regrets about starting therapy

No regret for me. It has brought my a great deal of introspection and self-confidence that I have not had in the past. It's absolutely hard and painful at times, and I imagine it has opened up wounds that I would have otherwise not ever dealt with. But... I see that as a good thing for me. I can understand how others may not feel the same way.

Nope, no regrets either. There have definitely been times when bad experiences with therapy (and bad therapists) have made me feel hopeless and terrible, but overall therapy has had a huge positive impact on my life. The things I've learned and the support I've gotten in therapy have been absolutely instrumental to me. So even though it's been hard work at times, and even though I've had plenty of bad experiences along the way, the good far outweighs the bad.

Yes of course but the comments seemed to be running towards people regretting having spent so much time in therapy digging deeper into their psyches. (Here is my one world truth though: Too much of anything is bad.)

I don't regret having "started" therapy, exactly -- my parents took me to a psych hospital when I was 15 and had an eating disorder. I was close to starving myself to death, so they intervened.

I DO regret having trusted "therapy", and therapists, as much as I have over the years. But where was the intervention for that? Therapists weren't questioning my (over) trust and dependence on THEM? I was scared and depressed, which is why I was going to them for "help".

When I asked my psychiatrist, at 15, if I was psychotic or neurotic, which were the commonly known classifications back then, he said that I had a "character disorder". Which is what they called personality disorders back then. That sounded horrible, like I had a bad moral character -- and since I was kind of an obsessively "good girl" back then, I didn't pursue or investigate it any further. Instead, I paid attention to people who said things like "anything you are willing to face (meaning, in yourself, I thought), you can overcome". And being "good", I was certainly willing to face anything! (Or, so I thought.)

But, it ends up, after all these years, that what I needed to be willing to face, in addition to my own stuff, was stuff "out there" -- in my family of origin, the relationships and dynamics, and in "therapy" and therapists, too -- and the effects that stuff had had on me.

In facing that stuff, the social support on PC and some other support groups has been invaluable. Don't know if or how I could have done without it. But I didn't need more "therapy", necessarily, though therapy may have helped bring some of that stuff to the surface originally.

Without something more than what is currently offered in a lot of regular "therapy", just eliciting that stuff in some of us is in no way a guarantee that it can be "resolved". And it MAY leave us worse off, at least for a long time. And I don't know if there is a way for a client to be able to tell that in advance.

People reading this forum can now get a clue what to look out for, maybe. People who don't read this forum may not. I really hate thinking that what happened to me could still happen to other people, though hopefully things are improving.

Magnifying and fetishizing my deficient “unfair” past—which therapist encouraged, was just my exercise in wallowing. It also was distorted: I wasn’t encouraged to remember the positive times. Nor were my interactions in the contrived air of the consulting room like my real life, since my therapists played omniscient oracle roles. No human outside therapy behaves like that.

The authentic “digging into my psyche” came from actual living life, facing difficulties, overcoming setbacks. It had nothing to do with the theoretical, detached therapy bubble I experienced. I THOUGHT I was digging into my psyche in therapy, but it turned out a scam for me—a lot of wheel spinning.

I don't regret it. I am alive. Without it, I'm not so sure I would be. I can function. Without t and the meds, I'm not sure I could. I know some on this board cringe at the thought of long-term therapy, but I'm a lifer, I'm sure - although with different therapists over the past 25 years. Mental illness sucks.