I was recently in therapy but did not feel that I was getting much benefit or that I understood the logic of it.

I suffered emotional abuse as a child and also later was traumatized from being witness to the deterioration and mistreatment of a sibling who went on to develop schizophrenia. I have been on antidepressants since my early teens. My diagnosis was PTSD, depression, and OCD.

So I went for therapy for 2-3 years and at first I was very hopeful but later lost faith in the process. I don't know what I was expecting, but basically the message I got was this:

-Terrible things happened to me, so that's real.
-I am valued (even though I was not treated as if I were).
-Bad things did happen and that was THEN. But this is NOW (though there are no guarantees that bad things or worse things won't happen to me now or in future).
-I have abilities and strengths that I did not have before (though not necessarily helpful in preventing many terrible things that could happen to me).

So based on that I should magically heal and feel empowered and move on!

What am I missing? Because in reality, from being quite anxious at the start of therapy, I have now become quite depressed after end of therapy. I feel like therapy wants to make you forget the past, forget your vulnerabilities.

Because what does it mean to "come to terms" with things? Imagine you're driving and suddenly the pavement cracks and give way and you fall 100 feet, and lose your family in the terrible crash. So therapist says something like: That's sad, cry about it for a year, now get over it, and just remember that that was past and that is not now. But I can't promise you the exact same thing (or something worse) won't happen again either. Just forget about it and focus on good things." WTF?

My feeling is that people who experience trauma or abuse, have seen the terrible side of things, like going to war. Your life will never be the same. Innocence lost. You can never go out and enjoy ice cream or laugh mindlessly or make stupid jokes. Why? Because you realize there is no justice, no fairness, no predictability, no logic to life. A rare virus on that ice cream could kill your friend tomorrow. Or that guy who is laughing hard...he might get diagnosed with deadly cancer and die in 6 weeks. You can stand next to him on his deathbed as he cries or is pale with fear, and what can you say, what can you do?

You can be glad it's not you, as if life is a wild psychotic beast that randomly eats people, babies, old, young, pretty, ugly, any time of day or night, will even come to your safe home and make you sick with a virus and make you suffer and kill you. That's life. People who don't see it like that are deluded. They don't know there is blood under their pretty skins. I don't know how anybody is helped with therapy unless therapy is about rebuilding walls of denial. You can't "get past" old wounds or human beings' fragile existence, as if they were hallucinations. They are real.