Quote:
Originally Posted by Parva
I've been in therapy for over three years; c-PTSD, childhood trauma, blah blah blah. Things just seem to get worse and worse as I go through all this. Transference, flashbacks, my relationship with my T has become unpredictable.
I don't see how my T is supposed to help me anymore, but there's no way I'd start this whole process over again. So I'm stuck spiraling downward. I feel hopeless and meaningless. I feel like a therapeutic failure. Everything we talk about, I feel, or she says turns into something bad. I am completely emotionally and mentally unbalanced, where before therapy, I was a functioning member of the high tech world.
My T repeats the mantra from Psych 101 - talk about it. talk about it. talk about it....I know not all therapeutic courses of treatment have positive outcomes, but I'm starting to feel like mine is having a decidedly bad result. But at the same time, the thought of leaving my T leaves me in even worse shape.
There is a part of me that's angry over this - like I got worse, so now I'm stuck because I would literally die if I stopped. If I knew back then what I know now, I think I would have just kept ignoring the pain and soldiered on.
I guess I don't really have a question in all this. I'm just hoping someone can say with honesty that it will be ok.
|
I can relate to therapy making you feel worse. With my first T I seemed to go on a downward spiral, I went from being someone who was living with stability to someone who sobbed daily, and had periods of distress where it was really hard to function, I had three periods like this that lasted for a few days, prompted by the therapy, I stopped after the last one as I felt that I couldn't carry on working if I carried on with her. With me, my therapy never felt 'right'. I talked about it quite a lot on here, and tried to with my T. Among other things I think my T was a terrible listener and talked too much herself. I have a new therapist and it is early days yet to see if the same thing will happen to me with this therapist, but I don't think it will, she is so much more responsive to me. One of her gentle suggestions to me is that we explore how I came to feel the way I did with my last therapist. I'm presuming she has suggested this so that we can understand it and avoid it. I have similar feelings coming up, but she helps me to feel them with her, it's completely different to how it was with the other T. My therapy with her feels right.
I think that something to consider is whether your therapy is 'right', but is just difficult, but will be worthwhile in the end, or whether it is going wrong, and will not help you. I really struggled with answering this question when I was seeing my ex-T. I think it is a really difficult question to find the answer to.