Yes, I have had therapy that made me feel worse and what I have learned about that is that the therapists that I felt that way with were failing me. Trauma work takes time and a therapist simply cannot push a patient beyond what that patient is ready to do.

I have noticed that you have slowly been gaining Trace, and I can see you are trying very hard. You have been working on trying to understand the challenge itself and how your symptoms are part of the challenge and what that means. You have a tremendous amount of trauma in your history, so you are simply not going to recover from that "quickly". The point is that you have been making progress, and if you struggle then you need to slow down and a therapist needs to understand that. If a therapist gets impatient, then that doesn't mean "you" are failing. It's clear that you are working at this, you are reading and learning and you have been gaining. Healing simply doesn't happen over night, especially when there is a history that has a lot of challenge in it that one is just finally sitting and "slowly" looking at.

You were always strong minded and outgoing despite the dysfunction you grew up in. You did not "fail" at life either, you managed to survive a lot and you were incredibly strong. You don't have to ever let go of that strength you had in your past either. Think of it this way, you had to cut a path through very difficult terrain in your life, and you did move forward and you did that better than a lot of other people would have too.

You experienced a major trauma and it's going to take you time to mourn and heal from that.