Still don't understand therapy

Yup....this seems to be my issue. I am good for a day after but then it is as if I never had a therapy session and I am trying to stay afloat until the next session and it is painful. I wonder what that is all about. So I think what if I just stop therapy? I would have to then not use it as a crutch and stand on my own two feet again just function and be a productive adult. I do feel like a child when I go into therapy. I suppose that is something to try and figure out why but I do not want to explore.

I did move to 2 x a week and have been contemplating moving to 3 x a week. I found moving to 2 x a week to be very helpful in allowing me to maintain things more a float. It did open up a lot more stuff for me. I see my T on M and Th. I can make it between sessions about half the time with no contact. The Th to Monday swing is the hardest for me and I still struggle with leaving at the end of sessions. Another reason I am thinking about moving to 3 x week is some changes in my life that are putting strain in how much time I am able to explore some of my feelings. So some of the thought process behind moving to 3 times a week is to elevate the feelings I have whenever there are more than 3 days between sessions and to hopefully provide me more time in a safe space to explore the feelings that are coming up for me.

Going more times a week does not mean that the overall process is easier. There are benefits and risks and one must weigh them against all other elements in one's life. For now, I am staying at 2 x week because my T does not have schedule availability to give me that no more than 3 days between session break. If and when that becomes an option, we'll explore the concept again and see where I am at. I know I would not have made the progress I have made without moving to 2x a week. I need the additional contact to remain open to my T and not close down out of several reasons, mostly embarrassment and shame.

oh, she is entirely too perky for you. even i find her mildly annoying.

I think therapy as a 'treatment' is way overrated. It is a good service to understand oneself, but treatment for MH conditions--I don't believe it is all that effective.

It's overrated, it seems, not by consumers/clients, but by authorities who are promoting it as a treatment for mental disorders. (But I also can't stand Western healthcare and put MH services in the same category.)

The way therapy is promoted now, the status quo seems to be go to therapist after therapist until you find the "right match", while spending years and hundreds or thousands of dollars, sometimes ending up worse than before or completely deteriorating. Then they are told "it can happen to you", "just find the right match", "I got lucky; you can too" or you hear someone say it has worked for them, but it took them 20+ years to get there. It just seems so crazy to me.

One reason it's oversold is because the research is highly flawed for many reasons. I don't think we can extrapolate the research results from such studies to the clinical world, so nobody really knows its effectiveness aside from the antecdotal evidence. It's next to impossible to understand, measure, interpret, and apply 'effectiveness' the way it's done now.

MH treatments are in the dark ages, and I can only hope for my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their children, etc. that it will change soon.

Then what do you think is the best treatment for mental health issues? Issues like BPD and cPTSD are more of a psychological injury and I see issues like Bipolar and schizophrenia mental illnesses. How do think they should be treated if therapy is over rated and not effective?

Thanks for this, I may look into EMDR after all. I don't cry, hardly at all. Sometimes I wish I would but I don't, or can't.

Sorry you got pissed and shaken by it. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons I don't cry is because I told myself one day when I was 11 and had been crying after my mother humiliated me that I was never going to feel like that again. Turned it off, but it's not subject to conscious control now and I can't turn it back on, even though I've pretty well dealt with feelings of having been humiliated, I think.

I edited my post a bit Moxie...I'm not discouraging individuals who want to go to therapy to not go, but like I said, MH treatments are in the dark ages.

But to answer your question more specifically, daily exercise, for example, is shown to be more effective than medications. So why is the standard to people put on pills, sometimes on a merry-go-round for years until something works, instead of exercise? St. John's Wort is the first line of treatment in other countries. Ketamine can instantly erase severe depression in some. Just some examples.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...cation/284587/

Here's one article, but articles with the same conclusions are available from multiple sources. If the flawed research is being used to promote treatments, then perhaps that same research can also be used to promote free and/or safer treatments.

The standard first line of treatment has been therapy and medication. There are so many risks with that recommendation, not just with the medication side effects or interactions with other drugs the patient may be taking, but with the therapy opening Pandora's Box, for example, and the client deteriorates. I am one who went to a provider for a minor issue, and ended up so much worse than before. I wonder how things would be if I was prescribed exercise at the onset of my symptoms? Of course, I may have ignored that treatment advice anyway, but just emphasizing the risk here.

This are numerous complexities for this issue (e.g, people are dx with depression and anxiety without getting tested for magnesium deficiency, Vit D deficiency, sleep disorders, etc.), someone who has borderline might be dx with bipolar, etc. I'm just pointing out an example of an alternative here, not trying to answer such a huge and complex question.

All in all, the status quo sucks.

Exercise is not a cure. It can help. I have done all the holistics treatments from exercises, I was a crossfit athlete, to herbals to vitamins, to eliminating sugar, dairy and gluten from my diet, going organic. That did not fix a thing.

I'm not talking about cures, I'm talking about treatments. Sure, it didn't work for you, I get that, but the research says that exercise is an effective treatment for depression or moreso than medications. The research says therapy is effective, pills are effective, but it also says that exercise is effective.

Those didn't fix a thing, but did or will therapy either? I hope so for you.
Hopefully you won't have to spend years and thousands of dollars on therapy to find out if it will work. Or go from T to T for years until you find the "right match" until you find someone who can help.

I agree that not all therapists view it this way. I think most of them are lost in a fog of delusion and blind faith and their own problems and needs.

Your feelings are similar to mine, Rayne. I did a degree in psychology, and I came out feeling like mental health treatments were half guesswork. My impression was that while they <i>do</i> help more than harm on average, and it's worth seeking help from mental health services if you are ill, the chance of a treatment not working for a given individual was pretty high. When you consider the amount of money treatment often costs, and how many treatments you might need to try before you find something that works, it will undoubtedly lead to some people being left worse off. Perhaps too many for us to call it 'treatment'.

I've been in therapy twice. The first time was to deal with depression. I was very ill at the time. It did help, but what ultimately 'cured' me was my life situation changing for the better. Not therapy. If my life was still the same as it was then, I would become depressed again. I wouldn't be able to outhink a daily, disheartening experience.

I recently returned to therapy to deal with a bereavement--I've stayed to sort out longterm issues. This time round, I feel like I'm sorting out problems and doing general self-improvement, not treating a debilitating medical issue that is wrecking my life and leaving me unable to function. Therapy is no longer treatment - - it's now one thing out of many things I do to improve my wellbeing, along with swimming, walking, spending time with my husband and reading.

I saw a documentary once where a psychologist observed that 'no one ever thought their way out of depression'. There are no truer words.

I think the problem is the very idea of MH treatment. If you have some verifiable or identifiable medical condition, then you can try different interventions to address it. If you are suffering from a psychological-spiritual affliction with no apparent physiological basis, it doesn't make any sense to talk about "treatment".

Mainstream healthcare has perverted everything. Problems stemming from life difficulties are lumped in with other "diseases" and the afflicted are herded into medical-like treatment models -- drugs and therapy -- that by definition .

Meanwhile, all sorts of low hanging fruit and foundational stuff that IS physiological is overlooked or deliberately ignored -- basic nutrition, environment, sleep, toxicity, gut pathology, etc.

Man-made electromagnetic fields, mercury, fluoride, nutrient imbalances, sleep disorders, infectious disease, parasites, messed up gut biome... these and other factors are know to cause "mental illness". Putting these people on drugs or in therapy might well be a path to more suffering.

But there is no money to be made by telling people to... eat better, sleep better, get rid of Wifi, keep mobile phone in airplane mode when not using, detox, etc. And once someone is on the drugs or therapy train, it's hard to get off, and that is hugely profitable. After a while, another drug is added, then another. And if therapy is causing problems, maybe a second therapist is added, and it goes on for years.

I think my psychological-spiritual affliction and problems stemming from life difficulties are mostly due to modern lifestyle, primarily social stresses. Alienation, family dysfunction, rootlessness, loss. Those affected my psyche and spirit, but individual therapy has not been much help.

Some families and communities keep things going, lots don't. Eventually things may change, simply because the poor mental health of individuals affects the overall society? But until then. . .the mental health system, at least in the US, is a business venture, first and foremost. That's the value system of the current culture and the way things are done. It's primarily and economic system for the production of material goods, and it hasn't helped much with my psychological-spiritual affliction and life difficulties. Maybe a business model is just the wrong model to help people with these kinds of things?