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[Below are brief excerpts from Paris and Donovan's story of therapy-gone-wrong in Therapy Revolution. Paris, an extremely intelligent and sensitive young woman, displayed extraordinary fortitude in her quest for help.]

Paris and Donovan were young, stylish, and newly wed. Donovan was a successful writer and Paris was a portrait painter. They both had strong family connections and shared similar values and goals, but like many newlyweds, found the first year or two of marriage to be stressful. In addition to dynamic careers, they had baby Oliver less than a year after the wedding. Life was busy!

Paris and Donovan scheduled a session with Dr. Lange [a psychologist]. He charged $200 for a fifty-minute session—a practice I am not fond of. I think most patients need a full hour of therapy, and the last ten minutes should be spent helping the patient wind up the session and prepare to leave. I believe the therapist should then, as a rule, schedule a ten to fifteen-minute break in which to write his session notes. Yes, this may mean he won’t be able to see as many patients in a day, but he will be able to focus more and do a better job.

At the end of the third session, he told them that Paris was the one in need of therapy…

Paris began to go to weekly individual therapy sessions without Donovan.

There was no treatment plan. No treatment goals were even discussed. The session followed the same pattern every week…

After several sessions, in which she saw little or no input from Dr. Lange, Paris decided she needed to understand more about the therapy process. “I asked him where therapy was going and what I could expect from it. He told me I had to ‘wait and see,’ and that I had to ‘trust him,’ and that the therapy process just ‘happened.’” After several more sessions, Paris still felt like nothing was happening. Of course, she was most likely correct. She decided to ask Dr. Lange again for more feedback, this time a bit more assertively.

“I asked him to explain the therapy process to me. I described to him what I do for a living. I told him that although I couldn’t actually teach someone to paint a portrait in the space of a brief conversation, I could explain the basic process; how I prepared the sitter, the setting, and the lighting; the tools I needed, like paints and brushes and canvas; and about how long it would take. I told him, ‘I’m hoping that you can give me the same kind of overview of therapy so I can understand what is going on in these sessions.’”

Dr. Lange appeared to be stunned by her question. “He said, ‘Incredible! What? You want me to tell you here in this office, in the next half hour what I learned in four years of psychological studies?’” Before he was finished, Paris felt so bad for offending him that she spent the rest of the session apologizing to him. She experienced very mixed feelings and felt off balance. At a subsequent session, after she tentatively questioned him again, Dr. Lange told her she simply must trust him. “How can you expect to ever trust your husband if you don’t trust me”?

After several more sessions…

“I had made myself very open, but somehow I felt that my failure to get anything out of therapy was my fault, so I kept on putting myself emotionally into it. Also, another weird thing about this was that Dr. Lange kept implying that part of my therapy was the actual act of me being kept in suspense. He even told me that I needed to understand that it was good for me to ‘not have too much information.’”

Though she and Donovan agreed that it might be a good idea to  remain in therapy for a while longer, the process continued to deteriorate. It ended with a conference call, recalled in great detail by both Paris and Donovan, which, regrettably, could only be described as abusive on the part of the therapist. When we interviewed Paris she spent many hours reviewing what happened and discussing it with Donovan to ensure that the details she shared were as accurate as possible.

In part two of this article, Paris brings us up to date in her own words.

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    Last reviewed: 17 May 2010