It's just too much for me, to do therapy. I don't know what I need, I just know that it seems that the expectation is to jump in and blindly trust someone. I've had so many therapists where it seems like the treatment is based more on the therapist's personal biases than anything else. I've had my family called behind my back over self-harm, after I explained that it would only make things worse for them to know (and yes I was overage). I've had a therapist try to treat me for dressing in a different style, and others defend that decision. I've had them try to act like I'm obsessed for following the same rules the rest of my quite mainstream religion follows. Every time there's something, something that the therapist just finds weird that gets in the way, whether or not it's actually a problem.
I need help, I just don't want help that comes with all the mess and biases and blind spots of modern therapy.
What country are you in? It might make a difference. If you're somewhere with private healthcare like USA then I think therapist can decide to 'treat' you for things that don't really need treating because they want the money. I'm not saying they all do this, but some might.
I do think you've not yet found the right therapist for you. It's normal not to 'click' with a therapist and sometimes it can take a few different therapists to find the one that's right for you. Don't write off all "modern therapy" on the basis of your experiences to date.
Also, what sort of therapy were you having? There are LOTS of different therapy styles, and again it might take a little while to find what works best. If you don't like "modern" therapy you could see a psychoanalyst who will be using a Freudian type approach. Or you could try transactional analysis.
Other types of therapy are cognitive behaviour therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, mentalisation based therapy, humanistic therapy, art therapy, music therapy, drama therapy, solution focused therapy.... the list goes on and on.
The only real alternative to therapy is medication, and it's not advised to be taken by itself. Therapy + medication is the best combination.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back, everything is different…
you once called your brain a hard drive, well say hello to the virus.
I don't think it's even about money. I think it's about that their personal biases and discomforts override everything else. A therapist finds goth fashion really strange and doesn't understand why someone would like it. So then "why do you wear all these weird clothes" becomes the subject of treatment, not because it's an actual problem, but because the therapist finds it weird.
That's the problem I've had with therapy - it's been more about creating someone that's "acceptable" to the therapist than it is about making me feel better. I don't want to be the good little girl who shuts up and acts normal and doesn't make waves. But in my experience that's what therapy is really about; not making you feel better, but making it so you fit whatever stencil the therapist has.
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.
You are allowed to tell your therapist that you dont find certain things a problem like the way you dress. That it is a part of your personality and a part that you like. You have a say in what you discuss but you of course have to talk and give them something to go on, rather than the way you look.
I hope you dont give up on it for good. I have had bad experiences in therapy as well as good. If you have trouble wording things, maybe something like art and music therapy would be good for you until you are ready to open more up. I find it easier to talk when you have something to go from like a painting youve made or a piece of music. You dont have to be good at these things to benefit from it. You are not there to create master pieces but to get emotions out and these ways are good ways i find. I no longer do music or art therapy but i still play cello and draw/paint at home which helps for me. But i found it helpful to do with a therapist as well where we could talk about it after if i wanted to. I also had music therapy as a group where each person chose a song that meant something to them or described how you we feeling, then we would talk about why that song meant something to you, how you feel when listening to it, how it made the others feel and think etc. I quite liked that as well.
Just because one on one talking therapy may not be right for you at the moment does not mean that there arent other types of therapy that may make more sense and be easier for you. And dont let a few bad experiences scare you off therapy for good.
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The biggest problem at this point is that the power imbalance is just too great for me to ever be open in therapy. I know that if I do end up with another bad person they have the power to make me do just about anything, by saying they'll report me as suicidal if they don't. I think I could only be comfortable with a therapist who absolutely 100% couldn't report me for that. Otherwise it's just too easy to abuse and I'm too scared to be honest because something might be misinterpreted.
That was the problem with the guy who was on about my clothes and everything. He worked for the school, and I didn't want to see him because I thought he was full of himself and too concerned about liability to be doing anything effective. But he wanted me to see him and he had all this stuff that was apparently evidence of how disturbed I was, even though a lot of it was just stuff like how I dressed. So he could basically order me around because I was too afraid to push back. I tried to talk to his boss and got told I must be misinterpreting things because of my mental illness.
That's why I don't want to see professionals anymore. Because if you do end up with the bad ones they won't let you stop seeing them without telling people things about you. And no one will believe you that they're the problem.
