Therapy makes me feel like a wind-up doll...

This was frequently my experience. The way therapy is "dosed" has always felt unnatural and problematic to me. Looking back I think each time I left a session feeling exposed and taken apart, then left alone with painful feelings, I felt slightly traumatized.

And I cant help but think of the analogous situation where the therapy relationship ends completely, and the client is not sufficiently put back together.

This was frequently my experience. The way therapy is "dosed" has always felt unnatural and problematic to me. Looking back I think each time I left a session feeling exposed and taken apart, then left alone with painful feelings, I felt slightly traumatized.

And I cant help but think of the analogous situation where the therapy relationship ends completely, and the client is not sufficiently put back together.

What I bolded here is how I feel sometimes. I am working with my T to not feel like this.

I feel like this too. I feel so vulnerable and fragile lately that it's even worse. Sometimes I leave the hospital where I see her and walk through the mall to get to the subway, and have to stop and hide in a public bathroom to cry and put my head down. I feel so overwhelmed and exhausted... And therapy itself is scary. Hugs.

Im sorry its scary and hard for you as well. There are times I get very overwhelmed. I think you are strong and making progress. Sending you big hugs!

Does anyone ever get the feeling that therapy kind of breaks down what I strongly suspect one's therapist would call 'defences' and makes you aware of a whole lot of pain, and then (because that cannot feasibly be dealt with in one hour) just sends you out into the world to be crazy for a week?

I'm finding therapy to be quite a disruptive influence, because one hour is not even remotely close enough time to really have any kind of a conversation, or really resolve anything at all, and more often than not what happens is I end up emotionally wrecked by the time the hour comes around and then I just have to leave.

And then what? You're just supposed to go back to your everyday activities while it feels like you're in agony?

It bothers me how there's supposed to be this 'team' element in therapy between client and therapist, but the therapist gets to basically spend one hour, keep their sense of self entirely intact, while you get taken apart like some kind of badly made lego toy and left to limp home at the end of it :/

Thank you!!! It's scary and hard, esp after the relationship I had with the last one.

We had a session a few weeks ago where I thought she was getting rid of me and all I could do was cry the whole time. It was hard to even look at her, I kept looking at the floor. After that one I stayed in the bathroom stall for 5 hours. A little bit nutty.

You're working so hard! I think maybe you should try to give yourself a little credit for this. (Though I don't know if that helps or not Therapy does seem to make life harder than it was before, because instead of just getting through the day, you have to do all the normal things while simultaneously carrying all the emotions that were dredged up in therapy. It's rough.

One thing I do like about this one -- and maybe it's because she works in outpatient psychiatry -- is that she does help me deal with things in my life and find ways to try to help me deal with them better concretely and to keep myself safe. This is way more helpful for me right now than endlesa dredging for seemingly no purpose. That's how I felt with the last one. It's like talking about my pain grew more pain and it broke me, and then she broke me. And, for what? To leave me heartbroken and struggling? Bad therapy is scary.

Thanks for your nice words though! Sometimes the idea of getting better scares me, which makes no sense, but it does.

Thank you!!! It's scary and hard, esp after the relationship I had with the last one.

We had a session a few weeks ago where I thought she was getting rid of me and all I could do was cry the whole time. It was hard to even look at her, I kept looking at the floor. After that one I stayed in the bathroom stall for 5 hours. A little bit nutty.