I'm sorry you had a bad therapy experience. I hope that the therapy strategy your therapist used is not universal, and that other therapists are open to trying other strategies (for other survivors, if your need for therapy has passed) -- "Getting A Life" and "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" are good strategies that a therapist ought to be able to help with.
I honestly can't understand what value a therapist expects to find in rehashing past experience that's already been discussed. (If the patient is in denial about something, investigating it could lead to a breakthrough. But "something happened, I feel awful about it" doesn't seem to lend itself to a solution that involves dwelling on what happened)
I didn't have a bad therapy experience. I had remarkably excellent support. I have no idea why you are framing it that way, other than the tendency being discussed in this very thread for the entire world to unhelpfully heap pity upon survivors.
Edit: The obit for my first therapist, a truly remarkable man:
> [Regarding therapy:] spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past [...] was keeping me miserable.
That sounds like at least the later portions were a bad experience. Also, I suspect a lot of people here have a default assumption that any therapy experience is bad unless otherwise noted, but the above quote is probably the main factor.
It wasn't a negative experience. Therapy was effective. But at some point I realized that continuing to invest so much time in a negative past experience was giving over my present and future time to said negative experience and what I wanted was to invest my time in positive experiences, to pursue something enjoyable and life enhancing.
Long experience suggests that it won't matter how positively I frame it or how carefully I say it, some people will insist on viewing my statements and me negatively -- as has been discussed elsewhere in this very thread.
I will however mention for the other readers that not all modes and schools of therapy see "digging up the past" as essential, in fact I believe this is a point of contention.
Methods such as Cognitive Behavioral Theory, I believe, focus much more on "OK, but how does that influence your behavior? Should it?"
I was in couple's counseling briefly with my husband. He also was very briefly in therapy on his own. He was extremely introverted. He hated telling all this private stuff to a counselor.
One day, I told him "You don't have to go to therapy. I don't care if you go to therapy or not. Therapy is a means to an end. Therapy per se doesn't matter. I only want our marriage to be better. I don't care how that happens."
So he quit both his own therapy and couple's counseling. And he was promptly and permanently a better husband.
I honestly can't understand what value a therapist expects to find in rehashing past experience that's already been discussed. (If the patient is in denial about something, investigating it could lead to a breakthrough. But "something happened, I feel awful about it" doesn't seem to lend itself to a solution that involves dwelling on what happened)