I have tried therapy on and off for a while now. People would always get frustrated with me and tell me to "get therapy," but I never knew what I was actually supposed to be there for. And I tried a service like BetterHelp before (can't remember what this one was called), but it just sucked ass and I'm not sure if the people on there were even licensed professionals.
I finally started going consistently with this one therapist, but I frequently get frustrated with her for not giving me actual coping skills or techniques. One of her favorite things to ask me is "how can you deal with X?" And I get frustrated and say "I don't know." Because if I fucking knew I wouldn't be in therapy. She seems to do a more meandering talk therapy style thing with vague ideas of DBT and CBT thrown in there. She's not giving me enough skills to not get fired at work. She helped me go through a difficult time, but now that that's over, I'm back to square one.
So I found a therapist who specifically states she does DBT. Over time I have learned that my core issue is emotional dysregulation which is treated by DBT. She told me she follows this one workbook. I got the book. It's great! It gives you a zillion and one coping skills. But after having several sessions with her, I notice that she spends the entire time just going "in chapter 4, this happens. Then in chapter 8, this happens" while my eyes just glaze over. Today the session ended 35 minutes early because she only vaguely contributed to me talking about a problem I had today.
I have been seeing both therapists concurrently until my deductible resets in January.
I just am so endlessly frustrated with the entire mental health industry. I've seen so many different therapists. I've really tried to do any exercises that they have given me. I've tried multiple different psych meds (trying a new one now actually!).
Nothing works. Nothing has changed about me. I'm the same person with the same problems. And nothing I seem to try makes a lick of difference. I try so hard. I try a zillion different things...exercise, getting good sleep, eating right, therapy, meds...nothing changes me. Nothing helps me.
What in the everliving fuck am I missing? Do I have to go through 30 different therapists before I can find one that can help me? Am I just doing therapy "wrong"??? What am I supposed to be doing here?
Through all this, I've found that telling someone to "go to therapy" is almost offensive...it just absolves others from caring about you and makes it sound like you're not willing to do the base effort in bettering yourself.
Sorry for the long post and thanks for taking the time to read.
Idk why everyone in this thread is telling me I am not trying. :( I am trying so hard. I do all of the exercises they tell me. I practice the skills. I listen to what they tell me and try my very hardest to digest it. I have been attending therapy for many many months now and I have been really truly trying. But I am still the same person.
There's no magic moment when you Become You. It's gradual and takes years and most of the time it's effective it's also apparently unrewarding, and there's no way to tell the difference between "this is useless and i should move on" and "this isn't immediately rewarding and i should be patient" except to experience the results. With experience it does get easier to tell the difference. At this point, I know within 3-4 sessions with a new shrink whether it's a good fit or not, but I've been at this for decades by now.
I can say that the session ending 35 minutes early for any reason other than one you agreed upon ahead of time is extraordinary and almost certainly unprofessional.
It's okay to say "You're not helping me, I need X, Y, and Z from now on" and if they can't provide that then just move on, or if you're sure just say "You're not giving me what I need, I'm moving on."
I also dunno about all this workbook shit. At that point you might as well join a support group or get on an app or shudder talk to AI for a helluva lot cheaper. In fact, I've had several support groups that were leaps and bounds more helpful than the shrink I was seeing; more honest, more direct, more empathetic and experienced. If someone handed me a workbook and told me to do "therapy" out of it I'd drop it on the floor, never return, and refuse to pay for that session. Therapy is done with a therapist, afaic. They're welcome to recommend reading or whatever (and often that helps), but therapy isn't a fucking worksheet, it doesn't follow a formula or a flowchart. I'm willing to bet $20 most of those zillion skills are just so many myriad reframings and permutations of the same two or three principles.
A good therapist doesn't just ask you how you can deal with X (though that is in fact an important part of it), a good therapist works with you to help you figure out how you can deal with X, including making suggestions of their own. A good therapist doesn't just watch you sputter and flounder on the high sea asking, "jeez looks like a tight spot you're in there, how ya gonna get outta that?", they throw the therapist's metaphorical equivalent of a float and bring you aboard and place you (to the extent possible in the circumstances) in calmer, shallower water. Conversely, a good therapist also knows your strengths and will challenge you when they know you're not living up to them, whether through laziness or mental block or you just hadn't thought of it that way or whatever.
Fuck anyone who implies you're not trying hard enough or that a mediocre therapist is good enough. You can tell good and well for your own damn self that it ain't workin; TRUST YOURSELF. Yes, it's important that you do most of the work and yes, some people or some issues can tolerate mediocrity, blah blah blah. Is that working for you? Seriously ask yourself. Keep trying 'til you find the right one. But don't drop the one until you've picked up another, if possible. less-than-ideal therapy is usually better than no therapy at all.
Oh, and medicine. It's very important that you get the right medicine. In my experience, I know within 2-3 weeks whether and how a medicine is working and when a psychiatrist tells me "lets check back in 2-3 months" It's almost always more to do with their scheduling than anything of theraputic import.
Granted, I didn't exactly try to stop her from hitting the end call button. But when me trying to talk about my experiences was just met with "ok well I don't like that part of that chapter" or something, I just didn't know what else to say. We stared at each other for a while before she was like welp see you in a few weeks! Idk...I did try to contribute. It just wasn't met with anything overly meaningful. She also spent like 10 minutes talking about how her dog needed extensive treatment and she had a not great day. Like I get that sucks but I would have rather you cancel the appointment than to just not listen to me and then end the call 30 minutes early.
I agree with you to some extent. I was excited when she showed me the book because it's actually a gold standard book for DBT. BUT I was hoping that it would be a supplement to the therapy, not just her telling me how much she loves the book for the entire session and not really say anything to me when I relate things back to my own life. The way she talks about the book all day, you'd have thought she wrote the thing lol!!!
Thank you so so much for saying this. Everyone in these comments is assuming I am not working hard because I don't even know where to begin to deal with X. All these comments effectively saying "introspect and figure it out" isn't helpful to me when that's all I do and I still can't figure out anything!
I kind of feel like I'm a teen just learning how to drive. And instead of explaining how the car works, your parent is just like "drive to that stop sign there." And I'm like...ok but I don't know how to drive yet can you show me? And they are just like "well figure it out. Go drive to the stop sign."
Everyone in here is chastising me for being unable to figure out how to reach the stop sign on my own. I am trying as hard as I can, but I can't get there without being given at least some idea of how to turn on the car, put it in gear, etc. I get that eventually someone could learn to drive that way, but it's gonna take them 20 times as long.
Thank you very much for your kind words. It has been very disheartening for me to hear on a mental health community of all things that I am just not trying. I honestly didn't expect that kind of response from half of all of the people there. It certainly isn't motivating or helpful to me. It just makes me feel even worse.
This second time around, I was searching specifically for a therapist who does DBT because that helps treat "emotional dysregulation", but now I'm wondering if I need to look for a trauma therapist instead.
I look for competency first, not any specific methodology; A doctorate is a good sign but no guarantee. Published papers are even better, read through some if they have them, thought that might correspond to academic competency instead of clinical. I find that the specific method they employ has a lot less to do with success than the person administering it or their experience. Lots of diverse experience is good. Current shrink did some years working in prisons, some years working with disabled veterans, some years working with the blind, some years working with the elderly before she settled down to private practice. I find it allows her a much more open-minded and empathetic perspective just from having seen so much of humanity. Always send them an email before you propose to book their services, that will tend to give you a decent idea of their communication, especially if you can get a decent email chain going, though of course some people are terrible emailers or texters or phone callers but are great in person so don't take any of these as gospel but as clues. I straight up would not consider seeing a shrink over telephone or televisual unless I'd already established an excellent rapport with them in-person.
One thing I always do now is, If I decide to book with them, intentionally find something to criticize. Was I made to wait 5 minutes past the appointed time? Is the chair in the room uncomfortable? Is there a distracting smell in the room? What you criticize doesn't matter as long as it's true and valid, falsity won't do here, just be honest and kind. It should ideally be something they have control over, but I don't nitpick. So, "I'd prefer the shades drawn" is probably a nitpick (unless you're photosensitive or something) but the chair is something you're gonna be sitting in for an hour. What you're looking for is not the solution to the critique, but the response to the critique. Are they dismissive, apologetic, aware-but-there's-nothing-they-can-do-about-it, do they accommodate you, etc. This will tell you a thousand times more than their website blurb about their style. It's testing whether their ego can handle criticism, and whether/how far they'll go to accommodate your needs. I test potential employers this way, too. You can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to honest, valid, kindly-expressed criticism. You'll never be able to tell whether they will be a good fit for you from this, but you can tell from an bad reaction to criticism that they won't be a good fit.
hope this helps
edit: Oh, and ironically I find that it helps to have someone who is different from you in important ways. With a friend, you want someone who you share a lot of common interests with and by extension probably think pretty similarly to. With a therapist it's practically the opposite: you want someone who has Therapy in common with you, and can see things from a different perspective than you do. There's such a thing as too much of this, but in general a perspective that significantly diverges from your own is a good thing.