r/therapy

CBT and therapy in general have been nothing but gaslighting. I used to have a gift. I was very observant and incredibly skilled at spotting danger before it happened. This gift is what has kept me alive in a very dangerous environment. I am not claiming this is a supernatural gift, I don't care about its origin, all I know is that some people are incredibly good at pattern recognition, and some people see things that others miss. I used to be one of them.

Until I was convinced to go to therapy for my PTSD. I have tried several therapists, and they have caused irreparable damage because they all operate under the assumption that you are doing mind-reading, or you have paranoia, cognitive distortions, or trust issues. So, if I see someone acting suspicious and trying to rob me, a typical therapist will label it as a cognitive distortion, mind reading, paranoia, anxiety, irrational fear, whatever, or try hard to find more benign alternative explanations to explain their behavior. As if assault didn't exist. Therapy has damaged me to such an extent that now I always question my sanity. I hate it and I'm livid. Now if someone were to rob me at gunpoint, my first instinctual reaction would be to apply the piece-of-shit CBT techniques and try to reframe it and find alternative benign explanations.

I have a close friend who has been suspecting for years that her husband was having an affair with a coworker he claimed to despise and to find ugly. Everyone said she was crazy, therapists convinced her she had cognitive distortions; I even read their notes. Turns out she was 100% right. He was, indeed, having an affair and he claimed she was ugly and couldn't stand her just to disorient my friend and ward off any suspicion. My friend is now in a horrible divorce and so the lawyers have subpoenaed the therapists' notes. And the girl her ex husband was having an affair with is pregnant.

I told one of my therapists that I had seen a group of people scouting homes in my area and acting suspicious. In his notes, he said I was having ideas of reference and delusions. Then, months later, these people were arrested and it was all over the local newspapers as they would target homes in my area. But according to the POS therapist, I was just acting crazy.

I am livid, rabid, furious at therapists and at the way society promotes therapy as a cure to everything.

My boyfriend (26M) and I (29F) broke up after nearly a year of being together. He’s told me the reasoning for it is that he needs the time and space to go to therapy, get better (working on his communication style - he tends to shut down and struggles to connect with himself to understand how he is feeling and his emotions).

What’s different and tripped me up is that he has promised and is absolutely certain that he wants us to be in each other’s lives at some point. I’ve been in a break up before but this one has brought up some really ugly and scary emotions in me that have taken me by surprise. I am neurodivergent and really struggling to hold the duality of some emotions and feelings I’m having - I feel so hurt that he chose to leave and know I need to move forward and begin to rebuild my life without him. But at the same time I’m not sure how to hold hope and trust that he’s going to work on his stuff. He has promised me that he is going to only act in our best interest during this time apart, and call me a skeptic but I am scared to believe him and get disappointed again.

My headspace is getting darker, I feel myself falling into anxious rabbit holes, I have no energy for things, I’m not hungry, everything feels like effort and I can’t sleep properly. My emotions are an absolute trainwreck and I feel myself swinging from anger to sadness.

He’s never given me a reason to doubt him, but I don’t know how to move on and hold onto hope at the same time.

Please be as kind as you can 🥺I’m a first time poster and not feeling the best but hoping I might be able to find a community who might understand :(

Hi!

Is it common for a family member’s counselor to want to meet me? I was a bit weirded out by it honestly because I feel like it’s lowkey an invasion of privacy and don’t want to intrude or anything.

Is it possible that therapeutic advice simply is not working? Despite sounding very nice and wise. You try to follow the advice and it is only detrimental to you. I feel like therapist either gave me straight out bad advice or just created a mess in my head.

I feel like I always start fawning over any therapist and they just use it to get paid easily. With my current therapist I recently started to feel like I get same AI answers for everything. I can ask chat GPT and it responds me with more thoughtful answers. (I already tryed two therapists, it was always the same)

Advice like:
Just unmask as autistic person, be yourself more!! => you just get bullied
Talk with people about your issues! => they mostly recommend stuff I already considered or just talk nonsense, smalltalk and such
Spend more time with people and you will feel better! => just makes me exhausted, lonely and miserable
I think you may have PTSD, narcissism, be sociopath, although I would never say, you are narcissist, sociopath => I did several psychological and personality tests, all came out as aspergers and minor personality developmental issues caused by bullying by peers and life with aspergers

To get a therapist you have to find one that is licensed in your state and also insured in your state. It doesn't matter if you're doing it virtually. For some reason they still need to fit the license of your state.

On top of that you need to find a therapist that specializes in what you're going through. Not every type of therapy works for everyone. As an autistic person CBT is not super effective for me.

Then you have to figure out if your insurance covers the provider that the therapist is being hosted on (for example, BetterHelp). Your insurance has to cover all of that and you're still going to have to pay a copay. If you're dealing with religious trauma you probably want a secular therapist, which is hard enough to find.

I’m so extremely sensitive. I have so much anxiety too. Every small shift in someone’s tone with me makes me bawl my eyes out. Like my manager (first job at 23, been there for a month) was aggravated but not being mean to me because I put the wrong thing on something and it made me bawl my eyes out and almost quit my job. I hollered for a coworker and they screamed “WHAT” and I had to go to my car and cry. Today I was in Walmart for the first time by myself and got a thing of cupcakes for my manager, I went to self checkout and seen a guy and his wife waiting behind one, so I waited behind a different one. I didn’t know you were supposed to wait in a general line especially since he was behind a different one, as I said I’ve never been there alone and I’m never the one to use the checkout it’s always the person I’m with. Well he looked at me and said “are you waiting in line?” In a tone and I said “yes” and he said, in a really rude tone, “well then you’re gonna have to get behind me”. I said okay.. I started shaking and fighting back tears. Then he ended up letting me go ahead and go in front of him because I had one thing, and I panicked so hard I couldn’t even figure out how to use the card. I got outside and cried my eyes out again. I’m on lexapro for depression & anxiety and it definitely helps but I don’t know Im so embarrassed of being this way. Everyone calls me a crybaby.

First things first- I created this acct specifically for this post/discussion, I don’t want people in my actual life finding out about these deeply buried truths.

A week after I turned 14 I was SA’d by multiple older guys at a party. I won’t include details here- but the abbreviated version is- I am female, and my friend and I were invited to a party that ended up being all older guys. I’d never drank before and had no idea what my limits were, what it would feel like to drink etc. Honestly idk how I didn’t die that night, but as horrible as it was- that was nothing compared to what I’d face at school.

The aftermath at school on Monday was absolutely brutal. I didn’t have parents I could turn to, and school started labeling me a behavior problem. I started to spend more time in the principals office and in-school suspension room. A predatory teacher took advantage, offering support, seeing how abusive my peers were. It changed the entire trajectory of my school career.

I was a freshman, the boys were upper classmen and most had girlfriends. Once those girls caught wind of the story they immediately started targeting me. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without getting verbally assaulted, pushed against walls, reading graffiti about me on the walls. Anyone who had been a friend kept their distance because they didn’t want to be involved. I spent my entire freshman year and most of sophomore year fighting for my life. I lived on edge, ready to defend myself around every corner.

I am now in my 50’s and while I’ve never forgotten any of this, I’ve worked hard to set it aside. The current news is dredging it up and idk what to do with it. I have a good life, I have never felt the need to work through every detail of that night. I know some of those guys who assaulted me have daughters and I do wonder if they even understand the damage they did to that little girl. I grew up faster and got tougher than anyone should.

Again- I have a good life, I love my life and wouldn’t change much, but I am truly heartbroken for the kid who survived this.

I guess I just needed to put it somewhere and landed here. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish, but it felt pent up, needing to be vented so thank you if you’ve read this far.

I've been going to therapy for 3 years now. For the first 3 months I had a therapist I really liked. She had to leave though and I got paired with a new therapist. One of the reasons I started therapy is because I've had a porn/sex addiction for most of my adult life (I'm 38 now). I started therapy after my last relationship ended, which is the longest I've been in and it was only a year and a half. I'll spend hours at a time watching porn. It consumes so my of my time and it absolutely affects my ability to maintain healthy relationships.

Anyway, that's the context. I'm reaching out because I feel like I haven't made any progress in that time. I still struggle to go longer than a week without it. I just feel like I'm making no progress, and every 2 weeks I go in to talk about the same thing over and over again. "I relapsed again, it feels like everything is a trigger", "oh no, what happened?" And it's the same thing every single time.

I've brought this up to him, about my concerns that I'm not making any progress, and that I'm not where I want to be. But he always tells me he things I've made a lot of progress. I just don't see it. And he also says addiction relapse is completely normal, even if it keeps happening over and over again.

Is he correct? Is what I'm experiencing normal? It just doesn't feel right.

salutations, I(20) have been debating getting a therapist for a few years now and for many reasons never did. Now I’m an adult with adult money. my question is, is it worth it?

Recently, i got a new job hopefully by the time my probationary period is over i can decide if i want to get a therapist but i feel nervous. I don’t know what to expect or how I should go about finding a therapist. In my culture things like these are looked down upon, seeking therapy is equivalent to being crazy. so I want to keep it a secret. my goal with therapy is to improve as a person and general advice with relationships(family). I would love to hear about everyone’s experiences and how they changed your life in anyway big or small.

I just sat for about 45 minutes on the floor of my room with a knife in my hand pressing it against my ribs, wrists, even my neck. I have MDD and have been going to therapy, I've had only two sessions so far but reading all these posts about therapy here, about so many people saying that therapy has done irreparable harm to them, made things worse or not helped at all makes me more hopeless than I have ever been. It just feels like a big lie at this point because no one seems to have benefited from it at all.

If you're someone who healed from therapy, who found it helpful, who thinks it can pull me out of this suicidal abyss, please comment to let me know, please give me some hope that's not false.

My therapist is really nice, but so far she hasn't talked a lot about my problems, rather she prescribed me some medicines in my first session telling me that the symptoms are very severe. It's not her fault entirely because I've also been keeping many of my stressors to myself because I haven't felt comfortable sharing them with anyone so far. I feel heard and everything, compared to one other session I had with a different therapist which I did NOT like at all and never went back.

My greatest doubt and fear is that I'm just, like, a worksheet to her, an assignment, and nothing more. My pain means nothing in the human sense to her, except another patient with their own stupid problems among thousands.

I just wanna know if it helps or if I'm just living under false hopes. Please let me know, the pain is unbearable and I can really really use even a fraction of hope.

For context im 16 im a boy and ive been seeing this therapist for about three months, hes about probably late 30s. Anyway in our last session i mentioned how i was sa for years by my uncle and how ive never told anyone i knew that this happened to me and it got very weirdly tense, he started asking what he did to me and stuff. And i did some research beforehand that said that the therapist has to tell your parents if your in danger and they have to legally and stuff so i was kinda guarded mentioning it in the first place. In that session i asked for him not to tell my parents, and he said he wouldn’t, which i was happy about because it was a lot of anxiety weighing on me.

But anyway he continued asking me what my uncle did to me, where he touched, and how often he would do that. I eventually asked him to stop asking those questions and the part that made me want to make this post in the first place is he said that in order to like know if im not in immediate danger i have to explain what happened so that he wont have to tell my parents so i have to like tell him what happened so he knows if im in immediate danger or not.

I understood what he was saying so i told him, making sure to say how long ago it was, but it didnt seem like that was the parts he wanted hear because every time i talked about that he would tell me to move on from that and explain more about what psychically happened to me. In detail that made me really uncomfortable. After the session i felt icky i felt more disgusted with myself but he told me that he wont say anything to my parents so im glad but i still just feel wrong like i said too much and now i cant take it back. Im seeing him again on Tuesday and i just dont want a repeat of what happened yesterday.

Hello, I’m a little nervous posting here but I feel like I need to get some feelings off my chest while being anonymous for now. I have struggled with shyness and anxiety for entire life, and symptoms of ADHD and depression started becoming more apparent during high school. I am now in my senior year of college after struggling through the entire time. My dad died after a very long battle with cancer while I was in college a few years ago, and since then my depression has worsened and my struggles with school and life got so bad that I had to take a semester off and continued to have poor performance in school afterwards.

I have been in therapy for years and years and in college found a therapist who is great. I have also bounced between psychiatrists and have found one now who I am confident will be able to help me with medication (currently Prozac and Ritalin, which have been good so far)

However, I have felt for a few years now that my drinking habits are problematic. I only started drinking in college and have had frequent blackouts and events where I have taken drinking way too far and just acted stupid, embarrassing, or put myself at risk. Recently, I don’t go out to bars at much, but have started drinking by myself more often, or when I start drinking I will stay up all night drinking and not be able to stop. I do not drink most days, but I do sometimes have the urge to drink to deal with stress, and when I do drink I can’t just drink casually. This is also where some issues with cocaine use come in. I never buy it for myself, but I know that my best friend and my boyfriend both have it on them if we go out, even if they don’t mention it. I don’t want to fault them because they are absolutely not encouraging me to take it, but if I’m drunk I will ask them for it and since they’re drunk as well they always give. This doesn’t happen super often, but I am genuinely concerned about my ability to control myself around substances nowadays and it seems to be getting worse. I feel terrible after if I get really drunk and high, but in the moment it feels like the only thing that can take away the pain, grief, and depression I feel.

I guess my question is how do I approach seeking help about this? I like my therapist and psychiatrist a lot but I have this weird idea that I will be judged harshly if I mention having trouble with drugs and alcohol. My mom does know that I tend to have drinking problems (she has struggled with this as well) and regularly checks up on me about that, but I find myself lying to her because I don’t want to disappoint her.

I am just so scared that this will develop further, I’m ashamed of myself, and reluctant to admit that I’m having an issue to anyone despite the fact that I have a great support system. I just needed to vent and see if anyone has ever felt this way or has advice. FYI, my boyfriend is extremely caring and loving towards me and I know would deny me any drugs if I told him about this to keep me safe: I just don’t want him to feel like he is responsible for my actions because I need to learn to control myself. Sorry for the long post.

I've been seeing the same therapist for almost 3 years. I really like them & felt comfortable (which is very difficult for me) & things were going really well until the last 4ish months.

We haven't made any progress at all in these last few months & they say that's because I'm stuck/blocked. They wanted to put me with a different therapist but said they'd be in those sessions with me, I declined. Every session we have switches to a new therapy tactic & I feel like that's part of why we aren't making any progress. I just want to stick to one therapy tactic/style & I tried to express that at the end of our last session & asked honestly if they felt like therapy was even going to help me at this point & if there was any point in continuing but it felt like it just became a fight & I never got a real answer. I sent a long, rambling (possibly even rude) message after leaving that session which just made it all worse but that is all on me. I did apologize repeatedly for that message.

I feel like they're "over it" & are only continuing to see me because they feel they have to? Idk. I won't seek therapy again & they know that but I don't want them to feel like they have to keep seeing me because of that reason. I feel like the therapy is dead in the water.

Does it seem obvious it isn't working anymore & we need to just part ways? Should I just go ahead & cancel the remaining sessions now so they have plenty of time to fill them if needed?

18 yo here. I've always felt i need therapy to cope with life.(frequent anxiety a attacks, episodes, self harm,etc) but I have no idea how to even bring up the idea of going for therepy. I moved cities earlier this year for college and my mental health has deffinetly become worse than it already was. Coming from an Indian household the idea of therapy is already not welcomed. But at this point it feels like that is my only option if I need to get my stuff together. Of anyone on this sub started therepy as a minor it would really help to know how you started your journey with therepy

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Porn addiction feels like hell

Iam deeply addicted in an unconscious way,I feel no connection to porn at all,but it's deeply in my unconscious mind that I can't help it anymore,I just don't understand what happens when I have the urge ,I don't think it's even an urge anymore it's not me when am there it's like addiction taking your mind hostage to feed itself,like a monster in me ,no more thinking no more analysing the only goal is porn,am only 17 but god forbid I tried so much

Does anybody have advice on how to get out of this hell I've been thrown into?