Therapy is what?

Good morning @unimportant first up congratulations on getting your hair colour done, it can be so liberating to take steps toward self expression and the identity under one's own choices and outcomes.

In regards to your counselling/therapy experience it does sound fairly disappointing and I can sense you have some feelings of rejection and/or being dismissed by both services which must hurt the emotions a bit so, don't take it personally, remember that counsellors and psychologists are professionals and they are bound by fairly strict codes of conduct and also regulations of the place they work at.

Depending on your exact personal history and issues you might find a better fit within another practice or in another therapeutic discipline. Drawing from my own life, one of the greatest things I ever learnt to do was meditation on the level of being able to dig into my own brain and experience and to find clarity on what was truly going on inside me.

As in some meditations force a focus onto something or a distraction from yourself, and they can be great for 'getting away from oneself'. I found that I needed to 'connect more within myself', not get away so I found a type of meditation which is just clearing my mind from all distractions to FEEL the thoughts and emotions in my body and to make sense of them while lying down for 15-30 minutes. It took me a while to learn how to do this and to learn when to do this, but it is now a very valuable tool so when I feel emotionally wierd I can usually figure out why, fairly quickly.

Back to professional services, the mainstream therapy approach is "Does the therapist believe the client has the desire and ability to change?" At risk of hurting your feelings I wanted to say that because the intention is not to hurt your feelings but to explore the obvious frustration and rejection that's comes out of your post. You went to people to get help, they didn't or couldn't help you, now you're on your own again wondering if you should bother to try.

You should always bother to try improving your life or healing trauma or upskilling socially/professionally etc because as adults we can only advocate for ourselves and life moves fairly quickly. My immediate question to you is, were you willing/able to change or was every session an argument with the therapist? Again I am not trying to pick on you just to ask a question which may prompt something within you for your NEXT experience of self improvment.

My personal psychologist was very frustrating for the first 6 weeks I saw her because I was waiting for her to tell me answers. It felt like I was going into the room, paying a lot of money which I didn't want to give to her, and venting crap about my life for 1 hour until I go home. But at week 6 I realised that the work within myself was happening outside of psychology, that by venting/discussing/talking about life for 1 hour in the session, outside of it my brain was working and my subconscious was calculating and I was forming my own answers to my own situations. Does that mean I don't need a therapist who sits opposite me like a doll in a chair not saying very much?

Financially I am tempted to walk away but I am now starting to believe that the therapist is important because she is allowing me to access the dark corners of my brain, and she is acting as an ongoing witness and 'friend' to those moments as I personally work through a lifetime of grief, trauma, injustice etc and within my own brain I come to a greater understanding of it all and where I come through the other side.

In times past I have had more talkative counsellors and therapists but I have always felt they have dismissed MY issue and tried, very helpfully to give me strategies to dismiss it myself, yet the issues kept recurring so I found myself in therapy AGAIN.

To relate that back to you, you might have done some progress this time and then if you change providers/modalities you will make MORE progress. At the end of the day therapy is about our relationship with ourselves and when we have a healthy relationship with ourselves life gets better for...ourselves! But its not making life "always comfortable" it's about improving cooking/eating/relationships/responsiblities etc that make life healthy and sustainable in many ways beyond the direct emotions of every day.

There are many different modalities for personal work and I have had a lot of success with NLP or neuro-liguistic-programming timeline therapy as it works very well with my way of relating to the world. There's also somatic therapy, feldenkrais, paganism, permaculture, and global philosophies such as tao, buddhism, kabbalah and in no way to send you down an alternative pathway but these ways of being can be worth exploring to find a little bit more out of life and have additional things to bolster your outlook and abilities in life. Its wise to stay connected to mainstream culture but the alternative philosophies have existed for centuries and for good reason, they keep us grounded to naturalistic ways of living and at the end of the day we are animals so we need certain physical and intangible things to not just survive, but to thrive in a complex society.

So even if things feel frustrating NOW and like a door has been slammed closed in front of you, don't give up on your journey as the rest of your life is ahead of you. Be proud of your coloured hair, think about all the things that are ok in your life, all the people who support you and take a breath and think, if I didn't get what I needed from these two professionals...a) what do I need and b) where do I get it from, now?

And re spending money on therapy its an investment in yourself and your own wellbeing, and you might be able to get some free counselling somewhere or you might be forced to pay for it. But, to spend money on your own wellbeing makes work worth going to. Its too easy to fall into distractions and 'buying satisfaction' but, those outside things never really fill the hole inside, if there is a hole in the soul. When you have found satisfaction within yourself by knowing that 'true you' truly needs and wants, you won't need much to get by as you will have generated happiness within yourself. That doesn't mean every day will be HAPPY! But it means that as you go up and down with the tides of life, you will know how to manage your own self so that you have somewhere comfortable to go and know how to find the things that keep you feeling alive.

All the best it can be a hard season at Christmas time, the silly season where everything goes out of routine but it's also a great time to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas - peace, joy and goodwill to all - and to get some stuff done with the extra time off. Whether thats inside your life or outside in society, if you keep peace, joy and goodwill to all in your mind you will have a good time. Take care and keep us updated on how you go, moving forward.

My husband died two months ago and I have been really shaken by grief to the extent I felt I was mentally ill. I saw a psychologist who reassured me that everything I was feeling was normal. It feels like this

Me. “ help! My body keeps catching on fire!”

therapist. “ yes, this is normal.”

me. “It really hurts”

therapist. “ Yes it does. This is normal”

long silence where I gaze around the room and she looks at me

So for now I have decided there is no help there. What helps a lot is talking with other people experiencing this shocking aching loss So now I am here

Hi @unimportant , Welcome and I'm glad you've reached out. I hope the community support here can help bridge the gap and support-deficit you currently feel.

I do like what @Sugarshack said, and I have seen it myself and also heard of some situations similiar (also from the psychologist perspective of feeling they cannot offer anything more to the client, and suggesting someone who has different therapy type training to try).

Your counsellor's actions/advice sound a little odd, unless they felt that both your psychologist and themselves didn't have the right "tools" to be able to help you. But even then, I would have thought they would suggest keeping being a support for you until your psychiatrist visit/review and their recommendations. It's a bit puzzling to me also. Unless finances are a big stressor, in which case I can understand that the cost of sessions may be adding to stress.

My personal experience with this has been one positive and one negative example.

The positive one, I had been seeing a psychologist for a number of years and she was a good support - although I didn't get better but she helped me cope week-to-week. Then my GP referred me to a psychiatrist for review, who recommended a psychotherapy-psychiatrist who could do both therapy & medication. Thankfully my psychologist was also very supportive of this and kept seeing me until I felt comfortable with the new psychiatrist and was OK to stop having her as a fall-back in case it didn't "fit" for me. To me, that's how I like it -- the psych lets me choose how much support I need, and supports the choice of who is the best support at the right time. I recommended that psychologist to a number of people afterwards.

My negative experience was actually the discharge from that psychiatrist a number of years later. Things went OK with the psychiatrist, but still there was no improvement (and the rapport was a little less than with the psychologist, sadly) over the course of years of weekly treatment. It just kept me afloat week to week. It got to the point where I felt we weren't making any progress and some of the thoughts I felt were most distressing for me and wanted to address I felt she was dismissive of. It got to the point that sometimes I felt worse post-session that pre-session, including angry at the dismissiveness or non-belief about one biological situation. She expressed that she did not feel she had anything different to be able to offer to help with that particular thought problem than we had already tried, and that perhaps one of her colleagues may be able to offer a different perspective/technique. So we agreed she would refer me to her colleague at the same practice and hand me over. I was then placed on a waitlist for the new psychiatrist "expected 6 months" (this in itself I should have pushed back on, given my MH situation at the time, and the fact i was transferring from internally - or at least asked to keep seeing the other psychiatrist occasionally until the transfer). After 4 months I called and checked the status and they said I was still on the wait list; I let them know I would be overseas for a month and was available still except for that month period. I did not hear from them again. Ever. Never got a call (or voicemail, or email, or SMS -- all of which they had for me and used in the past) about getting an appointment with the psychiatrist. I never confronted them about it, I was too depressed and SI at the time. I regret not writing a letter to them about it and how much of a risk that left me in due to the whole reason I was transferring was because of worsening SI needing treatment. If I knew then what I know now about the healthcare system, I would have put in a complaint to AHPRA or the local Health Care consumer-complaints organisation.

@Lyndee I'm sorry that you don't feel supported or heard by your psychologist. I understand what they are saying about grief being "normal" in your scenario, but it also doesn't sound like they are being supportive in how they can assist you to process that grief and cope with living with the pain and memories until the feelings are less intense and the grief is decreased, etc. (I am trying to be careful not to say "until the grief is gone" because I understand that for people there may always be a feeling of grief when thinking about the person's passing, but that it can be less painful and not control/overwhelm life. It can be a cherished time type of grief I hope in the future).

I hope this community here can help support you in this much more than your psychologist did. You don't have to be alone through it, and there is help available if you want it.

@unimportant

Sorry you have gone through this. The revolving door problem is becoming huge in the mental health field.

We try to be agreeable, and may people please at first before any of the healing work gets done. It sounds as if they felt out of their depth. I have had them try and get rid of me, rather than address any of my concerns or have a proper conversation, (say for example about the diagnosis of my parents). Surely an experienced psychiatrist should have been able to do that. Anyway, that is how I reflect on those so called "therapist" behaviours now, 40 years later. I trusted, obeyed, did the work and paid. I am not as convinced many manage their countertransference issues as ethically as they should, or even have sufficient insight. So why are they claiming money for their time when they are not actually doing anything of value?

I have actually trained in it a bit, so there are values, and there are good practitioners.

Hope is incredibly important, so the forums try and hold out for hope. The therapy is anything that you experience, feel or learn that helps you feel better able to function as a decent human and deal with trauma or bullying or whatever caused you to reach out.

Usually long term psychoanalytic therapy involves an ethical, trusting and trustworthy relationship where the client can work through their issues and find ways of doing rupture and repair within the therapeutic alliance. However nowadays, there are more therapy fashions in it than designer labels, though there are some good ideas out there.

eg ... random last site of interest

https://www.naturaltherapypages.com.au/article/family-constellation-therapy-australia

@Lyndee

they may have been trying to reassure you, and not pathologise your grief, but if that is all they could come up with, they obviously had serious limitations, I can see how you found it not helpful.

The profession needs to start recognising these issues and not simply be a lobby group pushing ahead their own economic interests.

I first did therapy at 17 and I am definitely a senior now. "Therapy" did help keep me alive but unfortunately it did not always do the right thing by my family, so I try and advocate, now.

Thank you for the replies.

I want to be clear that I am not trying to bag out my therapist. It was me who reacted and cancelled, maybe there was a better way of handling it. The difficult part is that it is a really important moment in our safety plan and part of that was structured supports.

Within a period of 3 weeks, I have gone from 3 support structures to 0. At least we have an end date for this stage, a simple 6 weeks.

Hey @unimportant

I can hear how important therapy was in supporting you with safety so it makes sense this is one of the most difficult aspects of not going. Your most likely already aware of this, but in case it's helpful I wanted to encourage you to reach out to Lifeline if needed on 13 11 14 - they are open 24/7 and offer counselling/crisis support 🌿

TunedIn 🌺

Why do therapists want you to open up and rip the covers off the trauma before letting you know you should not be there? Maybe the answer is don't say anything in the first place.

Hi @unimportant

It sounds like you have been doing an amazing job going to therapy, and starting to try to find a way through the trauma that you have experienced.

Healing from trauma takes a lot of time, and when you start to work through that trauma it is important to go at your pace, and have support around you if you do find that going back over the trauma does trigger you.

It sounds like that has happened for you, but it is really important to talk to your therapist about this, and what you feel you might need while you are going through this process.

Maybe some other members have some ideas or suggestions about how to cope when trauma triggers you, specifically from the process of talking about it all in therapy?

Cappuccino_75

Oh, @unimportant , so sorry, I didn't see your response as I have been busy and only looking at posts I am tagged in. Please do feel welcome and encouraged to tag me in responses using the "@" and then my username. 😊 This will help me see the message in my emails so I know to come and read.

I am so sorry that this has happened to you. Was this another appointment you have had since cancelling the ones with the counsellor and waiting for the psychiatrist review? Or is it with regard to that counsellor and the therapy with them?

Being unsupported after opening the can of worms of trauma is so unfair on you. Gosh, I am sorry you are experiencing that. I can assure you not all counsellors/psychologist/psychiatrists are like that -- there are ones which are very careful to ensure appropriate support and go at a slow pace so as to not overwhelm (or as little overwhelm as possible!).

I wonder whether @Chasingsunsets has any advice on managing post-session / PTSD responses?

I'm guessing it might depend on what the feelings/symptoms are for you @unimportant - would you feel comfortable sharing a little about how you feel/react? (it might help us give better ideas, such as whether a calming/grounding activity, or a distraction, or a processing, or a muscle-emotion-release, etc).