As an aside to this discussion, it’s even more harmful when psychotherapists dump their personal crises onto clients who are grad students in social work or psychology, counseling programs, if those clients are choosing some form of counseling as a career. There are tens of thousands of such students in these programs throughout the US at any one time. It is generally recommended by grad advisers that students have some form of psychotherapy or counseling prior to graduating. When therapists demonstrate to these student-clients this form of behavior in the therapeutic setting (dumping their personal crises onto clients or other unethical situations for that matter), no matter what the students learn in school as far as ethics are concerned, they may think something like, “hey, my therapist talked about their personal problems in MY therapy, so it’s ok for me to do it with my clients too!”. This perpetuates the problem; if you assume for example that just one thousand students have had psychologists, social workers or psychiatrists who dump their personal problems onto their psychology or social work or counseling students (or perform other ethical lapses), and multiply that number by the number of clients each student will see during their lifetime career, just do the math and you’ll see the magnitude of damage it can do to people. Even if just one therapist does it to one student, and that student has 500 clients during a career once in practice, for say a 30 year period (which is a very reasonable projection and probably very much on the low end for an active therapist), think of how many people can have their psychotherapy sessions “really messed up” as result of what just one psychotherapist did many years prior.
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