Too sick for therapy?

Does anyone ever feel that they are sick beyond what therapy can help with? I am beginning to really believe this about myself. I think I am just too broken and should quit and accept the sickness and do the best I can instead of burdening other people with my problems.

Roseleigh.. You aren't too far gone, or too broken, or too anything!

Maybe you just aren't ready?

It could be that. I just hold on to the old bad ways of coping so strongly. How do you make yourself want to let that go?

I feel this way, oh, about 100 times a day. This is my go-to hopeless mode as T likes to say. I too feel so broken and so entrenched in my ways and see little hope of changing...all the thoughts you expressed. I think a good therapist can help to keep you moving forward, though I am at a loss on finding that internal driving force for change.

Yes, I often feel I am beyond help and I even think that I bothering my T with my problems and this is why I won't open to her.

My T says it's because we are not allowed to talk or go to anyone as children so this is why we feel the way that we do.

Sometimes. But my T seems confident that he can help. I figure any improvement is better than none, ie not going.

Yup I feel that way also but I will end up dying by my own hand so for me not going is a death sentence. I daydream about how I would be if I quit therapy now. How long would I be able to put the mindful techniques in practice, watching out for cognitive distortions and all the other crap we learn to do? How long before I slip and spiral down?

There are no bad ways of coping, just ways that do not work very well for us anymore. Identifying the situations that cause us to go into such coping behavior is hard! But we have to know what the actual problem is (not just the response) before we can work on it. It takes a long time to identify the problem, then we have to look at all sides of it and see how we want to work with it and then we have to both dismantle the old habits we have of working with that problem and solve the problem and/or figure out better ways of dealing with it now. All of that can take a lot of time and effort.

We don't get through school the first year or even two, but it takes us 12 years. Learning good life skills takes a similar amount of time and if we did not have good teachers in our parents when we were growing up, that just makes the learning more difficult because we have adult things we are doing (making a living, raising a family, etc.) at the same time; it's like going to full-time night school while we work during the day. There's nothing wrong with you, you just have a very difficult task in helping yourself at this time.

It's scary because we get so used to coping in a negative way that it's hard to change. For me, it's realizing that I'm wasting my life by not changing and that I'm giving up the life I should be living. I think about what I'm going to feel like in 10 years if I'm still in the same spot........and then I realize I don't have any more time to mess around. Change has to happen.

I'm sorry to hear that anyone feels they are too sick for therapy. For me it's hard to understand how this could come about even though I've been through years of desperation and hopeless, still I felt that therapy was a positive thing.

I think that time helps with letting things go. But the real motivator in the present is exactly the pain that this clinging to the old ways produces. Once you get so tired of that pain you become willing to do almost anything to let it go. And then change starts to happen.

As soon as you see some important change happening even if small, you realize that larger things are possible. It is always difficult and challenging but it's better than the raw pain of being twisted up in knots. Having someone hold your hand while you try to untie them is just life giving freshness that helps you want to move forward with more change.

Yes. I don't feel therapy can help me, I think it just made me worse.