Yes, there has to be some kind of feedback! I like the way you described how a person could ask questions, questions that were designed actually to obtain information!

I am going to post something here that I composed yesterday, to try to explain what I want, but don't expect ever to find:

Since I talk about therapists who do not seem to know clearly what it is that they do, I no doubt will be asked what I want in a therapist or helper of any kind. I am going to follow something that I read a long time ago, in a description of a therapy, but I will use my own words. The therapy I read about took place in an inpatient setting, so it did not have to deal with artificial limitations such as 45- or 50-minute sessions once a week or so. It could concentrate on what the patients needed, rather than on schedules which have become accepted practice -- even though those might make therapy much longer and much more difficult than otherwise might be the case. Incidentally, this therapy was reported to be the only one for which the patients, when surveyed, said they had been cured. It took maybe twenty sessions over several weeks, sessions which lasted usually several hours. (I think the lessons of this therapy could be applied to other situations, however.)

The therapy sessions were normally initiated soon after the patient woke up -- at a time when she was somewhat calmer and more favorably inclined to the therapy. Otherwise the therapist should try to first establish a calm state by taking actions (not just making claims) so the patient could comprehend that she was safe.

The therapist would start a session by asking the patient to enter a state of watchful self-observation, to report to the therapist on what she observed internally, and to avoid worry about what society or other people would think about what she observed. The therapy consisted of a dialog in which the patient continued to report, with occasional encouragement from the therapist not to judge, but to continue to report. If the patient became agitated or wandered off the track of observing and reporting about what was happening inside, the therapist would gently push her in the direction of calm observation and reporting. This was virtually his entire role: not to comment, not to judge, not to correct. He was there to reassure the patient that reporting everything she observed was the course to take, and to reassure her that that was safe.

As I said, sessions in the therapy I am writing about typically seemed to take a couple of hours, during which the patient was encouraged to reflect on what was happening inside her, and to report. Over the course of these sessions, the patients became calmer and were able to report more and more. They themselves began to remember more, and began to change. Once changes began, those started to become more rapid, until quite a full relief from symptoms occurred -- often quite quickly. The patients achieved, towards the end of the course of treatment, the ability to reassure themselves (rather than having to rely on the therapist always to do it). With the aid of the therapist during these weeks the therapy did not turn into a long stretch of "advance and fall back", but each session built upon the previous ones, until stability was achieved.

Afterwards the patients themselves, in a survey judged that they were cured. The therapy was reported to achieve something like an 80% success rate.

It feels to me as though this is the kind of therapy that would work for me. However, I do not know of anyone who does anything like this, or anyone who I think would even understand it and why it works. I expect only objections -- why it cannot be done. I think this therapy and how and why it worked has been virtually lost to the profession.

What happens to me, in almost any kind of interaction with other people, but certainly has always happened in therapy situations, is that instead of getting moved gently towards a stabler, more reassuring condition, exactly the opposite happens. I always get diverted from what feels like a truer "me" to a state of loss and confusion. This seems not be be recognized by anyone I know; in fact I don't even know anyone who cares. That is what happened in my first therapy: instead of moving towards a more rewarding state, my therapist "pushed" me towards instability, confusion, and increasing panic. And he would not recognize that he was doing anything wrong. I have never been able to get anyone else to understand what I am talking about. I have tried. I am unwilling to continue to beg for someone to listen.