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I, too, didn’t have a choice. My parents took me in for MH treatment for an eating disorder (starving myself close to death) when I was a teen-ager. I left that therapy better than I went in and accepted my “mental patient” status. That was in 1963 and it wasn’t the same then – Freudian analysis was in vogue then.
In recent years not so, of course. And since the underlying traumatic incidents had been discussed in my early therapy, I did not know that they had not really been resolved. They didn’t know much about trauma treatment 50 years ago. And I could not know what I did not know, either about treatment or about my dissociated emotions.
Unfortunately, nobody can know what they do not know, including therapists.
To people who have tried to get effective treatment for years and years – I got to my current therapist because a SUPPORT GROUP friend recognized my dissociative symptoms. She recommended that I consult a trauma specialist whom she knew. Many, many lesser-experienced therapists had not recognized the problem, even at the best psychiatric hospital in my area. So if you’ve had any trauma at all in your background and regular therapy hasn’t worked, please consider going to a trauma specialist. Re-experiencing and re-owning parts of me that experienced trauma has made a really big difference in my life. Very, very painful and disorienting sometimes but ultimately effective.
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