My first round of therapy made me worse. I was totally retraumatized. I just dove into a whole treasury of traumatic memories and had absolutely no way of coping with them, and my therapist’s orientation didn’t allow him to offer me any ideas about how to deal with them. He repeatedly pointed out how hard I was working, so not being dedicated enough to the task was clearly not my problem, and he seemed a little freaked out about about the state I was getting into.

I am so grateful I found my current therapist, who has a lot of strong opinions about the necessity for therapy to actually be helpful and also the potential for harm when a therapist doesn’t know what they are doing.