If they are truly a bad therapist (lots of wounds and baggage), then they are likely to take it quite personally and react defensively. They are likely to focus ONLY on your diagnosis and attribute your judgement, exclusively to your own pathology.
If they’ve done their own emotional work, and have earned deep faith in themselves and their skillset, they will be much more chill and sanguine about your opinion. It won’t land with any substantive force.
They will consider the very real possibility that they’ve been mis-attuned and have misstepped at points in your work together (everyone does; there are no perfect humans), but they will also be highly aware of the 30 other motives (most unconscious to you) for you having made such a GLOBAL and BLACK vs WHITE claim about a person’s overall skillset. A skillset for which you are largely untrained and virtually blind.
That sort of speech (“been a bad therapist”) is much more illustrative of a young (blaming and poor-me) brain, than of a competent adult making quantitative measurements of reality.
It tells a really competent counselor much about:
- perhaps they went too fast (their mistake)
- perhaps they did not prep you for very normal, natural “resistance” (an unconscious drive for homeostasis preservation) (their mistake)
- your wounding, emotional age, communication skills and black vs white thinking
Dewey Gaedcke’s answer to What are the benefits of seeking therapy?