What kind of therapy works for you?

[seabadger]

I read plenty of threads here where people are devastated after therapy sessions. That's an obvious sign the therapy is working. Im doing regular group talk therapy sessions as part of an addiction recovery program and I haven't even been able to tap into my emotions with it yet. There've been instances of other people in the room tearing up when I talk but I feel nothing. Not even sharing the deepest, darkest things I'm carrying, the ones I'm consciously aware of. Im somehow healing, but it's like hair growing it's happening so subtly it's only when I look back at how I was before that I see the progress.

I really want to accelerate this whole thing, I don't know how though. I found out about EMDR and am gonna try it ASAP. I heard of someone doing it on their own, how do you do that? I heard of somatic therapy and ego state therapy but haven't read anything about them. I tried ayahuasca and experienced a full on exorcism. 4 of them actually. That was too much too soon I think. I did iboga once and that was an almighty powerful healing experience, I was incapacitated for weeks after but I'd definitely go for round two with that. I saw my trauma symbolically and was ploughing through it and processing it at lightning speed. For now I need to go for substance free approaches since I'm in a 6 month addiction treatment program and they wouldn't understand about iboga and things like that.

Have you found any highly effective trauma release methods.

 

[EveHarrington]

Sounds like you've tried a lot of alternative therapies and not many standard therapies. I personally recommend CBT, DBT, and ACT as my top three. I don't think anyone should do EMDR on themselves as processing cannot be done in a vacuum. (Processing requires an outside perspective.)

 

[seabadger]

We do DBT here at this treatment place but I find it useless. With that said the counsellor who does it isn't very good at all, maybe with a better counsellor it would work. I tried CBT while at the psych ward, I found it really boring and superficial. Again, probably depends on who's administering it. DBT and CBT seemed like purely conceptual things to me, like sitting in a classroom, i can't see how that has any healing effects.

 

[EveHarrington]

We do DBT here at this treatment place but I find it useless. With that said the counsellor who does...

It has tons of healing effects....for me. You skimmed the surface on both of them so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them. I have childhood trauma so if you have adult trauma, I can't really make any recommendations.

 

[Suzetig]

I read plenty of threads here where people are devastated after therapy sessions. That's an obvious sign the therapy is working

Or a sign that the therapist is abusive and provoking a high level of distress in their clients, or a sign that the process is too quick and the client can't stabilise themselves or a sign that the client is really quite fragile.... I could go on.

The obvious sign that therapy is working is that your symptoms improve and your quality of life gets better - whatever that looks like for you. That might mean you understand yourself better, are more self aware, your relationships generally improve (or aren't getting worse), you end harmful relationships, resolve painful memories , cope with or manage symptoms better - whatever. Distress can sometimes be a side effect of effective therapy for some people it's not a goal in and of itself. Very deep work can be done without any tears at all.

Focus on what's getting better in your own life rather than the level of distress other people seem to feel. What type of therapy have you found helpful in making changes.

 

[8888]

Art therapy has really helped me. CBT helped some but it doesn't seem to anymore so I'm just getting into DBT. I haven't tried EMDR.

 

[Moozie]

Sensorimotor therapy has helped me alot. It combines talk therapy with somatic experiencing. It uses a lot of imaginative work to create a sense of safety and internal attachment.

One of the issues I had was that I everytime I would walk into the therapy room I would get highly activated and on edge that it would be difficult to do any kind of work. No one knew how to calm me down until I saw a sensorimotor therapist. He used my body to track what was going on and relate that back to the original trauma. He then used various activities on me like placing pillows between me and him or drawing an imaginary bubble around myself to create a sense of safety while I was in therapy. Believe it or not it helped.