I Don't Know How To Cope

I think it's obvious that I'm furious and probably hurt that the program didn't help me as hoped, especially because the year ahead will be terrifying. But I also don't have time to worry about this **** anymore, time is moving on and I'm not getting left behind anymore. I'll destroy anyone who gets in my way.

P.S. I tolerate your spirituality, or whatever it is (seeing as Buddhism isn't really a religion but rather a lifestyle), but that sort of mindset doesn't apply to me. I understand the principle that balance is important, but that is what I am trying to achieve through mental, physical and emotional excellence and success. Beyond that, it's not something I could take seriously.

Ultimately I just wanted something that helps me deal/manage when my emotions get out of hand and that was what they promised me, so I feel my frustration with them is valid.

Yes I'm making assumptions, forgive me if some were wrong.

If you think DBT might help you and it's just been the course with your psychologists that failed to work, then you might want to try a bit harder with the mindfulness bit of it. In which case the most affordable, yet not even that spiritual and in many places quite sober alternative to another DBT course might be a Theravadin Buddhist meditation retreat.

Good courses don't force you to believe anything, they just want to help you to practise mindfulness. Though meditation courses didn't free me of my personality disorder, they definitely helped me cope.

Anyway, I hope you will get better

You just have to do the skills A LOT and practically every day. It has not helped me much and I feel frustrated with therapy too. Every therapy session my therapist just wants me to write out my thoughts and behaviors and I'm just like I know them already. I know I'm not doing what aligns with my values all the time. But there's something deeper to it, you know. I feel like she won't go deeper and just wants to drill these simple, often unhelpful skills into my head. What medications have you tried? Personally I don't really like that route but I do have to take them unfortunately.

Until now I only read a book on DBT and my experience is limited to mindfulness practice. There was an interesting thread on this subject lately on this forum, I'll put a link here if I can find it later. Mindfulness practice doesn't work for everyone, and even those who benefit can't always apply it, speaking of myself.

With a couple of days of intensive practice I could concentrate on my breathing, or on my legs moving and the feeling of my feet touching the ground, and be happy. I need to be in the right mood for it, but if I am, just practicing mindfulness can make me happy. For me this ability came on the third day of intense practice under retreat conditions, and I think it's well possible to miss out on this aspect of the practice during a course with psychologists.

A 10 day course in Thailand cost me $50 in total ($5 per day), accommodation and good food included. They had a British monk as a teacher, incredibly good value because Buddhists have it the teaching needs to be given for free, though some might consider 30mins of daily mantras as a hidden fee

You didn't mention learning distress tolerance in DBT. That's what helped me when my mind is out of hand. If they only taught you emotion regulation and interpersonal relationships, then that's like two legs of a three-legged stool.

I'm also not a fan of meds, But, I've been on a bunch since I was a teen - the most recent I've tried was Urbanol. Most meds have either no effect on me at all (which was the result of Urbanol) or they make me even more dysfunctional, like I have no energy, I become constipated, I become moody, I become listless, I hallucinate (that one was kinda cool), I become manic, or I become fuzzy (like I don't register the world around me anymore). But those were just a few, most of them had no effect what-so-ever.

I started experiencing that in week 8 of the 10 week program I was in, and I haven't been able to recreate it and experience it again outside of hospital. Meditation and mindfulness had become intensely frustrating and aggravating for me.

No, we did learn distress tolerance, I'm sorry I didn't mention it - I just found it the least helpful. I have a distress tolerance box, but when I am in distress it's absolutely useless.

The distress tolerance doesn't actually distract me most of the time, and even if I manage to distract myself the feeling never gets resolved so it just keeps repeating until distraction is no longer effective. In terms of self-soothing, there is nothing they taught me that allows me to self-sooth at all. I can't eat to self sooth because I'm obese already and I can't employ sex to self-sooth because sex causes me other emotional problems and just makes the situation worse. Other crap like staring into a candle flame just makes me angry, if anything, it elevates the bad feeling. "Improving the moment" doesn't help either, because it's theory is based on the idea that "I should feel good because others are probably worse off than me" - which is a ****ing disgusting mentality, so that obviously doesn't work.

I'm extremely frustrated. I've given up on psychology all together and have accepted it to be a collection of pseudo-science ********ers just ********ting for cash because they can easily manipulate people into thinking their theories are somehow real science.

The only reason I still come here, to this site, is because many people here have similar problems to me and I'm hoping that in some random spurt of luck someone ends up solving one of their own problems with a solution that I can also apply to one of my problems. Plus, I see worth in asking advice from people who are roughly in the same boat as me - that makes sense to me.