I want to share my experience so no other mother allows her child to see Arlene Vanderdussen and thus makes the same mistake that I did. I hired Arlene as a therapist to work with my teenaged daughter to overcome some adjustment problems and teen issues that she was grappling with. Arlene worked with my daughter over several months and my daughter began to trust her and depend on her assessment of situations. Once my daughter was hooked, Arlene began to undermine our mother-daughter relationship by using clinical-sounding explanations that basically blamed Mom for everything that was going on in my daughter's life. Arlene worked my daughter over so thoroughly, I was put in a position where I was under attack from my daughter on a daily basis. When I spoke with Arlene about this, she went on the attack and made accusations that were patently untrue about my mothering and about my personality. I happened to discuss my experience with a close friend of our family, whose daughter was also seeing a therapist. She got very excited, and said she was having the same problem with her daughter's therapist. She described a name-calling incident in which her daughter's therapist called her terrible names. The names were the same as Arlene had called me, and when I asked my friend the name of her daughter's therapist, she said, "Arlene Vanderdussen". Now, my daughter talked quite a bit about this other girl in her sessions with Arlene, but Arlene never let either of us know that she was seeing both of our girls. When I had a serious discussion with my daughter about her "therapy", she decided on her own to stop seeing Arlene, and we have worked to strengthen our relationship and renew the mother-daughter bond that we've always shared. I hope Arlene does not get the chance to use her divisive techniques on any other trusting, unsuspecting people.
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