PC has been a sounding board for me, especially over the last year, and I have felt accepted and supported -- or at least not rejected -- here. As I've indicated before, I DID feel rejected by my last therapist, a feeling that was traumatically difficult for me, and I believe that feeling eventually got connected with feelings that were cut off when I was a child.

I had been in therapy off and on for more than 50 years, almost continuously in the last 20 when my late husband was diagnosed with a terminal disease. When it didn't work, despite my best efforts, research, interviewing therapists, I got actively negative, not just jaded.

It may well be that a need for me to process dissociated and confused negative feelings -- and to work through a negative transference, maybe -- had been an issue all along, which I couldn't completely understand because, of course, some of those feelings were unconscious or dissociated. I intellectually suspected it and told my last therapist that I thought that I was having negative transference toward her but then -- the depth and intensity of my hatred, I guess it was -- she couldn't tolerate. Six years into a therapy, the last 3 I paid out-of-pocket because my insurance changed -- and we get to the core of my issues and she can't tolerate them!! Jaded is not really the way I felt.

She offered some referrals. But I don't really have another 6 or 7 or even 5 years to devote to the mythical therapy "journey".

Fortunately, the last therapist had helped enough with some other issues of dissociation, and I had developed some other sources of support, that I think I may be going to be OK, or as OK as one might reasonably expect at my age.

Overall, I "believed" in therapy -- now see that as an idealization in many respects. But that's not something I could see at the time.

I still "believe" in therapy -- with some enormous reservations. Trying to find a "good fit" with a therapist is a farce -- it can take years or never. But . . .I almost starved myself to death when I was a teen-ager and without therapy -- or the 11 months in a psych hospital away from my family -- it probably could have been worse for me.

Not that there haven't been many years when I was very ready to pack it all in, wishing that law and custom allowed a "walk-in" clinic at the funeral home.

For me, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the issues when my last therapy ended a year ago. Plus, fortunately, my last therapist has been willing to engage in some occasional email and snail mail contacts so that, now, I don't need her or hate her quite so badly. So, writing here and having some other just general acceptance and support from some in-person groups seems to have made the difference.

Time will tell. I may yet get well and write a book. Or just continue to post here when I feel like it.

I hope this helps you some, Calilady. Hanging on by a thread -- is a thread! Mine seemed to break a couple of times this last year but somehow, maybe, it grew back. Things feel a little stronger than that, now. Though who knows what tomorrow will bring.