therapists

Many people go through school and become therapists without having a real understanding of what they're doing. I've looked at the GRE test: doesn't teach you any empathy!
There should be some emotional tests for those who want to become emotional healers. Besides the medical expertise, there should be some sort of evaluation that goes beyond the intellectual capacity and could only be handled by emotionally evolved people.
Working with emotionally scarred people may be heavy on the soul. If you have any feelings at all, it'll mark you. I think it's the same as working with lepers, back in the day, when medicine was just another version of witch craft: if you don't know what you're doing, you'll become a leper yourself.
I tried therapy myself and didn't get much out of it. I felt that 45 minutes per session were not enough for me to express myself in depth. Also, I could not reach my emotional self to be able to tell the therapist exactly what I felt and since I was paying for all this out of my own pocket, it became a rather expensive approach to healing.
Also, I am part of some self help groups, where a bunch of victims of abuse try to make light on what happened to them. These women are ready to regurgitate slogans learned from self help books, at a moment's notice. I am sure that what they read in those books resonated with them, but they just can't put their finger on it and can't name the emotion the reading stirred up. They rush to preaching and what they say sounds more like a mesh of generalities and platitudes, than really personal stuff. Same goes for those women still in therapy: I'm sure it helps them in some way, but they can't really tell how. It is difficult for them to express what they have learned about themselves and their wound during a therapy session. This lack of clarity should be blamed on the therapist. If things were clear for the therapist, things should be clear to the patient. But things can't be clear for the therapist, since the therapist is thinking about dinner while the client spills his guts while sitting on a couch with ugly patterns.
My point is: each client is unique. Each abuse experience has a devastatingly isolating effect. From this perspective of isolation, an abuse victim can heal in her/his own time. No therapy session can measure up this timing. Healing is as personal as inspiration: it comes in waves, it can only be felt by one individual at a time and it is not repeatable. Memories come out of the subconscious when the conscious mind is ready and not a moment earlier. The subconscious doesn't respect a schedule, let alone the therapist's schedule. Healing can only happen in the privacy of one's loneliness. A therapist, at the most, can only soothe some of the effects.
To be Ariadne, one must first know the labyrinth.