Quote:
Originally Posted by sugahorse
I tihnk I may have asked this before:
For what reasons do you go to therapy and what are you hoping to achieve?
I am BP II and struggle with depression mainly - how can I expect my T to help me with this? These are MY emotions and no amount of talking can help what is going on in my head.
I feel like I'm wasting my time in T, as it appears there just is no point.
I have a friend I can talk to and confide in - why then do I need to regurgitate it in T?
T is a lovely person, but from the reading I've done here, a T and their patient need to be emotionally distant from each other (Not sure that made sense, but basically you cannot have social encounters with your T, chat regularly on the phone, become their "friend"...)
I just want someone to care about how I feel - and I'm not sure a T will - but your friend can.
Arg - sorry about the rant. I'm just trying to put the pieces together.
Being depressed, lonely, needy, anxious...are these really things I can expect therapy to help with?
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To me, it's kind of like this. We are born like a blank hard drive. From birth onward we are collecting data like: what our place is in the world, what it is like to be in a relationship with important people (parents), how other people care for us, how we care for others etc. We get "hard-wired" from the start. Then we use this initial data to go on and live our lives, all the while referring back to that original information that we gained early on. But at some point we may realize that our original data is not making a good foundation and is actually causing harm to our system. Maybe the original data contained a lot of viruses that caused original damage. In this analogy, our early relationships help form the hard drive we work from (they are kind of like early external forces). However, sometimes these changes to our "hard drive" from the external forces occur later on caused by trauma and resulting PTSD. Or the changes can occur to our "hard drive" at any time even without
any external forces, rather the forces are
internal like chemical imbalance. Sometimes we have one type, sometimes two, sometimes all three.
So (IMO) a good therapist is there to help us to re-write our hard drive with better software that doesn't shut us down, or cause us damage when we use it. So we can run more smoothly. She or he is there to help us to switch out any fundamental data that is causing us more harm than good.