Oops. My error. I guess I was confusing what you said with something I have read several times about therapy other places.

Wow. That is so different from me. I just feel, and feel, and feel so much, so many emotions. It can be a real pain in the neck. I often wish I could just stop feeling. The problem just got worse in therapy.

If you substitute "think" for "feel" in this sentence, it comes close to describing one thing that was so frustrating for me in therapy. Therapists just seemed to assume that I see things differently from how I see them. I suspect that it is in large part because I tend to see things in complex terms, and they seemed to see things in such simple terms.

I'll second that therapy can be surprising. I found it hard to deal with the negative surprises -- and most of them were negative for me. There were very few positive ones, in my experience, but there have been some.

That makes sense to me.

I guess I communicated well enough here. I appreciate your recognizing that my situation was different from mine -- particularly since one big (negative) surprise with the last therapist I tried was when he said, "I think you are harming yourself by focusing so much on how you are different from me. I think you should focus more on how we are similar." Ironically, that was shortly after a positive surprise: I found that talking with him had been helping me deal a little better with the "therapists in my head," and as a result freed up energy for me to implement additional means to deal with my intrusive thoughts and accompanying emotions. I tried to explain (in the next session, after writing out my thoughts to increase the chances that I could articulate them) why I think focusing on differences is so important, giving several examples in my life where that has been the case. But he seemed unresponsive. In a later session, I asked him why he thought I should focus more on similarities. He said it was because he believed in balance. That didn't make sense to me. Overall, my experience with him was the most helpful I have had -- but it was like two steps forward and one backward: I slid backward from the gains I had made, but not entirely. The sliding backward, the loss of the at least somewhat supportive relationship, was very painful, but I did come out with a little less fear of therapists, which enabled me to do more reading about therapy with not as much anxiety, pain, and shame.

Yes, which to me brings a little bit of comfort -- it gives an affirmative "reality check" to my perception that one size does not fit all in therapy and that therefore it is reasonable to (at least try) to tell a therapist when they seem to misunderstand me, and what does and does not work for me.

I'm not entirely convinced that age is always a minor factor, partly since age can influence so many other things. Also, the people who responded were all noticeably younger than I currently am by several years. Thus they come from a different age "cohort" (in particular, are baby boomers, which I am not, and I believe that that is something about me that influenced my experiences in therapy), and also started therapy in a later year, when some changes had begun in the profession.

I'm going to try to assert some boundaries here: I would appreciate the kindness of your not asking me personal questions without a very good reason for knowing the answer and without telling me the reason. I don't like being treated as an object of interest, so your question is de facto asking me to do you a very big favor. It's definitely not supportive; quite the opposite, it is confrontational by way of being intrusive. I don't think you are ill-intended, nor that you intend offense, just that you do not understand where I am coming from -- i.e., inaccurate empathy (which is understandable given what you have said above that shows how we are so different in our emotional histories.) I hope you do not take offense at my response.