HorzaContributor
What to do if therapy doesn't work?
I had a bit of a breakdown as a teenager, nothing seemed to help (medication/therapy), so I sortof just lived with it. However, I had another fairly big breakdown now I'm in my mid 30s, and I've been seeking support for about three years now: but I'm not getting anywhere.
Effectively: most psychologists operate from a very particular treatment methodology. In short, they believe that they can just convince patients that their underlying thought structures that are related to trauma are irrational, and those thought structures can then change which means the patient can work through trauma, if not towards a cure, then at least towards management of symptoms. The core idea is that the beliefs about someone's traumas that cause them problems, not the traumas themselves, and if this specific treatment methodology is correctly applied, then patients can see improvements in only a couple weeks!
But for people with complex trauma (or any serious trauma, even), this kind of treatment methodology (or other popular fads like 'mindfulness') isn't really useful, at all, but it appears to almost always be the only thing that's available (probably because it's cheap?). I've seen more than one psychologist who has told me straight up that they don't know how to treat me at all, and to speak with a psychiatrist. My experience with psychiatrists has effectively just been having pills thrown at me which make the symptoms far worse, and told my problems aren't bad enough for serious attention and that I just need to see a psychologist.
Has anyone managed to get out of a situation like this? How do you get help, when the people you go to for help say they have no idea how to help you?
