I’m aware the premise makes no sense.
Over the years I’ve been in and out of therapy. In my teens I had a serious enough depression to necessitate medication to somehow level me, a few years after that I went back because I felt I wanted to unpack a few things from my early years, after that I went back to pick up on the work I left behind, after that I went back to try to find a way to cope with the eminent loss of someone very dear to me and very recently I went back because I felt the need to give it another try to unpack a lot of wrongs in my head.
Unfortunately, every single time, as I try to go back and pick on the process - and I feel the need to stress that I’ve been received by multiple professionals over the years - I’m always directed, more or less openly, not towards what I want to resolve but towards something completely unrelated. And no, I am not a professional in mental health but I think I am minimally qualified to know what I think/understand is bothering me and want to explore and try to find a solution/rationalisation for so I can drop that issue or at least drop it in value in my mind so I can move forward.
Instead, my concerns have constantly been ignored or overlooked and all type of approaches been tried to deviate me, as such:
- hypnosis (went horribly wrong)
- cognitive and behavioural shift (as in “You are acting/feeling/thinking wrong.”)
- completely ignoring my concerns
- openly antagonising me
- a very veiled attempt to create in me a notion of “faith in a higher power” (I’m laic)
The last approach is to try to teach me how to meditate.
I have always been received by licensed professionals, two of them through my NHS; no spiritual counsellors nor anything in the like.
I’ve been able to make more breakthroughs by reading philosophy books than by sitting in a chair and talking back and forth with a therapist. But I always get the feeling that I really need some degree of counselling I am not getting.
Am I being paranoid, unlucky or just expecting something that isn’t at all aligned with reality?
Situations like you describe are sad and extreme. Fortunately not my situation but it does not stop me from relating with what you shared about your brother. In my lowest point, under the effect of medication that was supposed to help I still remember the feeling of numbness, the fogginess in my head, how it was hard to think and even explain myself. Nobody really cared when I said I wasn’t feeling well. I was expected to comply, to be peaceful, silent.
I’m not afraid of going where it hurts. In fact, that is exactly where I want to go. Peel back the layers, expose the wound and analise everything that piled on it and was put on top of it to prevent it to fester and keep me going and functional as a productive member of society. What made me into what I became and that I want or need to discard in order to be a better person.
I never went to therapy with the same problem or issue in hand; I went back when I stumbled into something I could not solve by myself or when I felt overwhelmed or truly in need of some guidance. Getting several professionals telling me either flat out I do not need to look into what is troubling me or that I should not when that is precisely what I am looking for makes no sense to me.