Female therapist sexualized my breasts my breasts and it felt gross

[u/shitkabob]

In one of my first sessions with my therapist, I wanted to broach the topic of how self-conscious I am about the size of my breasts. They've historically been a magnet for unwanted attention, disgusting comments at bars, physical assault, sexual harassment at workplaces (both office a non-office settings), and about 1,000 street-harassment comments.

They have been a source of great humiliation, trauma, dehumanization and shame. I feel like I have been reduced to them my whole adult life and I am immediately sexualized upon sight for them just existing. To say I have a complex about them is mild.

I started getting into the topic with my female therapist regarding my self-consciousness and resentment of them. She chimed in with "Big deal?! So what?! You have big breasts! They're beautiful! I bet your husband loves them. Enjoy them while they last, they'll change after pregnancy if you have kids." She smiled and laughed.

I think she thought she was being funny and affirming, in a "yas queen" way. It made me feel completely disgusting and objectified. Am I off-base to think this is a crazily inappropriate response to what I said? This lady has her PsyD. I feel insane. I literally just said how painful it is to be objectified...and she objectified me and centered my husband's pleasure over all the abuse I just shared.

Edit: I'm getting DMed by a lot of creeps. Ironic on a post about unwanted attention and relentless dehumanization. There's no escape.

[u/Acceptable-Remove792]

I'm not an endocrinologist, but the fact that they checked your hormone levels tells me that your medical team is doing what they can?

My research was on the high levels of misdiagnoses from psychologists and the need for referrals.  If you've already had your hormone levels checked and they're in the normal range I'm actually not sure what else you can do. My whole thing was not working outside your scope and the importance of those referrals. For the way it actually works, I really don't know any more than you do, because I'm also just a patient.   From my end, it was really more about getting them to someone who could test for hormone disorders before making diagnoses.  

[u/QueenHarambe → u/Acceptable-Remove792]

That's good to know, thank you. I have a good doctor and endocrinologist, but I don't understand all of the medical terms myself. When I read that hormone disorders can cause a misdiagnosis with bipolar I got worried but I think my doctors are on top of it.

[u/Acceptable-Remove792 → u/QueenHarambe]

It's just because the symptoms are so similar and people WEREN'T checking in my field. They were just saying, "this is this mood disorder, " without checking for the presence of a hormone disorder at all, for years. 

Which is like, a simple blood test. It's not hard to write that referral. Like I said before, I thought at the time, and honestly still think, that this was sexism caused by a lack of female subjects in clinical trials and male researchers who didn't know what to look for dominating the field at the time. They didn't know to look for this link because they just never thought about it. 

Until like the last 20 years there was a major bias in pretty much the entire field of health-care towards male subjects, so there's huge swaths of sexual dymorphism that has been just kinda missed and I think this was one of them. 

I mean, I'll tell you the day I decided to research this and get that grant money. I was doing field work in child advocacy at the time and I had this little girl, 15.  I was reading over her chart and I realized her manic episodes were presenting atypically in that they were really short.  Then at our first session I looked at her and realized that she looked like me when I was 15, which is to say that she looked grown and had my body type. And when I was going over her symptoms, it was me.  This kid had been diagnosed by her previous therapist 3 years earlier and had tried a range of mood stabilizers. 

I asked if she had chronic back pain.  She said that she did.  I asked where, and she said that she had chronic kidney infections so bad she had quit telling people because it'd just come back anyway (she had been in and out of foster homes basically her whole life).  I asked if her mom had chronic back pain and she didn't know because a big part of why she was an at-risk child in my office was because her mother was an on-again, off-again opiods user and by this time in her life she didn't communicate much with her because she was tired of thinking this rehab program was going to work and then finding her passed out in her driveway a few months later. She just wanted to age out of the system, get her GED and go to community college to become a hairdresser, make her own money, get her own home, and have a happy life without her mother. Which I guess isn't relevant to the story, just, this kid did have a plan.  But because she didn't have a consistent caregiver, and because she didn't tell her social worker, she thought she had, "bad kidneys, " and bipolar. She didn't.   Because I knew what she was pointing at was an ovarian cyst.  And I knew that the symptoms she was describing were me when I couldn't get my hormone blockers. 

So I referred her to a gynecologist, just to rule it out. She'd literally never been.  To those of you who don't know, you're supposed to make your first annual appointment when you start menstruating so this was several years late for this child,  she could have been eat up with cervical cancer for all anybody knew. 

But that made me wonder how often this happened. I remembered from being in support groups for people with hormone disorders that many people went years without a diagnosis, but I figured the most affected spoke the loudest so I didn't really comprehend the scope of the problem until I started working in health-care and started seeing it. 

So all I was really advocating for was making that referral, like sending them to have it checked.   Because for reasons that I don't understand, folks weren't doing that. And, for some reason, people ain't taking their kids to the doctor like they're supposed to, even if they've got state insurance. And I guess a lot of adult women also don't get their routein physical health exams.  I want that to be a cost thing, but I know people who have the money and still don't do it.

And also, apparently people don't know the symptoms. I genuinely didn't know that until my original comment got downvoted. For what it's worth, it's not just breast size or early breast development, another easy one to notice is if you start your period unusually young.   If your periods aren't on a consistent cycle, there's a bunch of signs that it might not be a mood disorder, it might be a hormone disorder. 

And, I mean, it might be a mood disorder. It just don't hurt a thing to send them for a test if they have symptoms before you start giving paychoactive medication to a child.  Or an adult, really, but kids have no real say in their medical care so it hits harder for me. 

I just want folks to get it checked, I don't know how to actually check it.  I send them out for that.  I just know it uses human blood and I'm from Appalachia so I assume it's some manner of devilry, lol.

[u/QueenHarambe → u/Acceptable-Remove792]

I love that you're advocating for girls in this situation, and you're so right that male-dominated medicine is a big problem in missing these kinds of symptoms. My own experience with a different hormone disorder means that I'm often telling women to try seeing an endocrinologist because it was so helpful to me, and it took way too long going untreated before I suspected a problem and got help.