my therapist is a goddamn saint
 

how many of you dudes/dudettes are in therapy? have any therapy stories? love/hate your therapist? post here

i literally argue about reality being real or not with my therapist and she has patience for my dissociated ass. and so many other things. she's not perfect, we've had issues, but always resolved them. she just keeps trying to help me, bless her heart lol. she has helped me a lot but some of this stuff has gotta be frustrating. complex ptsd is fucked up shit and to look at it in the face twice a week with me, and with others i'm sure almost every day, takes a special kind of person. i'm very lucky to have her.

New thread. Who here doesn’t have a therapist?

jesus christ is my therapist

I hear he's a great therapist but really bad with schedule, most people say they are still waiting for the second appointment.

I don't. I should, but I don't.

webMD is my therapist

huh, you think that's something...

i think of my therapy sessions as check-ins to be sure i'm not indulging in negative patterns and to say out-loud things i tend to only think about. it helps with perspective- to understand where mine comes from and maybe see another one.

basically.

holy shit the lols

i've had one for 11 years and love her dearly. and she just moved to another state. hoping i'm not being delusional when believing that she's helped me enough over the years that i'll be alright without her..

had one in highschool who was super cool, my first time seeing a therapist. was a wreck without him, i wonder what he's up to now. dude was super cool and helped me out a ton. i didn't know about the concept of therapy before him.

then in college i had a couple terrible shitheads, i just saw them every so often so i could get antidepressants, they weren't really therapists if i'm being fair, they were psychiatrists (residents i think), it was really awful. they weren't much older than i was, didn't give a shit, the whole thing made me feel terrible.

then after college i iddn't have one for quite some time (~5 years), until i really needed one. first one i had then was super bad, spent the whole time trying to tell me about her stuff, it was super frustrating because i desperately needed help.

and thank goodness i then found the one who i saw for the last 11 years. really fortunate. #LindaRules

#NinaRulesToo

#WomenAreGoodListeners

glad you had linda. i've seen mine now for 7 years... bit more. i hope she doesn't move, but she's in her late 50s and already living where people retire so hopefully she stays. she also has at least several long term clients with complex PTSD (including me) who she knows need the long term relationship. not that she should stay or would stay just because of us, but i'm sure it factors in.

i expressed to her that she is a saint yesterday, after a particularly hard session where i was crying about how what happened to me was so bad i had to turn on dissociation 24/7 and it's been like 14 years since i've been out of that situation and still can't fucking turn it off, and how fucked up it is. and all this time without improvement (in this one area) and she still is patient with me about it and still trying despite my constant reporting that it has not gotten at all better even with 7 years of seeing her, my doubt it will ever get better, etc. although i have moved from not even wanting it to get better to wanting it but really afraid to wanting it but not as afraid. so that's progress i guess. she said it is her honor to hang in there with me :embarass:

super awesome, both of you

i see a head shrinker every week. and i'm in group therapy too

#YoSoyNeedsATherapistToo

It's always an awkward moment when your therapist asks you how it's going and you say "pretty well," not knowing if they are just greeting you or legitimately inquiring about your recent progress.

my therapist doesn't say a word until i do. it's less awkward now.

me: hi

her: hi!

me: my train ride here was awful

i feel this on a spiritual level

i'm seeing a therapist over the summer and it's actually pretty lame. this whole CBT thing basically, at least for me, seems to be saying to lie to yourself that everything's okay

CBT can be useful if you have serious cognitive distortions or OCD tendencies. stuff like catastrophising (like someone who doesn't text you back right away hates you, is cheating on you, etc), personalizing everything, black an white thinking, etc. but it doesn't treat the reason you have these problems in the first place. there are different schools of though, getting more common is cbt/dbt and that you don't need to treat or talk about what caused these issues. it's a $$$$ thing, really - insurance doesn't want to pay for long term therapy. and that might be true for some people, that talking about stuff isn't necessary or could make it worse. but IMO regular talk therapy supplemented with cbt/dbt/etc is better. sure there are some people who have a purely inherited/reinforced by parent who also had it depression and/or anxiety, and a pill or some CBT stuff will be enough. but everyone is different.

When my therapist asks how I am, and I am shitty, I relish the opportunity to be like, "This has not been a good week," or "I feel awful." I just assume that he wouldn't ever ask me questions about how I am unless he wanted an honor answer.

The first two times I tried CBT I came away feeling exactly like you, Ram. I just felt like it was teaching me to lie to myself in order to make things more tolerable. And like Reprise said, my past therapists put all the emphasis on CBT and changing my reactions rather than actually addressing the causes of my issues, and that made me feel like they were de-legitimizing my feelings and my situation and telling me the only problem in my life is actually myself.

CBT finally worked I think because I was ready for it to work and to not fight it. Some of that came from desperation, because I started to realize I was actually going to destroy myself if I didn't change my life significantly. Some of it just came with a late-20s recognition that the lines between "real" and "false" perceptions of abstract things are not concrete and there is actually a lot of truth to the idea that we create our own worlds through our thought processes.

Most of what I do with my therapist is just regular talk therapy, but CBT has really, really helped me change my ****-cognition and gain more control over my own mind. It has revealed to me things which I do and think that I wasn't even conscious of. It has helped me take control of my snowball effect catastrophic thinking. It's helped me realize that even when the things I think about how awful life is are true, obsessing over them and not being about to accept them does not do anything to change them, but rather just degrades my own mental health. It's helped me identify triggers to my anxiety and depression which I was not aware of. I really cannot understate how helpful it has been to me

Yeah it depends how desperate you are, to change. I came into CBT after I was discharged from an involuntary stay in the psych ward with psychosis and mania, and I was pretty desperate to avoid going back. I remember wishing I could talk about more stuff that caused my descent (or ascent, as it were) but being grateful after a year was finished, with my clinical psychologist, that she had focused on making me well right now, rather than wasting the sessions with me dwelling on my past. A lot of my problem is rumination and giving me too much time to talk about my childhood and adolescence would have legitimised the rumination in a way.

The other thing about CBT is that for it to work you have to be brutally honest with yourself and your therapist. That means spilling your innermost thoughts and feelings and dropping your guard, in my experience. Which isn’t easy. But otherwise you just end up talking about and trying to change feelings and thoughts that aren’t a really your own. Of course that isn’t going to be helpful either....

no one can control what happens to them, but they can control their reactions and that what cbt is about in my experience....discerning the fears that stem from what we have learned from our relationship with our parents or from discrimination we've experienced growing up. we internalize that junk and it becomes who we are and dictates how we see ourselves.

obviously it's incredibly hard to learn new coping skills and re-parent ourselves, but some of us have no other choice

Yes, dwelling is not good. I used to ruminate about everything all the time, and bring that to therapy. But we had to work on regular living first, before I naturally filled my life up with other things (as I became less depressed) and wasn't ruminating about trauma 24/7. Now I mostly just visit it every few sessions for a bit, when it's relevant, and then put it away again. Kinda crazy that I can do that now.

You guys should try giving this a read. It's helped me a lot. It's a brilliant book



Each chapter goes in depth with a lot of helpful advice, but the 12 rules are:

Is Jordan B Peterson Dr Phil's pen name?