I feel the same way.

I was hospitalized for 11 months when I was a teenager with anorexia nervosa. When I went home I continued “not eating” until one night, feeling terrible from the near starvation, I finally realized that not eating was a dead end road. Literally. And that mattered somehow.

I don’t think therapy itself made the difference but having my disorder recognized and, as things turned out, getting away from my family for 11 months probably did. Anorexia is definitely hard to explain to someone who has not had it. It’s irrational but can be very deadly.

Nevertheless, I’ve still had problems off and on for more than 50 years. When my late husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness I definitely felt I would need help to readjust. Did not find help, fell apart, was blamed and shamed by therapists. But in a fallen apart state where else could I turn but to continue to try to therapy? I definitely considered that voluntarily leaving life would be the most rational thing but I didn’t think I could convince my adult children of that. So I put that idea aside. Ten painful years later I still think that was the most rational thing I could have done. But it’s not over until it’s over.

Six years ago I was diagnosed with DDNOS (now probably OSDD) and PDNOS. It had always been recognized that there was some trauma in my background but the depth of the trauma had not been explored or treated. I didn’t consciously know about it either because of the dissociation.

Fortunately my trauma therapy has been mostly successful. But trying to become my own person at 69 is still extraordinarily difficult. Plus, there are all those lost years when therapists didn’t get it and I was clueless.

The right kind of person for therapy? No, the question needs to be how the therapy profession, university departments of psychology, or maybe the NIMH (here in the US) can develop and provide the right kind of therapy for distressed and disordered people that show up at the doors of clinics and therapists’ offices. Including sometimes telling people they have something the therapist doesn’t know how to help with and that therapy itself can entail some very big risks.