If truth be told i have probably needed therapy since my late teens but apart from a few short lived abortive attempts have, at the age of almost 51, had little in the way of therapy.

The first two were an absolute disaster(first in my early 40's second mid 40s)with both the therapists adopting a 'If you want to mend the error of your ways' approach as though i was a criminal and recalcitrant as opposed to someone who is fundamentally a good person but handles negative situations in less than constructive ways due to past experiences.
Both were not backward in invalidating my experiences which scarcely helped matters.
Fair enough to say i don't handle certain experiences well but to dismiss them entirely?!

Last year i saw a woman for 'therapy' i put it in brackets as she was not a trained therapist but had been assigned to me as one of the women working in the day centre i attend to help me primarily with 'anxiety' issues.
After a short while she admitted that i had problems that were really beyond her remit (said i needed intensive therapy) and that the best she could do was a 'sticking plaster' job.

Things started off reasonably well but disintegrated when her religious sensibilities(after several sessions she announced she was a member of a 'minority' religious group) clashed with certain things i came out with in order to get to know me better.
Next thing i am told that her workload has had to be reduced and she is no longer seeing me.
A possible replacement fell through due to him being 'booked up'. This was about 6 months ago.

As things are i have had to try and cope with my issues as best i can on my own with friends who have known me online for years saying they have seen comparative 'improvements in me from when they first met me.

That is not to say that things are perfect though indeed far from it.
Sometimes despite my own best efforts not to i end up messing up big time .
What is so distressing at such times is the reaction i get from mental health professionals and often from other mh sufferers who are quick to pick up on any stumbles and falls in a hostilely critical way without taking on board how much of an effort and struggle it can be to have to deal with things on your own or the many times through your own efforts you have not fallen and stumbled' .

Due to social anxiety/phobia and not too good social interaction skills(not good at initiating conversations/ do not find small talk easy/reliant on others to sustain a conversation as opposed to my leading it) i have had very few real life friends (my late wife being an exception) .

However even if i was to overcome these social anxiety/interaction issues for which again little hand on help has ever been given(though the first overt signs of mental health problems were of a socially phobic nature in my early teens) and less fearful/more able to interact with others in real life i am painfully aware that there are 'personality issues' that in themselves would have a negative effect on sustaining friendships with other people namely the tendency to rejection senstivity/paranoia/and what i think would be called 'black and white thinking'/and enotional reactivity.
For example i can really like someone but then they have only got to say something that i construe as being negative or overly critical and i am prone to going into 'Can't trust them.They're no good '
I even had that with the last woman i saw. At first i thought she was great to the point i was thinking she was quite fanciable and worrying i was getting too strong feelings for her.By the end though and not entirely due to her religious persuasions i was a lot less positive about her.
Let's just say she had swung from relative hero to relative zero.