Finally considering therapy as an option because talking about my problems just ruins friendships and relationships clearly
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By all means give therapy a shot but from my own experience with therapy I would just caution you not too expect too much. I tried it for years, between 23 – 29 and got nothing from it. You might be one of the few that do get something from it so like I said initially try it, just manage your expectations. My opinion is that therapy is a scam, a business but some people do claim to derive benefit.
Therapists get mixed reviews around here. I think I can see why. Please let me say I am very happy with my therapists work and then I will share how I found her.
Please let me start with the basics: cost, insurance participation, gender, and how conveniently they are located. If this is all a go, great, but you still have no assurance of the most vital component of all: a person you can connect with. After trying seven therapists in a row, all of whom could do little for me, I decided I had to look at more than those basics. You see, I had assumed, over and over, that any therapist I picked with just those basics would relate to me, and I to them. Not so at all. Here is what I did this last time and found an excellent therapist for me:
I started with googling therapy modalities and protocols. I picked one that appealed to me. It was EMDR.
Now I googled “EMDR therapists my area”. The therapists profiles on Psychology Today diong EMDR were a gold mine of info. Now honestly, most of those folks profiles and even some of their pictures were off putting to me. But I only needed one therapist among the many. I found her. Gold.
Now one more thing. Most clients are not suicidal. So most therapists seem unsure what to do with us. They worry about having to report us to the authorities. Some of us worry about that too. So go to therapy and in the first session say suicide crosses your mind but nothing imminent. NOT IMMINENT.
If that is not enough to get them off the suicide worry track and on to helping you with the underlying issues, then they have no business trying to help you because you will never build up a connection of any real depth with them.
I wish you the best.
can you let me know? ive been thinking about it for a year or so. mostly because of my friend just so hed stop bothering me however i think i might get something out of it. but i have my own problems with it. i hope it works out for you 🙂
Hi Hope Dream Love, It will be interesting to see what Uonlyhaveurself has to say after the first session. How about if I share my perspective? I have been in therapy for going on 5 years. Not to worry, she has her work cut out for her. I am 61 years old so these traumas go back some 50-60 years and she has worked her tail off unearthing the mess and that probably has a lot to do with the 5 years it has taken. It has been worth it all the way. In my comment above I described how I found her. It is a life changing experience and it is positive. Even if I off myself some day just because it is the compassionate thing to do, I will have lived a much much much better life thanks to her help.
overall has it help with the thoughts? i would like to get them under control. like a lot of quotes i read say, i dont want to die i just want to stop the pain. however with the way this world is turning upside down in a every man for himself sort of way maybe dying is the better option.
It has reduced the number of daily suicide thoughts by a lot. I t has reduced the time I spend thinking about it a lot. It has changed the very way the pain operates.
Basically, the pain has changed from happening whenever/wherever for long duration, like days, to just a brief shot of it, like minutes. My pain, living day to day, is quite brief these days. That said, I do catch the most pain that I do catch in therapy but that is under the direct management of the therapist, it is far more tolerable than if it just happened whenever/wherever and she is very good at knowing how much I can handle and controlling it for me in real time and I know that pain is going for a good cause.
When our pain is awful we either want it to stop or we want to put a full stop to us. The world is upside down in a whole lot of ways but this is perhaps manageable after all.
No one can tell you when dying is the better option or not. That is your call. But I decided to get therapy for my complex trauma and the trauma effects are steadily being eroded.
i spend 24/7 thinking about death. i just want it to all stop but it seems like something causes me pain every day. i just cant escape the memories. i cant make the thoughts stop.
24/7, just like me, when I started therapy. The world is a trigger rich place, so yes pain can happen almost every day. I have the memories, still, plus therapy has turned up long forgotten ones. So what happens in EMDR is that we get to reprocess the painful events with a caring therapist right there with us. After any where from two to say about ten reprocess efforts the pain associated with that memory stops. I totally remember what happened, still, but the mental agony is missing from it. The good news is that not every single awful event has to be reprocessed. The brain clusters similar events.
One really clever aspect of EMDR is that you only need to remember what happened but do not need to tell it all to the therapist, unless you want to. The therapist can see in your body movements the intensity of the thing and will take very simple, highly effective steps, to help you reprocess that event.
Because of the severe, prolonged, comprehensive abuse I suffered, at the hands of many people and that starting at infancy, plus that I waited until into my late 50’s to get going with therapy in earnest, the therapy has taken years but I am ok with that.
I’m lucky to have friends that listen and give feedback, probably more than a therapist would be allowed to say. But whether we’re talking about friends or therapists, it all comes down to this: talk is talk.
The question to anyone seeking therapy is, will your problems go away through an attitude adjustment? Or do you require tangible efforts to fix your life? Do you just need a pep talk so you can apply for a good job, or do you need to be able to afford an education for better skills or a lucky break just to get an interview? Talk won’t help with the latter.
So I suppose what any therapy seeker should ask before spending a bunch of money is: are my problems imagined, or are they real?
If they are real then maybe you’d be better off using that therapist’s $100/hr few to solve those problems instead of talking about them. At least that’s what I would do if I had that money to spare.
I think it just helps to have someone listen honestly. I need at least someone to know how I am feeling