How's therapy supposed to work re awful things that happened in past?

I was recently in therapy but did not feel that I was getting much benefit or that I understood the logic of it.

I suffered emotional abuse as a child and also later was traumatized from being witness to the deterioration and mistreatment of a sibling who went on to develop schizophrenia. I have been on antidepressants since my early teens. My diagnosis was PTSD, depression, and OCD.

So I went for therapy for 2-3 years and at first I was very hopeful but later lost faith in the process. I don't know what I was expecting, but basically the message I got was this:

-Terrible things happened to me, so that's real.
-I am valued (even though I was not treated as if I were).
-Bad things did happen and that was THEN. But this is NOW (though there are no guarantees that bad things or worse things won't happen to me now or in future).
-I have abilities and strengths that I did not have before (though not necessarily helpful in preventing many terrible things that could happen to me).

So based on that I should magically heal and feel empowered and move on!

What am I missing? Because in reality, from being quite anxious at the start of therapy, I have now become quite depressed after end of therapy. I feel like therapy wants to make you forget the past, forget your vulnerabilities.

Because what does it mean to "come to terms" with things? Imagine you're driving and suddenly the pavement cracks and give way and you fall 100 feet, and lose your family in the terrible crash. So therapist says something like: That's sad, cry about it for a year, now get over it, and just remember that that was past and that is not now. But I can't promise you the exact same thing (or something worse) won't happen again either. Just forget about it and focus on good things." WTF?

My feeling is that people who experience trauma or abuse, have seen the terrible side of things, like going to war. Your life will never be the same. Innocence lost. You can never go out and enjoy ice cream or laugh mindlessly or make stupid jokes. Why? Because you realize there is no justice, no fairness, no predictability, no logic to life. A rare virus on that ice cream could kill your friend tomorrow. Or that guy who is laughing hard...he might get diagnosed with deadly cancer and die in 6 weeks. You can stand next to him on his deathbed as he cries or is pale with fear, and what can you say, what can you do?

You can be glad it's not you, as if life is a wild psychotic beast that randomly eats people, babies, old, young, pretty, ugly, any time of day or night, will even come to your safe home and make you sick with a virus and make you suffer and kill you. That's life. People who don't see it like that are deluded. They don't know there is blood under their pretty skins. I don't know how anybody is helped with therapy unless therapy is about rebuilding walls of denial. You can't "get past" old wounds or human beings' fragile existence, as if they were hallucinations. They are real.

It sounds like you're still in a dark place, and maybe the work is not done yet. A persistent negative cognition is one of the symptoms of PTSD, that imbalance you talk about, that feeling of life as a psychotic beast, I've been through that in my PTSD too. But part of the healing has been able to process more so that I see a more balanced view. No, never the same, I'll never be the same, but I see the bane and blessing of it, not just the curse. I definitely know that sense of life as "nasty, brutish and short" but also the other half of it. So, my therapy wasn't about building walls of denial, but about feeding the part of me starved for beauty, meaning, relationship... those things that balance the darkness.

PTSD can definitely take more than 2-3 years to work through and I wonder if it was time for you to reevaluate with your therapist, see a new one, or take a break and then maybe start another round of the work.

I'll tell you: I did one round when I was a teenager, before I even knew what I had, and found it helpful, but when my life changed 20 years later, I had a relapse and brought new things into focus and this second round has been powerfully healing. Healing is cyclical, my therapist says, so that, perhaps, is my answer to your question of how it's supposed to work on terrors from the past.... healing in stages, circling back to events and finding new perspective, making meaning, not erasing, not rewriting, but holding and coming to terms with, creating a sense of proportion and balance and increasing the capacity for happiness.

Looking for therapy or a therapist to be logical is an exercise in frustration for me. I believe therapy could be logical but have not found a therapist who could manage it.

It sounds like you were pressured to move on too fast. It takes more than a year to "get over it", and honestly, you never fully do. It will always be there, and you will always remember. And you know what? That's okay. It's normal to still have those feelings. Therapy really should have given you the tools to acknowledge those feelings when they come up and to be honest and vulnerable with them, and then to know what to do to move through them. The work isn't done when you quit therapy. You just have the tools to be able to do the work yourself.

Partless – I feel you.

I’ve given up the idea that the therapeutic process is all of a sudden going to give me a bright and sunny outlook on life, or that I’m going to feel better about the past. Actually, in the year I’ve been in therapy, it’s been a tumultuous rollercoaster, and I feel worse in some ways. What therapy DOES give me is a place to go to that’s supportive and caring, when these horrible things do happen again. I’m not sure if that’s the idea of therapy… I’ve hear others here musing about internalizing your therapist so you don’t need to go anymore, but I honestly don’t know. I plan to keep going until someone tells me to stop.

I was physically beaten and sexually abused as a child, and suffered an attack during college where I was held at gunpoint and nearly died. I understand what you mean by life never being the same and having one's innocence lost.

There's nothing anyone can say to "snap" anyone out of the place where you can't see the goodness that life has to offer. I went on to advanced education, a meaningful and fulfilling career, a long term marriage, children, and a happy family life. I have good friends, a nice home, and looking forward to retirement in about 15 years. So the point is you move forward from your trauma. If you're lucky, you see how it shaped you in positive ways, giving you the ability to act swiftly and surely in a crisis or not being afraid to stand up for others who are being bullied. Maybe it gave you an emotional range deeper and more sensitive than most people's, which makes you a good listener and a good friend. Maybe it made you a better parent, because you're more attuned to what your kids need rather than yourself.

For me, all these things happened. I couldn't really tell you how. It's not that I had some magic thought that turned my life into something good. I can say that I used therapy to point me in the direction of where I wanted to go, but I was only able to do that once I'd understood where I'd been. I spent many years in therapy, much of that time in trauma focused work, detailing what I'd been through and seeing how it still lived in me, how I was still affected by it. I worked at living in the now, and not being reactive to what was in my past.

So I think how it's supposed to work is that you end up working towards your future. You appreciate that there is more to life than what happened to you in the past.