section decided that this person was the asshole. I don't necessarily like labeling people that way. This is kind of why I struggle with this subreddit too because I don't like labeling people as like you're an asshole so I don't super love that but I do think this person was not maybe being super kind to their partner by refusing to go because it sounds like they weren't being very helpful as a co-parent so I'm glad that they reached some kind of compromise. So yeah, I'm going to wrap it up with that today because these are very long and I could just talk about this all goddamn day. If you like the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel. If you guys like this video format, let me know in the comments what your thoughts are. Like I said, if you have comments or opinions about how to make this more approachable or interesting or if you just like it the way it is, I would love to hear about that. We have content like this but also other like Therapist React style content so I would love to have you subscribe and stick around and be part of our little mental health revolution and share the video to help the channel grow and to help each other grow and I will see you next Saturday and also come to our live stream. Have fun. Okay, bye. you