In this interview, therapist Phyllis discusses the roots of abusive behavior, emphasizing that most people are born innocent and become conditioned by harmful experiences. She describes her work with Parents United, particularly the non‑offending parent group, highlighting how survivors often lose protective instincts and feel helpless when abuse occurs within the family. Phyllis reflects on how her own trauma deepened her empathy and effectiveness as a therapist. She defines what a psychotherapist is—typically holding a master’s degree in psychology or social work—and outlines the breadth of training, including family dynamics, intrapsychic processes, and various trauma‑focused modalities such as EMDR, somatic therapy, hypnosis, and inner‑child work. The conversation then moves to the myriad symptoms that bring clients to therapy (anxiety, depression, nightmares, addiction, relationship issues, creative blocks) and how these often stem from negative core beliefs formed in childhood, like feeling unlovable or invisible. Throughout, Phyllis stresses the importance of a safe therapeutic relationship to help clients uncover the source of their pain and begin healing.
Chapters
they're also just doing what they were conditioned to do. Um, and that's not to excuse the pain or the responsibility, but it's, it's an important part of what I wrote about in my book and what we need to know in the world of psychology, that people are not born molesters. They're not born someone who just beats other people, unless perhaps, you know, in a rare case there's some brain anomaly that really doesn't— that doesn't wire them properly. But for the most part, a baby is born an innocent, loving, you know, innocent, beautiful, essential human being, and then something happens to them and they get conditioned in a way that's either healthy or not. So one of the beautiful things about working at Parents United was our ability to work with children and help them while they were still young. There was also something that was really profound for me in working— we had a group that was called non-offending parent group and primarily that group was a parent who had not abused their child but who had not been able to protect their child and it was usually either their spouse who had abused the child or another family member and sometimes they knew and sometimes they really didn't know and they just, you know, it just happened, you know, out of their hearing and out of their sight or they had been molested by that person and then they ended up leaving their children with that person, you know, and from the outside, what was so profound about my learning there was from the outside, it's like, well, how could you leave your child with your father if your father molested you when you were little, or, you know, whoever it was? But what happens is people often get really disabled by abuse. Their instincts of self-protection and protection of others actually go offline and they become helpless in the face of their own abuse, abuse in the present, or abuse of those around them. That's not true for everyone, but it certainly is an understandable and known psychological outcome. So I just learned so much about the dynamics of abuse, the effects of abuse, and then meanwhile I was, you know, doing a lot of my own personal work still, because I did that for quite a while. So it was a really profound experience to feel like we could intervene on the front lines, you know, and, and know that there was help for some of these children who were going to grow up and, and otherwise probably would have either continued to be victimized or perhaps become victimizers themselves, or in any case suffer the way I did. You know, because it's a very, very, very painful, um, it's, it's really impossible to put into words the devastation that it does to a person when you are violated by people that you trust and that you live with and that you depend on, or anyone else. But when it's in your family, it's a certain kind of trauma that's a little different than if it's a stranger.
Point, point taken. I've had a few people that have come on and talked about being abused, and they say exactly what you say. Sometimes it's hard to put in words if you haven't experienced it, then you, you really wouldn't understand what somebody's talking about or going through, right?
And so in some ways, you know, the, the silver lining was that I think it made me a better therapist because I knew what that experience was like. I knew what that pain was like. I knew how hard it was to move through it and how important it was to have a safe other person to go on that journey with you. It's very hard to do that work all by yourself.
So on that note, Phyllis, so what exactly is a psychotherapist?
Yeah, a psychotherapist is someone, uh, usually, usually with a master's degree, which is, you know, a graduate school degree in psychology of some kind. Sometimes it's a social work degree, but that's usually training in being a therapist as well. And you just— you've learned all about family dynamics and intrapsychic dynamics and early childhood conditioning, and you also learn about many of the healing modalities that help people recover from the things that have happened to them with other people that have really hurt them and given them, you know, negative messages about who they are. Most people have some kind of coping mechanisms that they develop out of abuse or neglect on whatever level it happens, whether it's emotional abuse or abandonment or actual violation of your body, or it could be not in your family. It could be discrimination in your community. It could be the effects of poverty. It could be that you've developed an addiction as a way to try to medicate your own pain. So there's, There's all kinds of things that we learn about how to treat different symptoms and get to the causes. And so most psychotherapists, I think, learn a lot of different modalities. They learn how to work with children, they learn how to work with couples and families and individual adults and do sometimes, you know, we do hypnosis or inner child work, or there's a wonderful methodology called EMDR, which is based in working with the left and right hemispheres of the brain. There's all kinds of new technologies or somatic therapy. But basically the bottom line of what a psychotherapist does is try to uncover the source of whatever pain brings a person to therapy. Could be pain in a relationship, it could be addiction, it could be an inability to really manifest who you feel like you really are, your creativity is blocked, you can't find good work, you end up being attracted over and over again to partners who are not good for you, you're having trouble parenting, you know, whatever it is. You're obsessed, you're highly anxious, you're deeply depressed, you can't sleep. Sometimes people come in with horrible nightmares. I mean, the list of symptoms is endless. And so we try to help people get to the source of the pain. Where did it start? What happened to you? How old were you? What did you learn about yourself, you know, positive and negative? And usually out of negative experiences, we take on negative beliefs like I'm unlovable, I'm not worth anything, I don't matter, I'm invisible, I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, you know, just whatever messages you got either implicitly or directly. Children are like little sponges, they just absorb, you know, the reflections they get back from other people and then out of that we develop coping mechanisms.
