Posted by Tabitha on March 24, 2011, at 1:29:31
In reply to Re: I withdraw my previous post, posted by sigismund on March 24, 2011, at 0:06:13
Toetapper, I appreciated your post and I'm sorry it created discord & regret on your part.
Everyone else, thanks for giving me encouragement to write about it here. I'll fill in a bit of what I'm going through. It's hard to write it down as it seems to become a long rant every time I talk about it. For basic stats I've done 17 years and $200-300k with current T, who I thought was "a good one" most of this time. Prior there were some mediocre and one who really hurt me, but fortunately those were briefer. It's not really particular flaws of particular therapists that's the issue for me. It's just that I realized it wasn't working the way I'd once expected it to, and it wasn't working the way it once had, and when I started looking at the assumptions that I saw built into the whole undertaking, I realized I couldn't even believe them any more. It really feels like I had a belief system I didn't much question supporting it, and it all collapsed. Or it collapsed slowly over time, and I just hadn't wanted to see it.
This is going to seem impersonal and perhaps a bit boring, but it's overwhelming to try and sum up the history of it, and the events, and describe what we've done. These are beliefs that no longer seem true to me
1) That it's possible for me to determine a cause and effect for my feelings or moods or personality characteristics by thinking about it and talking about it. This assumption is so ingrained into what we do, and it's just seeming absurd to me. I can spin up stories and 'insights' all day long about why I might feel the way I feel or do the things I do. They're never really true or false. How could such stories ever be true or false? They're not verifiable. This is one where I told her many many years ago it just seems like I'm speculating and making up theories. I don't know how to decide if they're true or not. She told me that the ones that 'resonate' are true. Well none of them really resonate. Sometimes one will resonate, then it doesn't seem true or valuable at all later. I assumed I was lacking some kind of ability to do this and I'd gain it over time. I never did! I just got more and more impatient with trying to do something that I can't do, and doesn't even seem logically possible to do.
2) Corollary to the above: that it's possible for me to tell what's true by whether it resonates (meaning feels more intense internally). There's a huge contradiction here! On the one hand, I've been educated about transference, and how the most compelling true-feeling belief can be false. Yet when applied to cause-and-effect theories about myself, I'm supposed to ignore this and look for the resonance. It's ridiculous.
3) that looking inward and exploring inward is a good response to emotional distress. That there's some valuable truth or experience in there I need to dig for. If I can't find a cause, I can find some important process working itself out, some meaning, right? Just never worked. I kept looking. I've found the opposite is more true for me. Looking inward is a bad response to emotional distress. It makes it more intense and keeps me stuck longer. I'm too inward-looking to begin with! There's a theory that depression is actually caused by rumination (thinking too much about problems) and I can believe it. When I actually try to limit the exploring inward, I move through emotional distress more quickly.
4) that 'insight' leads to changed patterns of feelings and behavior. I'm not even sure therapists believe this one anymore. It feels like my thinking changes as a result of new behaviors and experiences, not the inverse. The sort of forced insights I dredge up in therapy really don't seem to lead to change for me. I have thousands of pages of journals of my insights and looking back, I either had the same one over and over and over with no change, or they just don't even seem true any more.
5) that I have an inner child and I need to talk to her and form a relationship with her, and not doing so is tantamount to child abuse. We tried to use this one for my procrastination of chores. Supposedly my inner child was blocking me and I was supposed to bargain with her and pay attention to her. I think I got 15 minutes of progress once with this approach. The exact opposite works better for me. I need to put my feelings of distress aside entirely and do what needs to be done. I need to plow through my own resistance. Then I actually do feel better, after accomplishing something.
6) that talking about problems and pain is going to relieve it. Sometimes it seemed like it did, but even then, it also seemed to distract me from taking action. It felt like I'd had some important progress in therapy that was more important than anything I might need to do in life. It felt like I'd done my work for the day (or the week) and needed a break. More often, all the talking and venting just seems to intensify it. I come out feeling worse than when I went in. Things I didn't even notice bothered me, blossomed into huge problems in the therapy session. I know the argument-- this is important stuff we brought up. Well maybe so, but isn't it equally possible it's just manufactured distress?
7) that the process of therapy has the power to change me. We were supposed to be working out relationship issues, or working out old trauma, or something. I was supposed to change as a result. Sure, I changed over the 17 years I was doing it. It just didn't feel like the changes were related to therapy. At one point I truly believed that people who weren't in therapy weren't going to grow or change. Over time I see people who aren't in therapy experiencing plenty of growth and change. This really shocked me! I thought their growth must not be real or something, just a facade. Where did I even get this idea?
8) fix your internal world, and the external world will fall into place. Why did I ever buy this?
I still can't figure out how to make myself change. It does seem like I achieve some things I set out the achieve. But the timing doesn't seem under my control at all. I struggle and struggle and struggle for years with no progress. Then sometimes areas that were impossible get easier. When I look for "why did that improve" the only things I can find are actual real changes in circumstance. I don't find internal change causing it at all! Quite the opposite.9) that therapy is mental health care. I'm embarrassed to have charged so much to insurance and taken advantage of insurance parity legislation in my state. It isn't health care. For a while after I realized it didn't feel like health care, I thought Ok, well it's more like education. It's necessary education I didn't get growing up. I can't see it as education anymore, since I've lost faith in the tenets of it. It really seems like a form of entertainment, in the sense that interests and hobbies are entertainment. If you enjoy mucking around in your head and inventing stories about yourself, Ok then. Nothing wrong with that. But viewed that way, it should feel good, or feel like mastering challenges, like other hobbies. It doesn't. It feels bad most of the time. It feels bad like some unpleasant thing you have to do to get better. But if I no longer believe it's going to 'get me better', and it doesn't feel good, then what is it? It's a habit and a dependency
I'm actually still going. I've cut back from 3 hours a week to 1.5 hours every other week. I was afraid stopping suddenly would create some kind of emotional backlash and I'd end up getting sucked back in entirely. So far I'm functioning better without it.
poster:Tabitha
thread:980953
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110206/msgs/981037.html