For years, I believed that therapy didn’t work for me. In the first session, I either felt like it was “too much” for the therapist to handle, or that my problems were not serious enough to require therapy. It wasn’t until he realized that perhaps it was his ADHD that he began to think of his approach as a trait rather than a flaw, and realized that perhaps he needed a therapist who understood ADHD.
I was right at first. After the 45-minute session, I felt seen for the first time and felt even more energized. My therapist also had ADHD, but was able to easily follow my “information dump” stream of consciousness sessions. She understood all of the shame that my traits caused over time, and she helped me begin to unravel my issues with emotional dysregulation.
However, after about 18 months, I felt that the treatment was no longer effective.
I’ve been burnt out at almost every job I’ve ever had. Tech support, freelancing, and marketing roles all ended up in the same place. It’s the mental image of punching a pancake into a brick wall, with a ghostly feeling. For several weeks after that, I couldn’t produce anything at all.
This tended to occur in environments or situations where I felt my voice was stifling. When you feel like a cog in a machine serving an organization’s purpose at the expense of yourself, when the same back-breaking work never seems to end.
Of course, I never expected something like that to happen during treatment.
I had been undergoing eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trauma therapy for nearly a year, but experienced triggers so severe that I became convinced that EMDR was not working for me. At least not to the extent that I felt it was working. To build the necessary boundaries.
I began to feel that the “healing” work would never end. My therapist and I seemed to be endlessly reliving the same memories without feeling any new peace. Not knowing what other “key performance indicators” to achieve, I began to feel left out of treatment and like a failure.
After trying to explain this, my therapist insisted that I was much further along than I thought. So why didn’t I feel that way?
I messaged my therapist between sessions, which we agreed I could do, but I got frustrated and frustrated when she didn’t respond. My ADHD rejection dysphoria kicked in and her “ignoring” me made me feel abandoned, tipping the balance of my transition from healthy to unhealthy. It was exactly how I felt in other unhealthy relationships when I was given the silent treatment for not meeting expectations.
In fact, when my therapist asked me if she could consider treating me for depression, it was less like an offer of help and more like a signal to me that she didn’t know what else to do. could hear. All I heard through my filter was that there were conditions that had to be met to receive help. I needed to get my symptoms under control before she could continue working with me.
Shortly thereafter, I stopped treatment.
I then enrolled in a 6-week intensive program of energy healing combined with life coaching. For the first time, I learned how to describe how different emotions feel in my body, along with different meditation methods. I started making big changes in my mindset. For example, from an “either/or” mindset to a “both/and” mindset.
But by the time it was over, I was ready to complete all the healing. Even though I tried so hard, I still didn’t feel “healed.” Then again, he always had one trigger to work out and one more test for others to determine if they felt “safe” with me around. I was exhausted.
But for myself, the first time I had to slow down and listen to myself, I realized that I was doing things differently. There were no expectations to meet, no spiraling attempts to explain myself to others, and no need to consider other people’s opinions, so it was just me and my intuition.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to get to that point without all that hard work. After years of hearing that this is not the case, I had to slow down, listen, and hear that it was okay to trust my intuition. I also had to learn how to listen.
I started focusing more on body work and energy work. Reiki healing has helped me continue to change my mindset. Yin yoga has begun to help stretch the connective tissue where trapped emotions are said to be stored. I listened to solfege music while I slept, listened to binaural/bilateral music while writing in my journal, and continued all the work I started with EMDR at my own pace.
I also started making more of an effort to meet friends who I felt accepted me the same way I felt accepted. Granted, this has led to the loss of some friendships, and I’ve come to realize that the relationship has been much more unbalanced and even toxic, but it’s not the kind of situation I believed to be of my own making. did.
It took me several months without treatment and slowed down to the mental pace I needed to realize that all along I had been unconsciously reacting to a ticking time bomb buried deep in my subconscious by the boundaries of treatment. .
Growing up, I believed I had a problem that needed to be “solved.” So asking for help meant having to prove that I was worthy of it. Proving that I wasn’t a lost cause meant proving that I could understand myself enough to identify my “problem areas.” It was a form of people-pleasing, but I didn’t think it was traumatic because I hadn’t yet questioned what it was, much less why I believed it.
However, I soon realized that these beliefs kept me in an endless loop, trying to prove that even if I wasn’t pursuing what my therapist wanted, I could still try and achieve my goals. Ta. Not getting answers felt like giving up.
I now believe that my early burnout was related to the same underlying issue. I felt like I needed to prove my worth to people who had never set the bar before, or who had continued to set the bar very high. I was never able to develop a sense of myself or my abilities, an internal indicator that would help me communicate the discrepancy.
The world we live in does not allow for this kind of deep introspection. Most people work multiple jobs and bounce back and forth from day to day. There isn’t much room left for it to exist. The “self-care” and “forest bathing” trends only work when you’re too stressed to listen.
I still don’t know if the real purpose of therapy is to learn to listen to myself or just to cope better with my life. choose Because it is the standard by which others have achieved success. What I know: Therapists and coaches can help us untangle our minds and hearts, but ultimately only we have to answer.
Christa Miller I’ve been a professional writer for over 20 years, publishing work that includes niche trade, nonprofit, and local lifestyle articles, content marketing, journalism, peer-reviewed research, and novels for children and adults.
