Stopdog, have you ever just arbitrarily decided you wanted to believe something else, "try it on" and see what happens? As a child, I sometimes would climb on top of my dresser in the bedroom and look at the room from that angle, for example

Perception; this is good/this is bad, empathy is adversarial, the therapist is the enemy; is all ours and can be arbitrary, just based on habit rather than what we might be feeling. It's like what we expect to see and reminds me of those science shows about perception and attention, where they ask you to count how many times a team of 5 bounces basketballs and in the middle a gorilla walks through and you don't see it. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/g...xperiment.html

So, sometimes I just "assume" the opposite of what I am having trouble with, see what things look like from there. I picture my therapist sitting next to me on a bench, like a friend might, instead of across from me like a judge/principal/teacher, etc. It gets much easier for me to talk to the person/T :-) Or I decide the angry person across from me is hungry, or frightened, maybe has too many stresses going on in their life at the moment; make up a story or not about them, and I don't mind their anger so much anymore, I'm better able to think and try to stay calm, reasonable, factual (repetitive in what I am saying so it has a chance to get through the unthinking anger and register with the other person) instead of letting the situation get out of hand.

What if therapy did work for you? What might that look like? What if your therapist (the specific one you see now) were not an enemy but on your side, how might that feel/affect you?