When what doesn't kill you hurts you

I hate my therapist - he is such a ****. I hate therapy; I hate the process; I hate how flawed and damaged I am - I hate feeling the feelings that working through intense emotions elicits. I hate how a tough therapy session opens old wounds and tears my insides; how it triggers deep seated insecurities; and, how when i come home I am left with a bunch of loose ends - battle scars that come from my therapist breaking my defenses; and finally, on recognizing how lonely the process of therapy ultimately is.

I hear you. I've been there. Just know that it does get better.
I remember feeling all of these emotions you mention a few months ago.
It is confusing and i know how much of a struggle it is for you now.

I was working against a timer though so the situation may be different.

Keep going. As they say in therapy... The only way out is through!

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You can stop therapy if you want to.

Or, another perspective:

Everyone has wounds. Therapy capitalizes on those wounds by magnifying them and making them the center of your experience. Feelings are not 'worked through', they're physiological responses. They rise and they fall, and they are always, always increased by fixating on them.

The only way out DEFINITELY isn't 'through' (if that were an apt metaphor for how feelings work, which it isn't). That's how you end up in decades of therapy.

Firing your therapist and returning to a life without therapy is absolutely an option. The world will not fall apart without therapy. In fact, for a lot of people, the sheer relief and reduction in stress is tangible in their lives.

It's easy to get caught in a therapy trap.

Here's how that works:

You have a problem, and people tell you therapy will help. So you go to therapy.

The therapist sets about digging for traumas and wounds. You experience a welling of anxiety and misery accompanied by an odd feeling that the therapist can 'do' something about them. (They can't.)

The therapist tells you that you've been repressing these feelings which have to be 'worked through'. Therapist encourages you to experience every horrible thing that ever happened over and over again and to have a whole lot of feelings about it. Therapist tells you that you never experienced these feelings properly in the past. (You probably did.)

This makes you feel bad. Feeling bad horrifies and scares you and makes you think you need more therapy.

Cue endless loop where therapy makes you feel bad things, so you think you need therapy to stop feeling bad things.

Seriously, you can just walk away from this nonsense. I've not seen many people who subscribe to the 'I just need to work through all this' theory actually leave therapy in a good place, or leave therapy at all.

The only way out is through. You can leave if you want to. Hmmm, interesting. I'm so sorry you are hurting so badly. Are you left alone for a week to try to deal with all of this on your own? I guess you could leave therapy if you wanted to but I also agree that hurting is necessary on the path to healing, though where that belief comes from is a mystery, I just always believed it deep down. I am not looking forward to going through it though and think that I sometimes shut off, close the routes etc to avoid the hard emotions that I really want to feel. You are brave for going through this. Maybe reading some 'success' stories might help you want to continue.

I totally get this. It is lonely. A therapist who leaves you hanging for the week after stirring things up like that, with no plans in place or ways to cope, can make things a lot worse than they already would be. I have had some of those. The one I have now does not do this kind of thing, but it's still hard. If I were you, I would seriously consider looking for a more supportive therapist, or one who can help you work out ways to cope during the week and build on that over time.

The flip side is.....what was so awful before therapy for us, that we entered this process.

Very true Mouse. For me it was that I was on the brink of selling everything I could to raise enough money for a plane ticket to anywhere that I could get my hands on enough drugs that I could end my days stoned out of my head and at the mercy of con men, thieves and generally terrible people. I was so on the edge that I had to do something pretty drastic to stop myself. That something was Therapy and, now, I can see a better way. I am back to functioning and have even started living a little which is pretty good considering the spiral I was in.

Yes, it is hard work sometimes but it really is our choice whether we continue or not. If it is doing more harm than good then I would probably leave. If it is doing more good than harm, despite the hard times, then stay. I am so sorry you are hurting though, it really isn't pleasant. You ate not alone. Keep posting and hopefully you can find some support here.

There's certainly some truth in this. Much more than I wish there was! However, like others here, my life simply was not worthwhile before I entered treatment. Perhaps there are other effective ways of dealing with the original presenting problems but I know that for me I absolutely needed an empathetic and non judgmental ear as part of the process.

I don't think the answer usually lies in either extreme of doubling down or leaving. But there needs to be a sufficient structure in therapy and alliance with your T that despite pain, you never feel left alone with that pain. It sounds like neither are strong enough for the level of pain you're experiencing. What you feel outside of therapy very much depends upon what happens inside therapy. So what needs to happen within the therapy to modulate what you feel outside of it?

I never felt as though my T was "breaking" my defenses--that sounds like a therapy moving too forcefully. But when my pain was acute, my T was more available to me. If my functioning suggested I was becoming overwhelmed, my T would slow things down. Generally, he let me set the pace, but sometimes he would defer getting into something if he believed I wasn't strong enough to pursue it. Are there things your T could do, or not do, that would help you to feel more in control? Can you talk to him about it?

My T was right out of a nightmare. He manipulated everyone around me. What kind of an idiot does something like that? He placated me while knowing, KNOWING IN HIS HEART, that he was ruining my life. MY LIFE!!

What kind of HEARTLESS creature does something like that to me and then, to top it off he ABANDONS ME. Just like he abandons every woman in his life. He has some serious psychological problems and takes it out on women - including his clients.

MAN UP YOU COWARD!!! He carries around a big knife while hiking but he STABS HIS CLIENTS IN THE BACK WITH IT. He is going to destroy that poor woman he is with because he has no respect for women. You'll all see that I am right.

Well, therapy is not for everyone. It's not an exact science and in some cases, owing to individual differences etc., can make things worse. So, you always have the option to walk away if you hate both therapy and your therapist.

Hating one's therapist is not really a good sign for effective work anyway. You are in control (paying their fees) after all.

I am so sorry you are hurting. Personally I think if you hate your t it might not be a good fit. You pay for it ( or someone else does) and there is no need to keep paying for something that is that disturbing

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I think the way out could be to go through one's pain or trauma or whatever, but the path does not necessarilly need to pass through the therapy system. For example, sitting in formal meditation could be an effective way of processing all sorts of things. And you are not at the mercy of a timer or a stranger whose livelihood depends on your inferiority and compliance and whose own mental health is unknown.

Some trauma experts do say that relational trauma requires relational healing. But to assume that the relationship must be with a paid therapist strikes me as a bit nuts.

Therapy is not a compulsory rite of passage.

Also, when people talk about "working thru" in therapy, I rarely see this defined.

Therapy is not a science at all. It's more like religion or didacticism or a system for inducing process addiction.

I sense that the OP is suffering due to the basic experience of therapy rather than individual differences or other details. Could be wrong.