What are the most important lessons you've learned in treatment?

My big takeaways:

My psychiatrist (or therapist) can't read my mind. If I don't say it they can't know it.

If I'm looking for Dr. perfect, I'm going to be looking my entire life. I understand that my psychiatrist is a human being and will not always be perfect with me no matter how much I wish he were.

Hiding information from my psychiatrist is a treatment disaster.

Just because he says something I don't like doesn't make him wrong.

It's best I do not use second hand treatment information from a website to argue with my psychiatrist. He tends to know more about me than an anonymous lay person.

I don't think Im interested in "lessens"like that.
I couldn't care less about that sort of stuff.
I love learning or behind aware of unconscious, material.

As easy as I think it is for people who know me well to read when I am struggling. it is not. They may know something is off but they can't read my mind.

Not all T's are the same. Just because I hear a horrible comment by a T in my work office, does not mean all Ts have negative thought of their clients.

It is okay to cry while there with them.

She can't read mind.
Sometimes I'm wrong and she's right.
Maybe there's someone who wants good for me.

I guess my lessons weren't about therapy itself, but more about myself.

It's okay and necessary to advocate for myself.

It's okay to put myself first at times.

I am not broken.

I'm not powerless. I have choices. I make them all the time. The question is whether I am making healthy, rational choices or if I am making reactive, emotional choices. It is within my power to decide which kind of choices I make.

(Yeah . . . that last one! Important for me.)

It's okay to cry
The more honest the better
I do not have to be scared to share with her
I am not a weak person

That vulnerability is not always a bad thing and can lead to deeper connections with the right people if I let it (therapy has taught me how to let it), and that I am not broken.

1.I don't understand star wars.
2.That it was okay to have negative feelings and to feel anger .
3,That I had value (yep still working on that).
4,Conflicts could be resolved.
5.That men could be kind and what a healthy relationship with one actually looks like.
6. I didn't have to be better than I was.
7."You can only do what you can do".
8. Spacing out which I'd always done was dissociation.
9.How to identify what exactly what I was feeling.
10. Learning how to self soothe.
11. How not to self harm ( I went from most days --> nothing for 6 months at the moment.)
12. "you don't expect someone with a broken leg to run a marathon."

1. That I have people who care about me and love me, even if I have trouble feeling that care and love at times.
2. I am worthy of having people who care about me and love me.
3. I am not bad (still struggle with this one).
4. Self Harm is really hard to stop even when I really want to.

5. Emotions are difficult. They are what they are, but I have trouble allowing myself to feel them. I stuff them down and that causes problems for me. I'm trying to learn how to deal with having emotions.

6. My therapist (former T, Regular T) care whether or not I kill myself.
7. One thing does not make the sum total of me.
8. I am worth fighting for.

9. What I went through as a child is abuse.

10. I can still love my parents and have a good relationship with them now even though what I went through as a child was abuse.

11. My faith is my strongest asset in fighting my depression.
12. I have to have lots of tools in my toolbox to fight my depression.
13. Self care is important.
14. Don't give up.
15. My best is enough. I am enough.

That I shouldn't have trusted a therapist.

That I learned enough discernment and psychology to see that and see where the problem lies.

So , one negative , one positive.

I could make a ridiculously long list here but this is probably the most important and essentially covers everything:

I am not as worthless as I have always believed.

Feeling are not facts

1. It's only temporary
2. Teflon mind
3. Thoughts, feelings, actions, and situations are not a part of my core self
4. Facts vs. Feelings
5. Clearly express wants and needs
6. Thoughts affect feelings affect actions, etc. Change one and you'll change the others
7. We all have templates from our past that we see others through. When we lower those templates, we are able to see who the other person really is.
8. Respect is more important than love
9. I deserve respect and love
10. I am loved and lovable
11. There is no "try"
12. Having more support only makes you stronger
13. You can love two people at once
14. That everything is as it's meant to be.

to add a few more to my list..

1. While it is painful to lose somebody you deeply care about, the relationship and memories make the pain worth it.

2. I am not to much or to needy, this is a work in progress.
3. There are people I can trust
4. I need to be patient. There are no shortcuts in therapy.

That I was primarily using therapy similarly to some old, repetitive patterns that were not constructive, more just hindered progress. And that subtly, but quite stubbornly, tried to push my therapy to follow and reinforce that pattern. I was not using it in a therapeutic and progressive way. When I'd fully realized this, I quit because it more just got in the way of growth rather than helping (it fed an old compulsion and stuckness). It became very clear that it was not therapy I needed to work on and resolve my issues. Since then (~2 years ago) everything in my life has become a lot better, including my mental stability and peace... because I finally truly dealt with the issues and try to maintain better habits and discipline. Achieving that could have never been done via talking and thinking - a tendency for being stuck in talking and thinking (and way too much useless analysis) was part of the primary issue, to begin with.

That I have absolutely no idea how sitting in a room talking to a stranger helps anything at all. I never saw the point or that it did anything useful in the least. I never had the experience of it being useful like others report it being for them.

I felt validated and affirmed, somewhat important and like I could get OK if I just followed their program and came and talked when I had problems. Maybe it did help me sort some things out sometimes but the greater issue of how I could do that for myself I never learned while in therapy. It didn't happen. Instead, I now think going to therapy hampered that, although I didn't know that and apparently didn't have the ability to know that as long as I was "hooked in" to the therapy mindset. (Cult and addiction are words that others have used to describe their experience with therapy and they feel right to me, too, in describing my experience.)

From that perspective, the last therapist terminating me because "she didn't have the emotional resources to continue", "helped" (???) me break the addiction -- I did have the support group I have mentioned and this forum to vent on. Had I not had those resources, the rejection, reenacting and triggering rejected feelings from my childhood that I didn't know I had, despite 50 years of therapy on and off, might well have done me in worse, sending me back to therapy for more addiction or a hospital.

The main "lesson" I have learned is that I can change (at least, in some ways) if I work on things, and that working on things is good and important. This sounds obvious but I don't think I really knew it before, I felt like any kind of work was just tiring and time-consuming and if I wasn't going to be the best or perfect anyway, then what was the point? I have really expanded into new areas/activities over the last couple years because I'm much more willing to give things some effort than I used to be.

That a lot of things I thought were acceptable growing up were in fact abusive.

That it's remarkable that I've managed to be as happy and functional as I am in spite of all of it, but that dealing with all of it on my own has also taken a much larger toll than I realized.

That change is possible.

That things don't have to feel as awful and difficult as they used to.

Overall I've learned a tremendous amount about why I react to things the way that I do, what patterns exist in my life and relationships and where they come from, and what it's like to have someone actually be helpful in dealing with all of this, instead of being "helpful" and making it worse.

One is "you can say no, even after you've already said yes"

I can manage my dissociation through grounding techniques and internal dialogue with my different parts.

All of my alternate personalities helped me cope with the trauma that was too hard for my entire brain to absorb.

I am safe and in control.

I am no longer in the dangerous places.

I have a right to my feelings and opinions.

I have a right to assert boundaries without fear of being physically harmed or threatened.

I have many strengths.

It is okay for me to ask for help.

It is okay for me to say no.

It is okay for me to take a break.

..That I can, and should, make boundaries, too. Definitely. Boundaries are not just in the ‘therapist’s’ domain.

...To recognize unethical, bizarre, hurtful therapist behaviors. You’d think I would have known this but didn’t. ‘Therapy’ can mean so many different things..there are so many different types of ‘therapists’’ and ‘therapy’....

It didn’t occur to me that a medical doctor, a psychiatrist...would try to harm me.

To be honest and open as much as possible. Plus to be assertive if I believe I'm not being treated fairly in therapy