"The End of Therapy."

By Kathryn Robinson, The Seattle Weekly, November 13, 1996

"Dineen spells out the process whereby the practice of therapy turns ordinary life events into trauma. First, she argues, therapists psychologize everything, even outward circumstances. "Your pet dies and it's a psychological event," she says. Then the psychological reaction is pathologized into a problem that the psychologist can help. Then the generalizing begins, wherein therapists escalate perceptions of damage by comparing slights to trauma, as when criticism is re-labeled "verbal assault." "These are huge assumptions," Dineen says. "I don't want the assumptions made that just because something bad has happened to me, I've become a victim"...
The danger of the elevation of one's pain, intentional or not, Dineen attests, is the client's identification with it. People begin to lose their own sense of control over their lives. They learn that the only one they can trust is their therapist."