It's true that we all go through something at some point, and it's true that therapists are supposed to be there to help people process, improve, and heal.
While both of these statements are true, therapists sometimes cannot help but judge the situation, even when they try their hardest not to.
Curious, Redditor DealSoggy6952 asked:
"Therapists of Reddit, what's been your biggest 'I know I'm not supposed to judge, but holy s**t' moment?"
Family To A Fault
"Up until recently, I worked in child safety. There is an obsession with family unification that's been going on for about 25 years now. It's absolutely deranged and has done so much damage to kids."
"It all happened because we figured out it was cheaper to try to support families and keep them together than put kids into foster care. We underfunded foster care and also underfunded the resources it would take to support families and get kids out of really bad situations as a result."
"I used to be part of a team responsible for 'preserving families' whenever possible, but the truth is that by the time they got to us, most of the time they needed to be apart, so we didn't often recommend it."
- SeasonPositive6771
Helicopter Parenting
"I had a preteen client whose guardian kept requesting progress notes to see how they’ve 'been doing.'"
"It’s against clinic policy for clients and parents/guardians to have access to the notes; they’re allowed to have access to everything else, though. The client was 'very defiant' to everyone but was a wonderful kid throughout their treatment with me."
"When I met both with the guardian and parent, who both insisted on knowing everything about the kid, everything started making sense. Once the parent requested to switch therapists only because I declined their request for the notes, I knew how unhealthy the family dynamics were. I felt bad for the kid because they were opening up more about the family dynamics and how they impacted them; we had a good therapeutic relationship."
- Spiritual-Map1510
A History Of Lying
"Oh, God. My diagnosis changed from Major Depressive Disorder to PTSD… and then my mom started calling the therapist to ensure she knew 'I had a history of lying.' She also started hounding me about what was going on in my sessions because 'she was the one paying for it.'"
The therapist told me so that my mom couldn’t throw it in my face or act like there was a conversation between the two of them I was unaware of, God bless her."
- birdsofpaper
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
"I had a woman once bring in her child for scholastic issues. The child clearly had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome."
"I asked her gently if she consumed alcohol while pregnant, which she confirmed. When I told her that is likely the cause of the scholastic issues, she said, 'I don't feel bad about it.'"
"Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in general gives me a case of the what the f**ks."
- complete-hurry-7160
An Absentee Mother
"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.' She just abandoned him with two kids to raise solo, and he was doing his best for them."
"Therapy was the daughter’s idea; she had been having troubling, intrusive thoughts lately about mass shootings. These thoughts were upsetting to her, and she did not want to act on them. I can still picture how scared and sad she looked telling me this."
"I just wanted to wrap her in my arms, but instead, I offered so much praise and encouragement for her seeking help and trusting me with this information."
"She also met most of the diagnostic criteria for the onset of a schizo-affective disorder. We pulled her dad into a session, caught him up, and explained the most urgent part of the plan: he was going to take her for a full eval with a great psychiatrist colleague of mine who understood the situation and was going to get her in stat. The daughter seemed relieved, the dad seemed relieved, and we scheduled a time to talk soon."
"Well, the mom woke up from whatever festival ditch she had passed out in to angrily call my office and flip out on me."
"How DARE I?! Am I trying to poison her child with pharmaceuticals?! Did I EVEN draw her blood and check her vitamin levels?! Do I want a bad Google review or worse yet, a warrant issued for my arrest?! Do I even understand herbal supplements?!"
"I need to stop now because my head hurts remembering all of this."
- justtheretoleer
Gone Too Soon
"I heard concerning information about the way a child was being treated (not my patient, but a sibling of the patient that I had never met), called CPS and reported it that day, and the following day found out the child had died."
"It was traumatizing, and six years later, I still think about it a lot."
- rorypotter77
Learned Behavior
"I worked with a teenager who was struggling with eating disorders, to the point she’d been hospitalized for organ damage at one point 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…"
"For those of you wondering why I was eating with the kid and the mom, the teen was in inpatient, and the mom was visiting. I was working as a psych tech, and the kid wasn’t allowed to eat unobserved since I had to document her food intake to make sure she was eating sufficiently as a part of her treatment plan, so I joined her and her mom in the cafeteria for the meal."
"I definitely passed along the info about the mom’s eating habits for the therapist to follow up with in family therapy."
- othybear
Terrible Priorities
"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 because we only wanted boys.'"
"The sad thing is, the girl didn’t even look bothered; she had clearly heard it all before. They were attending family therapy as the girl was actively suicidal and they 'didn’t know why.'"
- TheAnxiousPangolin
"My mom said this to my now deceased sister. My sister had depression, anxiety... andthen later had cancer. They can't figure out how she developed it because she was only 30 and passed at 35."
"Oh, I don't know, mom and dad, maybe it's the constant belittling and telling her she's was always going to be a failure. They've said 'even trying to abort her failed.'"
"My sister cried to me every day as we were kids about everything she heard. Even as we became adults. She never got over it. I think our body really does keep score."
"I'm actually now addressing my issues, too. Things started coming up in my body that I didn't worry or didn't hurt before. Mental health is just as important. It's part of the overall health. Be kind to yourselves, folks. Nobody else will give that to you but yourself."
- Radiant_Nobody_9547
Learned Aggression
"I used to work in an acute child psych ward. Saw a lot of angry preteen/elementary (think eight to 12-year-olds) and mostly boys, and most often than not, parents treated the kid really harshly and were shocked this only made the kid worse. Also, I worked in an area where they did NOT want to hear their “old school” parenting could be a problem."
"I had one dad who said, 'Well yeah, I will spank him (11-year-old son) when he gets angry, look, I know everyone nowadays doesn’t like that, but I was spanked my whole life and I turned out FINE.'"
"It took my entire ability to bite my tongue and not to say, '….Sir, you just got out of prison three months ago after serving five years for a violent felony.'"
- Just-lurking-1122
A Myriad Of Options
"The dad that told me I had two and a half sessions to 'fix' his daughter."
"My teenage client who threatened to assault me while his father just sat there."
"Another teenage client who got a giant tattoo of a band she had never heard of."
- Mission_Muscle812
Worth The Investment
"Not a Therapist, but was a Social Worker. I worked with Adults with developmental disabilities."
"A mother of one of my clients asked, 'Why do I bother involving her son in activities?'"
"Her son was dropped on the State's doorstep at the age of three. Her son was 43 when he was my client. He delighted in and responded quite well to joining activities."
"It was another soul-crushing moment in the field. So many days of driving home, crying and borderline alcoholism, to numb the pain, before ending my almost eight years in that field of work."
- Moveyourbloominonions
She Must Have Been Projecting...
"As an intern, I had a couple where the woman was chastising the man because his mother is in an 'abusive cult that tortures children' (Mormon). The guy had ex-communicated and doesn't interact with his parents and hasn't for years."
"She thought this was a good reason to not 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 for support for her beliefs. She was also just calling him names; it was weird."
"The whole time, he was like, '... I don't even talk to my parents, and I love my kids.'"
"In the end she said, 'I guess I'm just a b***h, aren't I?' while looking at me as if to get my reaction, and I accidentally blurted out, 'Your words, not mine.' Whoops!!"
- Dull-Fisherman2033
Seriously, Uhh... What?
"There's enough horror in here already, so here's more of a 'uhhh what?' situation. I was sitting in on a psycho-ed eval interview during the later years of my training, and the client was a high school age male who was known to the practice already."
"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?'
"With a straight face, he said, 'Nah, just need a parachute.'"
"Kiddo lays out the tissue on a side table, takes out his XR version of his (prescribed) ADHD medication, and proceeds to pop open the capsule, empty the medication onto the center of the tissue, wrap it up like a tiny old-timey bindle bag, and swallows it."
"My highly-seasoned supervisor doesn't bat an eyelash, but I'm clearly perplexed, so the client explains to me that when he doesn't want to deal with the 'extended release's part of his meds he simply removes the extension mechanism (the capsule shell) and swallows the med in a 'tissue parachute', which apparently was pretty standard practice among his peers."
"I had never heard of it before, have never seen it referenced since, but it stood out over the copious bizarre stories about illicit drug use I heard working with juvenile court for assessments because it was so ... normal seeming!"
- Rezornath
Truly Admirable
"Maybe not the holy s**t you’re thinking of, but I get that feeling when I think about all of the ways my clients have been able to go on with their lives despite how much s**t they have had to carry."
- PurpleConversation36
"Yeah, I was trying to find a way to formulate this, too. I have heard more shocking things than you can even think of in my therapy office, but listing the outrageous ones here feels exploitative."
"However, the truly jaw-dropping moments come when I think, 'How are you even still ALIVE, let alone sitting here in therapy!?!?'"
"I had a lot of these during the pandemic, and I would often literally just let my jaw drop as I conveniently had a mask on."
- Conscious-Sleep-9075
These accounts were shocking and painful to read, and like the last two Redditors pointed out, it was a wonder that some of these people were able to keep going after everything they'd been through. Sometimes going through something makes you stronger, but sometimes, all that struggle feels like a waste, so much so that all a therapist can think is, 'What the heck?'
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