Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
About the only thing of value I got from therapy was the motivation to stop caring once and for all about the opinions and advice of other people, and to stop asking for it. Conveniently, this (and other factors) made therapy irrelevant.
Advice and opinions are about the giver. It's a way to feel less empty and invisible for a few minutes. Therapists have made a career out of this.
For me progress was when I stopped asking therapists and others what went wrong in my f-d up therapy, and started telling them. I sorted it out thru self-analysis and reading up on the cult of therapy. And I stopped worshipping fake authority and fake gurus.
Now I see the assessments and opinions of the therapists i consulted with as rather pathetic. The therapist who was in the room had a badly distorted almost cartoonish interpretation of events. Many people I solicited feedback from online likewise fed me a lot of insane nonsense.
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Sadly, my experience was like yours (and the OP’s).
My therapist inserted herself as an important person in my psyche and then destroyed it. The self-clean-up afterwards is what turned on that light for me. When I could accept the devastation related to my “unimportant status” to my important person, and I could also accept all of her judgment, rejection and hostility, I was freed. The worst had happened. I survived. Nobody else in my everyday life could ever descimate me in such a raw, straight-to-the-core manner - so I had nothing left to be afraid of.
A year later, I view my former therapist as narcissistic, incompetent and broken. And actually, quite monstrous for accepting none of the responsibility for therapy failure and letting me take on all the blame and shame. All the while, accepting upwards of six-figures of cash from me over an 8 year span. In many ways I do feel like someone who escaped a cult, and all the toxic mentality that went with it. I can’t relate at all to the desperate and grasping person I used to be. I’m now someone who refutes “the joys of submitting to the master”. I too no longer crumble at the negative opinions of others - and tell, rather than ask.
I think an experience like mine (ours?) could only come from “therapy gone wrong” - so perhaps it was successful after all.
OP - keep plugging away. You’re doing the work with or without your therapist.