Therapists Are Revealing The Moments That Made Them Break Their "No Judgment" Rule, And I'm Honestly Speechless
Warning: this post mentions child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, suicide, and eating disorders.
The stigma surrounding mental health already makes it difficult for people to seek help. Despite the progress that has been made in the last decade of trying to normalize therapy, there are many who still feel as if it's taboo.
Ultimately, a therapist's job is to listen to their clients without judgment. And it's an integral aspect of their work to ensure that those seeking therapy can be as vulnerable as possible and do as much digging inside to confront their traumas and heal from them.
However, through this process, therapists can find themselves getting caught off guard. People open up about the most personal and painful aspects of their lives. As much as therapists try to stay neutral and supportive, they're human, too. Sometimes, they hear things that will stop them in their tracks.
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A viral post in the r/AskReddit sub highlighted just that. One user asked, "Therapists of Reddit, what’s been your biggest 'I know I’m not supposed to judge, but holy sh*t' moment?" Some answers were just straight-up heartbreaking, while a few others were flat-out outrageous.
Note: these responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
1."I evaluated a child and had to testify in family court. During the court session, I learned that the mother had 'rented' her oldest daughter to her friends when the daughter was 15-17 years old. The mother told the daughter she 'had to do it; otherwise, her siblings would be homeless and hungry. Mother used most of the money for drugs. Father paid rent and brought groceries every week because he knew the mother didn't have money. Custody was 50/50 when this was happening."
"The judge did not terminate the mother's parental rights, and the mother got supervised weekend visits. The judge said it wasn't clear if the mother's intention was for her friends to rape the daughter, so she wasn't going to terminate the mother's parental rights. She went on about the importance of children having a mother in their lives. To this day, I judge both the mother and the judge."
2."I had a 17-year-old client who had an 18-month-old daughter and was 4 and 1/2 months pregnant when we began working together. After we built enough trust in our relationship, she disclosed that she had been repeatedly raped by her father for the past three years. He had sole custody of her because her mom suffered from drug addiction and had her parental rights terminated."
"She reported to him to the local police (small town). However, they were friendly with her father and didn’t believe her. They told her they would only follow through with a report if she would detail her sexual assaults with her father present, stating that if she could not do that, they would know she was lying. Her biggest fears were that her children were biologically her father’s. She would not get a DNA test because she didn’t want to look at them or love them differently. I made several reports to several authorities that declined to investigate or remove her from the home.
In the end, my supervisor and I worked our asses off to get her connected with a very thorough and helpful sexual assault agency in another state. My agency and the new agency split the cost to get her there, settled and safe. She was 18 years old by this time. I still think about her 20 years later and hope she’s okay."
3."Mom admitted she didn’t love her adult kids. The following week she wondered why her kids were 'screwed up' and were 'so unlikable.'"
4."I started my first-year practicum at the county behavioral health center, working with foster kids. I shadowed my coworker for a session with a 10-year-old. On the drive back to the office, she told me that the 10-year-old was a victim of repeat CSA and has formed a great bond with her caregivers and wants to stay with them."
"However, her CPS social worker was actively trying to get her back with her mom, who was still living with her boyfriend, who sexually assaulted the client. Her therapist continued to advocate for the client to stay with the caregivers because that's what the client wanted as well. I just cannot believe that CSA isn't an immediate 'nope, not getting your kids back' if that person is still in contact/lives with the perpetrator. Or is the perpetrator."
5."An attorney who specialized in insanity defenses during the sentencing phase of death penalty cases talked about one serial killer she worked with. She said that the most frightening person she ever met was her client's FATHER."
"Dad would tie his son’s hands to the rafters in their house, then whip his son with electrical wire."
6."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.' 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 school shootings, like…how to plan and execute one, and 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 schizoaffective disorder.
We pulled Dad into session, caught him up, and explained the most urgent part of the plan: He was going to take her for a full evaluation with a great psychiatrist colleague of mine who understood the situation and was going to get her in stat. The daughter seemed relieved, and Dad seemed relieved. We scheduled a time to talk soon.
Well, Mom woke up from whatever festival ditch she had passed out in to call my office and flip out on me angrily.
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."
7."I worked with a teenager who was struggling with eating disorders to the point that she’d been hospitalized for organ damage 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…"
"Edit: for those of you wondering why I was eating with the kid and the mom, the teen was in an inpatient facility, 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 in family therapy."
8."When I was an intern in my MSW program, I had a 19-year-old client tell me she was pregnant, didn't know who the dad was, but had narrowed it down to three guys. She was NOT going to stop smoking meth and had no intention of attending her OBGYN appointments. However, she was going to keep the baby and let her mom raise it as she did with her other children."
9."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 — we only wanted boys.' The sad thing is, the girl didn’t even look bothered; she had heard it all before. They were attending family therapy because the girl was actively suicidal, and they 'didn’t know why.'"
10."I had this client tell me they were afraid to move forward in their relationship because they thought their partner might become a secret vampire. They were worried that one day their partner would literally start sucking blood. It took everything in me not to burst out laughing. The things people come up with when they're feeling stressed. I totally get it; anxiety can make your brain go wild. I helped them sort through it, and they realized they were just projecting fears from an old horror movie. Still, that was one of those 'Did I just hear that right?' moments for me."
11."There's enough horror in here already, so here's more of an 'uhhh what?' situation. I was sitting in on a psychoeducational evaluation interview during the later years of my training. The client was a high school-aged male who was already known to the practice. 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?'"
"'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' 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 and have never seen it referenced since. Still, it stood out over the copious bizarre stories about illicit drug use I heard working with the juvenile court for assessments because it was so.. normal seeming!"
12."All the couples coming in for marital therapy as a result of deciding to become swingers. WTF did you think was going to happen to your relationship?"
13."I had a patient in a group ask for advice because she was feeling pressured into sex she really didn't want to have. A 'friend' had traveled two hours to see her and gotten a hotel room for them. The group heard her out, asked questions, and the consensus was something to the effect of, 'yeah, you probably owe it to him.'"
"It remains one of the only times I've dropped any effort at experiential/Socratic questioning and just flatly told people 'absolutely not.'"
14."We get some wild consult requests from time to time, like people who fetishize the profession and non-consensually involve us in their kink via email/phone."
15."I used to work in an acute child psych ward. I saw a lot of angry preteens/elementary kids (think 8-12-year-olds), mostly boys, and more often than not, parents treated the kid really harshly and were shocked that this only made the kid worse. I also 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 say, 'Sir, you just got out of prison three months ago after serving five years for a violent felony.'"
16."As an intern, I had a couple where the woman was chastising the man because his mother is in an 'abusive cult' (Mormonism). The guy had excommunicated his parents and hasn't interacted with them for years. She thought this was a good reason not to 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 to support her beliefs. She was also just calling him names; it was weird."
"The whole time, he's 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 bitch, aren't I?' looking at me as if to get my reaction, and I accidentally blurted out, 'Your words, not mine.' Whoops."
17."The dad who told me I had 2.5 sessions to 'fix' his daughter. My teenage client, who threatened to assault me while his father just sat there. Another teenage client got a giant tattoo of a band she had never heard of. And an extremely abusive (like, I got physically sick reading the reports of what she did to her children) mother who had her children taken by CPS, complaining about the food at the foster home not being fresh enough."
18."Mine is way milder than everyone else's, but when someone brings their child to me and they can't tell me the child's date of birth. It gets me every time. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T KNOW?"
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
The National Eating Disorders Association helpline is 1-800-931-2237; for 24/7 crisis support, text “NEDA” to 741741.
