I’m aware the premise makes no sense.
Over the years I’ve been in and out of therapy. In my teens I had a serious enough depression to necessitate medication to somehow level me, a few years after that I went back because I felt I wanted to unpack a few things from my early years, after that I went back to pick up on the work I left behind, after that I went back to try to find a way to cope with the eminent loss of someone very dear to me and very recently I went back because I felt the need to give it another try to unpack a lot of wrongs in my head.
Unfortunately, every single time, as I try to go back and pick on the process - and I feel the need to stress that I’ve been received by multiple professionals over the years - I’m always directed, more or less openly, not towards what I want to resolve but towards something completely unrelated. And no, I am not a professional in mental health but I think I am minimally qualified to know what I think/understand is bothering me and want to explore and try to find a solution/rationalisation for so I can drop that issue or at least drop it in value in my mind so I can move forward.
Instead, my concerns have constantly been ignored or overlooked and all type of approaches been tried to deviate me, as such:
- hypnosis (went horribly wrong)
- cognitive and behavioural shift (as in “You are acting/feeling/thinking wrong.”)
- completely ignoring my concerns
- openly antagonising me
- a very veiled attempt to create in me a notion of “faith in a higher power” (I’m laic)
The last approach is to try to teach me how to meditate.
I have always been received by licensed professionals, two of them through my NHS; no spiritual counsellors nor anything in the like.
I’ve been able to make more breakthroughs by reading philosophy books than by sitting in a chair and talking back and forth with a therapist. But I always get the feeling that I really need some degree of counselling I am not getting.
Am I being paranoid, unlucky or just expecting something that isn’t at all aligned with reality?
I have had a lot of therapists. Most of them were useless. I don’t know how much they were the problem vs. how much I wasn’t ready for therapy. Maybe it was both.
I started seeing a therapist shortly after a traumatic incident. I saw this idiot for years and he was completely useless. I kept thinking he’d get better somehow. He treated me like I was a friend there for casual conversation. He refused to focus on helping me with my issues. When I told him stories related to my trauma, he kept asking completely irrelevant questions. “My friend’s boyfriend accused me of lying” “where is he from?” What worldly difference does it possibly make where he was from? The therapist kept promising that next time he’d focus and he never did. I went through a period where I was really obsessively depressed about poverty and this idiot pointed out big houses to me, expecting me to be impressed when to me big houses are a waste of space where unhoused people ought to be allowed to live. If I were still seeing this stupid therapist now, and talking about my anxiety over how Trump’s administration is oppressing people, I bet he’d try to talk to me about how cool Trump’s ballroom is going to be. Eventually I took a course about counselling and realized my stupid therapist was making no attempt whatsoever to use any techniques to help me. The ironic and confusing thing about it is he taught my teacher for that course.
I also had a counselor at my university who was useless. I kept having to explain to her over and over again why I believe I was treated unjustly by the university. She kept making the same arguments over and over again to defend them and I kept making the same refutations over and over again.
But now I have a therapist who is actually helping me. I have been seeing her for a few years and it has greatly improved my life and my relationship with my family. I’m not sure I can quire explain how she has helped me. Initially, I wanted to talk through the things that had happened in my past and how it affected me, but she convinced me that first we should focus on learning techniques to better manage my behaviours when I’m overwhelmed. She helped me with that and now I’m much better at dealing with difficult situations and am now better able to discuss my past traumas without getting angry or confused. Now I’m slowly but surely processing my past trauma and healing from it