I do have a hard time with what "better" is. For me, a lot of it is that my life has been rather a string of bad things happening. The only better I really understand is from the people I grew up with, and their functionality seemed to come in large part from denial and victim-blaming. I was homeschooled all the way up in a group that definitely has some non-functional elements.
So it's very hard for me to say what "better" is. My life seems to have been rather a string of one bad situation to another, with no clear connection between them. I have yet to find any explanation why, but I'm also nervous of any solution that requires relaxing my expectation of bad things happening. Because I hear so often that the kinds of things I experience are uncommon and I shouldn't be worried about them - and yet they happen, even when I've said they'll happen and have been told I'm worrying over nothing. And I can't see any reason I'm causing it. (Example: I tell people I have a bad sense about a place and the landlord, and everyone says I'm just paranoid. A month later it turns out he's a complete busybody who's annoying everyone and even threatened my roommate - but now we're locked into a contract and it's hard to get out of without more proof than we have.)
I've tried CBT without much success. A lot of it comes to the prior problem - I've had so many times where people tell me my thinking is wrong. And it turns out in the end I'm right, only it's too late. Even when I was with an abusive boyfriend, everyone would say I was being too sensitive and it was black-and-white thinking to say he was bad, even when he assaulted me.
There hasn't been a lot of other options that are available, due to the limits both of transportation (public transit around here isn't great) and insurance. I've got some interest in transactional analysis, but I'm also again worried about the therapy relationship.
The power imbalance in the situation scares me. I really have had mental health professionals use privacy violations and even threats to call the police as weapons. I think they thought they were doing the right thing. I think they also read things as indicators when they weren't. One time, all I did was wear a bracelet with a bug in it. That was evidence of how disturbed I was. And that scares me. I can't fully trust a therapist knowing that such a power imbalance is there, because I'm always watching to make sure I don't accidentally say something that might be used against me.
I want to not hurt. I want to be able to prepare for bad things without having it overwhelm me. I want to understand why so many of them happened to me, because I have no answer. I want to understand how to defend myself, how to have boundaries in a world where it often seems that having them opens you up to even more problems.
I know the basics, in a lot of cases. Like, I understand how boundaries are supposed to work - I just seem to end up in a lot of situations where someone else's ability to violate them is greater than your ability to enforce them. Or I know what cognitive distortions are - I just don't know the difference between a cognitive distortion and an unpopular opinion. And I haven't been able to get answers to those questions.
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