Quote:
Originally Posted by AppalachianAxis
My old therapist might have been trying to move towards just what you suggest. She was trying for cognitive behavioral therapy with me. Having me try to analyse the ins and outs of why I viewed my own sexuality with such disdain. It didn't help all too much, though I suppose it was better than nothing. ...
I just don't know what to do anymore. My new therapist is a few twigs short of a full branch. The whole medication thing was the most sound of her many far-fetched solutions. She's just not trying to understand how this affects me on more than a superficial level. As such, I won't be seeing more after my next session.
Maybe I'll find a better therapist, maybe I won't. And I'm still in the exact same limbo I was years ago.  |
Thinking more about it... the therapist is not qualified to offer the medication route - she does not have the credentials/license to practice medicine that would give rights to prescribe. So, she is basically conjecturing. And, I agree with you, is being superficial.
It would take a lot of fine-tuning to find a drug for you that would fit the bill without causing intolerable side effects. The thing is, modern psychiatry is still a shot in the dark. there is some research that is promising to predict response to medications based on some tests, possibly genetic, but this is all in an exploratory phase. In practical terms, it is still a shot in the dark, EVEN a propos of intended effects of medication. She is suggesting that you take medications hoping to "luck out" on "catching" a libido lessening side effect. And, in the process, not "catching" anything else objectionable.
And the chances of all of that happening exactly as she plans are... not zero, but close to zero.
Plus, medications would need to be tried and tested and possibly changed until you arrive at the station she envisions for you. So you would spend a lot of time in that process, hoping to get results but not getting them immediately.
To sum up, I think that the therapist dodges the issue because she is not competent enough to deal with your level of complexity.
Being not competent enough is not a crime, per se, if one acknowledges that one is not competent enough.
It seems that she tries to cover up her incompetence by coming up with the medication route solution. I think she did a disservice to you by creating the hope for the medication route - in reality, it seems that the medication route is a chimera, or, at least a last resort measure after psychological approaches have been all exhausted to no avail.
So if that chimera was the MOST sound of her far-fetched approaches, then after about those LESS sound proposals she came up?..
There are a lot of approaches that are neither CBT nor medications. Have you tried those? CBT+medications do not exhaust the list. Are you in UK? I think CBT is provided by the NHS.