A question about therapy

Up until about three years ago, I'd never seen a therapist in my life. I've always had lots of anxiety but it got to the point in my life that I didn't get out of bed in the mornings and I thought often about suicide. So I went out to look for help. I shopped around, had a session with someone local that didn't mesh well with me (she laughed when I mentioned one problem, which sucked). After that disappointing experience, I asked my entire local social circle who they knew. I got one person's name, investigated it and talked to the therapist and quickly realized we wouldn't mesh well (she was very religious and attacking problems in a way that wouldn't work for me). Eventually I found a no nonsense guy that I was warned about as he is known for being direct. He was fantastic. He told me upfront that we wouldn't be talking for years, that we'd attack my problems as a project, meet every week, then every two weeks until I was done working through a book on anxiety that had lots of exercises and revisit the problems after we finished the book (we did one chapter a week, I think it was a 12 or 13 chapter book). In the end, we did lots of exercises where I described my biggest worries and the book and the therapist helped teach me coping skills. My anxiety wasn't about life or death problems, they were problems that could be solved and could work out, and I needed to learn how to calm down and not think temporary setbacks were the end of the world. The entire process went on for about six months and my medical insurance covered almost all the cost (I had a $25 copay per session). It's been over a year since I last saw him, and I've had bigger setbacks since and I'm doing fine. It really changed my life for the better, and I feel like I gained life-long coping skills for the anxiety that has crippled my life for all my life (My mom's favorite phrase to yell at me when I was growing up was "Don't do that, you'll fall down and die!!!"). I would say the biggest challenge was finding a psychologist that I meshed well with. It took asking 50 friends for recommendations, contacting their offices and speaking to them on the phone and email, and I had to keep trying after a couple attempts didn't work. But eventually, you'll find someone that works and can help.

Therapy, when it's done right, helps you process experiences you've had in the past, which are now causing you to do things that aren't in your best interest now. My Dad's a behaviorist, so I'm biased in thinking that rather than a shoulder to cry on, a therapist is someone who can guide you to better things. My Dad's pat question is, "what keeps you from doing X?" Seems kind of obvious, but if you want to do X, then talking through your thought process about why you're not doing it is pretty helpful. When I had depression with a chronic illness in college, therapy helped me deal with the helpless and listless feelings I had. What changed was my outlook. I still have that chronic disease, but I don't let it run me and I don't feel guilty if I'm just to enervated to get up and do stuff.

It's been pretty life-changing for me. Therapy saved my life, for one. Not sure I'd have made it through the darkest days of my depression without it. It also saved my life, metaphorically speaking. I had a fucked up childhood and I had to do fucked up things to cope. For example, I'm a world-class champion at shutting down all of my emotions. Therapy has taught me a) what fucked up things I'm doing, b) how they connect to defense mechanisms for fucked up things that happened in my past, c) that those things are no longer working for me, and d) how to change them. It's like.. before therapy, I was living my life in a fog.. I sort of stumbled through life, doing things without really understanding why I was making the choices I was, or why I kept having the same experiences over and over again, why I chose bad partners, etc. Therapy lifted the fog. Now I can make better choices because I can see.

It's not for everybody. Specifically, it's not for me. At all. I have never, ever left a therapist's office feeling better; instead, I am reminded that I am depressed, and I'm reminded of all the reasons I am depressed, plus I get the additional dose of depression that comes from having to pay someone an exorbitant price to kind of listen and barely pretend to care. YMMV.

(Apologies in advance for this incredibly long, rambling answer.) I have done both group therapy and individual therapy. I have done therapy with a more behavioral orientation as well as more psychodynamic. I have found all of it to be hugely beneficial. When I first started therapy, I was a raging alcoholic who engaged in a lot of other incredibly self-destructive behavior, including anorexia and self injury. I was incredibly depressed, barely functional, and just an all around mess, still reeling from growing up in a chaotic household with a drug addicted parent in a home that was mired in dysfunction. I was haunted by pretty much constant suicidal ideation. One of the first major things I got out of therapy is validation. Validation can be so powerful, especially when you never had it growing up. That alone was worth the price of admission, so to speak, as was just developing the ability to talk about these things. Behavioral therapy (specifically Dialectical Behavior Therapy) really helped me get a handle on my incredibly self destructive behaviors. It also helped me become a lot more aware of my own emotional ups and downs, and helped me build up a "tool box" of sorts to deal with various situations. I'm naturally more comfortable with things that are practical and logical, so having a very rigid framework and participating in therapy that was sort of set up like a class made it easier for me to ease into other modalities. When I first started therapy, I suffered from being painfully self aware and at the same time completely blind to my own inner life. I had so much self hatred, and I had all this built up anger, that probably originated as anger at my family (or hell, the world), but all got turned inward. I recently found a practice test for a class that I took and "self graded" shortly before starting therapy, and on that test I actually wrote a note telling myself what an idiot I was for not doing better. It included profanity. It would be considered abusive if I ever said that to another person (I wouldn't). It was shocking, really, to see that and remember how much I tore myself apart. That note was not even an anomaly. It was just representative of my own self talk at the time. I've learned not to do that anymore. There are things which can make sense when you only live inside your own head, and being able to get those out in the open with a trained professional can be so transformative because only when saying certain things out loud did I realize just how screwed up they were. There's a reason why mindfulness is a huge part of DBT. Just being aware of your own inner life can really make a huge difference. I no longer hate myself, and that is because I have actively done everything I can to stop myself from thinking those kinds of thoughts, but I don't think I would have learned how to do that without being in therapy because it was just so ingrained. It was a cycle that I chose to feed into without even realizing that's what I was doing. And, because I was my own most vicious critic, I also couldn't handle even the slightest less than favorable feedback from anyone else, because it just magnified my own self hatred to a nearly unbearable degree. It made holding down a job nearly impossible. Today, I still don't like getting criticism (who does?), but I can accept it and not get torn down by it. Oh, and I've been sober for 3+ years, and I don't do any of those other self destructive things any more either. I eat well, exercise, and keep my room clean. I do my laundry regularly, cook my own food, and generally have a life I'm pretty happy with. Sometimes things get bad, but I no longer am stuck in this cycle of constant misery. I've found away to keep my parents at a comfortable enough distance so that there shit doesn't pull me down like it used to. I don't think about wanting to kill myself, and most days, I actually look forward to the future. If you had asked me five years ago where I thought I would be today, I probably would have said dead. (It's probably what a lot of other people who knew me at the time would have said to.) I never in a million years would have predicted that my life could be so completely turned around. Therapy was not the only thing that helped me make those changes, and not all therapy works for every person, but I have certainly benefited a great deal from it. It probably did save my life, but more to the point, it actually helped me have a life that I wanted to live, and it's help me become a person that I actually like.

I am of the mindset that everyone can benefit from having a neutral party in their life that has no stake in anything except your own well-being, whatever form that may take for you. I personally prefer a therapist in this role but some people see priests for the same reason. It's an objective voice in my life. Therapy did actually change me at my core. I used to give myself to others completely. I had no secrets. I had no boundaries. You "needed" me and I was there, with a fresh baked pan of brownies and my shoulder to cry upon and look I even brought tissues and a nice bubble bath gel so you can feel better - feel better at my expense. People who take that kind of comfort from others on a routine basis tend not to be the types to reciprocate. So I would need someone and have no one to turn to when most of my "friends" told me that talking to me was "better than therapy" and thanked me for helping them with their recurring crises. I learned through therapy that I had no boundaries. I learned that my relationship was abusive and I learned what role I played in allowing that man to abuse me. I learned what role I played in allowing my "friends" to take advantage of me and my kindness. I learned how to say "no" and how to set boundaries and how to walk away when my boundaries were repeatedly crossed and violated. I lost "friends" but I gained a best friend - myself. I'm still kind and caring but I am careful now. I turn my kindness inward first and care about me because it turns out you are the only one who can recognize you need care and you're the only one who can make sure that your boundaries are being respected and taken seriously. Whether people violate them intentionally, like my abuser did, or unintentionally, like some of my friends did, therapy taught me how to deal with people who use me and don't respect me or my needs. It taught me how to even recognize my needs. My therapist has been instrumental as a neutral sounding board throughout and beyond my abusive relationship. Group therapy helped me feel less alone when I was being abused. My EMDR therapist helped me get past the PTSD I acquired from being abused by my ex boyfriend for three years straight. These women all helped me become myself. I say therapy changed me but really I changed myself, using therapy as one of many tools. I consider myself blessed to have access to therapy. Friends are great but they are not neutral. Family again is not neutral. No one has the objectivity of a therapist.

I'm on medication for depression and anxiety and my psychiatrist is pretty much just a doctor, she doesn't do talk stuff. However, I feel like the medication gives me a solid foundation to start working on the more complex stuff. I compare it to a shield protecting me from bullshit so I have time to process things rather than just being immersed in it. Therapy is, for me, about having a neutral third person to look at my life with me and help me evaluate things from an outside perspective. For example, when I was a kid, I came home from my dad's one day (divorced parents) and found myself stuffed in the car and told we were moving to get away from my mom's abusive boyfriend. Everyone acted like I was a weirdo and a bad person for being upset by that. BUT DIDN'T YOU WANT TO GET AWAY FROM HIM? Well yeah, but yanking me out of the only life I'd known seem pretty fucked up to me. But everyone acted like I was a bad person for being upset about coming home and finding out "By the way we're moving away and your stuff is already boxed up and you'll be living in a new place and going to a new school" so I internalized that I was the bad person for feeling things in that situation and it tied into the reasons I'd suppress my emotions. I didn't even think of this as A Bad Thing that happened. It was just something that happened. My therapist could actually stop during my storytelling and say "Hey, wait, no, that must've been pretty traumatic for you, you must've been really upset. And you wouldn't be a bad person to be upset by that." And then we could start disentangling that. Or we come to something like this: My grandfather on my mom's side, who we lived with for sometime and was pretty much always around in one way or another, would start screaming and freak out if you made too much noise. I still have the habit of checking under my chair for dogs or animals before I push back from a desk or table because they'd lay down beneath the chair, get rolled on, yelp, and then he'd start screaming. And then if you were upset or showed emotion you'd get hollered at to CALM DOWN. My mom's side of the family was very Mad Men, all about preserving peace and harmony and creating an appearance of outward calm. My dad was of the "Stop crying or I'll GIVE you something to cry about" school and my grandparents on that side would make fun of you for crying or being upset. She helped me unite these disparate threads into one of many reasons why I don't show emotions. And it all seems obvious now that I'm walking you through it, but I needed that third-party help to get outside my own head and see what was going on. She's also giving me skills for evaluating my emotions and breaking down problems, which is something I need to work on since I haven't developed that vocabulary. I think one of the problems people often have is because depression or whatever is tied into it, they give up when they have a bad therapeutic relationship. Like, if I took my car to the shop and got a bad mechanic, I'd go find a new mechanic. I wouldn't go "WELP I GUESS THE OIL PUMP IS FUCKED FOREVER." But when it's your head, you go, "Welp, guess I'm broken and doomed forever" when you really just need to find a different therapist. I wouldn't say I'm a different person, but I am a less angry, less reactive, more thoughtful, and more compassionate person.

I spent thirteen years with un- and later misdiagnosed (and un- and later mistreated) bipolar disorder. I also grew up in an emotionally weird household. The selection of coping mechanisms I developed to deal with those two things ended up being pretty maladaptive once I found myself in a more stable situation, life-wise. Therapy is a safe place that lets me test out stuff that feels too scary to do in real life. For instance, I have a lot of trouble being vulnerable, and I'm very risk-averse. So I can try out being vulnerable with my therapist, which is a low-risk situation - I'm not going to damage one of my real-life relationships by trying it out in therapy, and finding out through therapy that it's okay to be vulnerable and that being vulnerable can go well then helps me translate that into trying it out in my real relationships, which ultimately makes them more healthy. I'm very avoidant. In real life, this means I blow stuff and people off a lot because it feels less risky to not do something that has a small chance of being bad and/or scary (I'm talking going to parties and talking to my friends about my feelings, nothing super dangerous, just stuff I find hard to deal with) than to take that risk, even if doing so is more likely to pay off for me than not doing so. With previous therapists, I've used avoidance to get out of talking about the worst bits of my feelings and the stuff I find really hard to talk about. With my current therapist, I sent her an email before we started working together detailing these patterns and asking her to hold me more accountable. So now, if I'm feeling avoidant about feelings or therapy, that's something I'm going to talk about in therapy, rather than a reason to quit therapy over. I find it easier now to short-circuit negative thought patterns. I used to let my brain talk me into corners a lot, and used the irrefutable negative logic of long-ingrained depressive thought patterns as really sound reasons to do or not to do things, and as cast-iron logic as to why everything was hopeless and pointless and I was going to be unhappy forever (so I might as well sabotage myself a whole bunch now because, eh, what difference could it make?). Therapy has been good for helping me see that the things I believe about myself and the world are not necessarily the only truth. I am trying to be kinder to myself, and that's something I wouldn't have done without therapy. It's really, really slow. I have a lot of behaviours and thought patterns that are doing me no favours whatsoever, and honestly I don't know if it's even possible for me to get to a place where my thoughts and feelings are pretty much like the thoughts and feelings of a person who didn't spend the vast majority of the last thirteen years being depressed. But I do know that it's possible to get to a place where my thoughts and feelings are significantly less worse than they used to be, and that's enough hope for me to go on for now. (I use "real" throughout to distinguish from "during therapy sessions" - I definitely think therapy is real, and part of my real life, but there's something about the therapeutic environment which is different enough for me that it needs differentiation)

Before therapy I felt nothing. I had deadened my emotions to the point that I thought they didn't exist for me. Therapy taught me how to feel again. I have been suicidal since I was 5. Therapy has helped me to learn how to manage those feelings since in my case they will never really go away. On a practical level therapy has helped me identify patterns that I have repeated in relationships through out my life and has given me the tools to start to change these unhealthy patterns. It has helped me grow from someone who could not make eye contact - who couldn't talk to strangers - who couldn't be anything but a sarcastic idiot into a person who can do all those things and be warm and kind and open with friends. Therapy has literally saved my life and continues to do so. Most importantly to me therapy has helped me understand my entire life.