ive alluded to this many time but to really explain, i think that the nice and pleasant promises of therapy (self esteem, independence, confidence, relationship skills, less pain, etc) probably have to do directly with how much of a threat your mental health professionals see you as.
the way i was treated as someone with diagnosed depression and anxiety was still horrendous. a fucking crime against humanity. but it got easily worse when i was given PD or PTSD diagnosis. the amount of diagnoses you have, which kinds, and how stigmatized they are, seem to be one of the biggest forms of classifying you as a threat. and it depends on the impact your mental illness has on your life, how it impacts the people around you, how “normal” you appear to be and how functional you are within society, and other things will land you somewhere on the threat spectrum, regardless of any actual proof of criminal or violent behavior. (and if you do have a criminal or violent history of some kind, that will get you some of the worst stigmatized labels. and then there’s also racism and all the other regular marginalized conceptualization of who is and isn’t a threat.)
for me, i had no history of physical violence or anything like that, but i had brutal ptsd, depression, i was angry at injustice and i was confident and asserted boundaries. i defined my own reality against their ideology, gently tried to educate and correct the authorities when they decided false things about me and then asserted them as facts, and i didn’t see myself as deserving of bad treatment. i rejected the “forgiveness” bullshit about abusers and mostly refused to do things i didn’t want to do. i was disabled and i didn’t preform shame for being different. so... i’d say i was something like a medium threat. and in order to contain me, the therapists would apply punishing doctrine and ideology, gaslight me, and ultimately they nearly blasted me into smithereens with thought stopping clichés, shame and guilt, instilling harm ocd, teaching me that i am inherently bad, and that i don’t deserve to be a person. i got kicked out of some treatments because the psychiatrist got sick of me (not because i was being inappropriate in my appointments or anything but because... i think my csa history made him uncomfortable and he was tired of me not improving in any way), i would be humiliated and coerced, manipulated, and so on and so forth. my freedom was seen as the main problem, not my suffering.
depending on where you land on that spectrum according to the mental health authorities who are steeped in indoctrination and stigma and suspicion of their patients, you may receive more baby talk, pity, and condescension, or you may experience threats, police calls, physical abuse and forced drug administration to pacify you. and of course it’s all justified to them because they are the self appointed zookeepers of us wild animals. we must be contained, and in their eyes, some of us may be allowed more freedom than others.
so if you are considered lower on the “threat” scale, self esteem and independence and personhood may actually be allowed to you in therapy! But it is absolutely not an option for all of us. For some of us, (like me!) self esteem and independence is not a goal or a good sign, it’s just more evidence of our volatile nature and must be brutally denied. Our “recovery” means submitting to authoritarianism, not freedom and individuality.
