Benefits of therapy

I've found therapy to be useful in my life.

1. It helped me understand SH and what it means in my life and what is behind it.
2. How to authentically love myself.
3. How to understand that my being okay is not dependent on others around me being okay.
4. Emotions are just emotions and are neither good nor bad.
5. I can get angry and the world won't end (or any other number of bad things)
6. I can trust another person and that trust won't be squandered.
7. Another person can listen to my crap without getting contaminated.

8. How to live with the hallucinations.
That's all I can think of but there's probably more. Kit.

I've learned I have some worth as a human being. I'm not totally damaged. There is a person who understands me. She's taught me coping skills.

Therapy helped me find the confidence to go back to school and is continuing to help me cope with the changes in my life and family that have went with that decision.

I learned an extraordinary amount about myself and about life by therapy ‘failure’:

1) No relationship, no matter how wonderful it feels at times, is worth changing who I am or sacrificing my self-respect
2) I am strong enough to overcome enormous loss and emptiness
3) I am responsible for my own self-care
4) Mistakes are often the best teacher
5) It is okay to burn bridges when I know I can’t return to where I’ve been. At times it is the only option
6) Giving up often takes more courage than holding on
7) I can’t control anyone but myself and my responses
8) I can’t expect the person who broke me to fix me

I basically have alot of ***** in my head and need some place to sort it out.

Me too. My husband calls it my hamster on the hamster wheel. It goes round and round and struggles to get anywhere. Sometimes the hamster gets his leg caught in the wheel and falls wrecking havoc.

Yup. Therapy was, if nothing else (and it was plenty else), a place to get stuff out of my brain and into someone else's. There was great value just in that aspect for me.

Thanks for making this thread.

I have had good therapy and absolutely horrible therapy.

Obviously there are positives to the good therapy, some of which has already been mentioned in this thread. I got to experience what it was like to trust again, which propelled me back into the world and able to trust humans. I got many skills and coping mechanisms and learned about how my experiences in life made me who I am. I learned skills that allowed me to discern abusive people from non-abusive people, and garnered assertiveness in order to prevent further abuse and protect myself. I got self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of self-compassion when a therapist was able to accept me for who I was when I was most vulnerable. I got to see what a healthy relationship looked like and in doing, I have learned that I deserve such things.

The bad experiences were horrendous and I will leave out the details for the sake of this thread, however, I learned a lot about human nature in the bad experiences and the trauma that ensued brought me to an utter breaking point. I lost faith in humanity as a result of my traumatic therapy, but it also was a blessing in disguise; I have found a passion in advocacy and in supporting those who have been abused by therapists. This is NOT effective therapy, but I have managed to find purpose in all of it rather than accepting the abuse was all for nothing. The best thing about the traumatic therapy is that it tested me to breaking point, which in turn showed me who I am. In short, I am a good person and I have to rest in that.

All in all - I can appreciate the good and the bad therapy.

Thanks,
HD7970ghz

This is a great post.

I love what you mentioned about hitting your breaking point, and with that, having it open the door to self-discovery. I relate to that quite a bit. I don’t necessarily view myself as a good person at this time (though recovery has been a work in progress) - but I am able to look at the worst parts of myself which were drawn out with bad therapy and accept them. I was able to tell myself “I may be wrong here, and I may be the bad person in this situation, but I am suffering and not willing to feel this way anymore. I’m going to do what I need to do to take care of myself.”

My therapy outcome can be described in one word: transformative.

I'm not sure how everything fell together so suddenly, likes it's all stacking up like that skyscraper in the UAE or a giant Japanese pagoda. Probably doesnt make sense to anyone reading this but it just came out that way, so I wanted to capture the moment here.

• Explaining the things that hurt me to somebody who appears to understand.
• Feeling heard
• Feeling safe
• Developing the ability to ask for what I need - still a work in progress.

For me the work in progress has been a great lesson for me. I have always felt that I need to be perfect and learning something new I get frustrated when I make slow progress. I have learned that being a work in progress is perfectly acceptable