Did you seek further therapy after a bad or harmful therapy experience?

Saw a bad T for two years who made everything 3x worse. She exacerbated my anxiety with her "treatment." Took me a while to realize it because she kept telling me I need to come in more and that I was only coming once a week was the reason things were so bad.

Took me 6 years to go see another therapist. We don't really talk about that therapist though. Just took me a long time to get up the courage to try again.

I first started doing therapy when I was hospitalized at 15 for anorexia nervosa. I spend 11 months in the hospital, that was the way they did things in the early 1960's. And when I came out I was a "believer". It was the "system", the "authority", it had taken me away from home for awhile and from my social anxiety and other challenges of trying to grow up. My anorexia wasn't cured -- I went home, starved myself even more until one very unpleasant night, after eating nothing, and with all kind of physical discomforts, etc., it finally dawned on me that "not eating" was a dead end path. Literally. So I grew up enough to make that rational decision on my own but there was lots and lots that I didn't.

And I still had all the social anxieties, plus remnants of trauma, etc. from earlier in my life. "They" said, at the time, that if you were willing to look at your problems, and not deny or hide from them, then you could overcome them. Made sense to me, and that's what I tried to do -- for over 50 years on and off. When I had a problem or major life challenge, that's what I did -- go to therapy. It was the "thing" to do.

I kept looking to therapists, then, to help me find myself. I had fallen off the normal track of development, having been out of school for a year and coming back a former "mental patient". I climbed back on, sort of, went to college, worked, got married, had children. But except for my life with my husband, my participation in life was pretty superficial. Probably needed to be since I believe the diagnosis of a dissociative disorder I got finally 6 years ago is accurate and is something that was always there, although I didn't know it and other T's didn't diagnosis it.

So I don't think I could have said of myself at 40 that I knew what drove me. I had read a lot about psychology and tried to figure myself out, but I still "believed" in the professions, and the professionals in the abstract, despite frustrations with therapists. And I didn't really have a (full, whole) self I could depend on, especially when it came to knowing my emotions and how to handle them in relation to other people, and how to understand other people's to-me strange behavior sometimes. So -- the answer continued to be -- keep trying with the therapy.

I didn't feel I had another good choice. Voluntarily exiting life continues to be frowned on and as long as it is, even if voluntary exit had been a rational thing for me to do, my children might not have seen it that way. So, even though I, personally, believed it made sense 15 years ago, there was a possibility that my early exit could be more hurtful to my children than my continued sometimes hurtful-to-them existence. So I stayed. But I definitely needed somebody involved besides myself and the only relatively "safe" people to try to get involved with, who I could sort of count on to have anything to do with me, was therapists.

The benzodiazepine analogy is a good one, I think. I definitely needed something to help me not starve myself to death when I was 15. But the lifetime "addiction"? Maybe not.

Trouble was and is, how to get a life without some help when you are kind of messed up from truama, etc., plus retraumatization and stigma, and at the end of your own resources. Supportive community is and has been, for me, a big help.