Thanks for your support here today.
Yes, my experiences with therapists are blended with frustration and disappointment as well. But now when I´m more lonely after leaving my counselor two months ago I think about moments in therapy when some of the therapists said something nice, I imagine being in their offices and so on. I can still remember how the office of my first therapist seven years ago looked like.
I can´t even imagine losing a person in such a way and after such a long time, I though understand it must have left a huge void. I guess those therapists weren´t at all good at helping you in your grief, many of them just looks for medical reasons and want quick solutions and that doesn´t work when it comes to grief.
I totally agree one shouldn´t identlify as a mental health patient just because you need some help during a period of time. I think mental health care staff should look upon their patients as humans first and foremost, not people who are "damaged".
I think I´ve learned about myself and a lot about psychology, psychotherapy and mental health care during the years I´ve met with counselors and therapists. But as my health has deteriorated rather than improved during the years I understand it´s more or less hopeless when I can´t pay for therapy myself and just choose whom I need to see.
There are no support groups I know of in my area where I could talk about what I need to talk about, how I feel and so on. There are a lot of meet-ups in different forms but not for getting support on what I need.
Quote:
Originally Posted by here today
Hi Sarah,
I think you expressed your wish very, very well. I can really relate to your sense of loss, even though my memory of experiences with therapists are more of frustration and disappointment than fondness.
The wish to belong – and the absence of belonging – are very real to me, too. I was married for 24 years to a man whom I loved, and I believed he loved me. He felt like my soul mate and I think it may have been that way for him, too. We belonged, together. But then he died.
And the lack of a sense of belonging with any anyone else was terrifyingly present. I had adapted to my family by meeting the expectation of others. Psychologists had suggested that they were fake – but I really didn’t see it. I didn’t have a non-fake reference point (besides my late husband and we are/were both a bit off the beaten track) and the years of therapy didn’t help much with that. Yes, I dug some up feelings and long-buried emotions – but then what?
In order to belong, one needs a social environment to belong IN. Yes, there are some things on the client’s end that perhaps are needed, too – but it’s not something that can be clearly enunciated to us by therapists, and the methods they currently have to try to help us “get it”, or something, certainly didn’t work for me. So then, I had a repeat – the social environment of mental health care is not one in which I belong, as a human being, either. As a “mental patient”, perhaps, but that’s not really belonging, as a human being.
It’s an extraordinarily difficult dilemma. One in which illusion and fantasy can seem better than nothing at all.
It may be very cold comfort, but it sounds like you may know some things about yourself that you didn't years ago. You might have learned them without therapy, or maybe have learned other things or more. But that's not what happened.
Can you think of a way that you can use what you now know about yourself to try to find ways where you might build a sense of (real) belonging? What has worked ( a little bit) for me is support groups -- but I tried bunches of them over the last 20 years. Some of them helped, some didn't, some were fantasies, too. So maybe you can think of another route which might work for you?
We all belong -- BECAUSE WE ARE HERE. But sometimes it's hard to feel that way, and also that may not be the way other people look at it and there's nothing you can do about them.
|