When treatment itself is the trigger?

[Sunset]

I was not a minor for any of it, except the one bit when I was really young and forced to keep with a treatment that was making me suicidal because I was supposedly too young for suicidal ideation.

The thing for me is I'm not chronically or even frequently suicidal, I just tend to have a very different way of looking at things that for some reason makes therapists nervous. I have a bit of a dark way of looking at life combined with a very religious tendency to look towards an afterlife. I'm the sort of person who would find the Capuchin Crypt peaceful and relaxing. I have a pretty gothic personal style and a tendency to be very involved with my faith and adopt a more religious outlook on things. In part this is my response to some of what I didn't like about how therapy went - I feel like religion gave me the acknowledgement that some things about life are just wrong, and how to handle that, that therapy never would. I might even think about how I would handle death, because it would be important to me to have the appropriate rites, and I realize even young I could perfectly well be hit by a car crossing the street. That and my brain tends to store plans for everything, even things I would never in a million years do.

And I feel like for some reason that tends to trigger as "suicidal" to a lot of people, even when I have no hurry to end my own life.

 

[joeylittle]

That's a really cogent description, @Sunset - specifically about how your religious beliefs/ overall philosophy relate to death. Also, since you're not actually suicidal, as you say - perhaps this is just the territory you don't go into in detail. Wait until you know the person better.

It's hard to fight what might be a misconception of a lifestyle (goth) alongside trying to get help with mental health. I think if you are willing to let your belief system take a back seat in your psychiatric relationship - until you and they know each other - it might help.

Again, not fair. But prejudice is prejudice, it comes in all forms.

 

[BlueOrange]

I've always felt that it's grossly unfair that when we need help the most, that's when it's hardest to access help that doesn't make things worse.

Getting help without being overly threatened by it is something I found extremely difficult to learn. You have to present yourself in a 'helpable' way, and it can feel dishonest to do that when you're filled with turmoil.

When everything gets all tangled up, I try to focus on one fixable thing. It not might be the biggest or smallest thing. Fixing any part of the mess reduces the complexity of the mess.

 

[Sunset]

I don't know. If I say anything about having had trouble with treatment before, I feel like I have to explain a lot to be believed. But if I don't say anything I feel like I get written off as uninvested and not willing to accept help, because the trust issues can't be addressed. I don't feel like I really get to know the therapist, or they know me, until the stuff that I don't trust them to know comes up. Even then...therapy's just impossible to actually get to know someone in the way you'd need to get to know them to trust them, for me. It's so weird and stilted and you can't really get to know and trust someone without seeing them in other environments than a sterile office one-on-one setting.

It's a Catch-22 because in some ways I'm still in some very difficult places in life. I feel like I've adapted an outlook that's protective and lets me deal with things that are just bad. It relates to some of what I said earlier, that therapy often feels very unrealistic to me. Very much like everyone can just take time whenever to work on whatever the therapist wants. It reminds me of an incident in college, where it was just before finals week and the therapist kept telling me don't worry so much and therapy takes time, and asking me why I was just so impatient? Truth was, I was trying to get away from an unhelpful family life. To do that I needed to keep my scholarship, and the stuff I was dealing with was impacting my grades. Long-term solutions didn't matter because they were going to be pretty irrelevant unless the short-term crisis got solved.

 

[BlueOrange]

That makes a lot of sense. Maybe the thing to do is to strengthen other supports, leave therapy for another time.

 

[Sunset]

Part of the trouble I'm having is, with crisis after crisis after crisis, I'm finding I can never get out of crisis mode. And the thing is, my life story is the exact thing they say don't worry about because that never happens. When you've heard 3, 4 times, things are better now it won't happen again, you're just being paranoid, and then it does happen again, you stop believing it. The reality is I'm never going to be able to address any of this stuff until someone can give me an actual answer for why seemingly rare and entirely unrelated crises keep happening to me and what I can actually do to stop them. But that's work that I can't find a single person on the PLANET to do.

 

[Lucycat]

until someone can give me an actual answer for why seemingly rare and entirely unrelated crises keep happening to me

because there is no answer. Nobody can give you a 'why'. It is the same for all trauma sufferers -'why me?' is asked so often. I hear that you are saying 'why me again and again?' but it is the same thing. There is no reason and you will wear yourself out if you keep seeking the impossible.

 

[joeylittle]

The reality is I'm never going to be able to address any of this stuff until someone can give me an actual answer for why seemingly rare and entirely unrelated crises keep happening to me and what I can actually do to stop them.

I'm going to be a little annoying here: As @Lucycat says, there is no "why" to anything. So if that's your criteria, you are setting yourself up for never getting help. Secondly, I'd like to challenge your definition of "crisis" - because I believe you do have more power to "stop" them, but not in the way other people have told you in the past.

There are many, many horrible and unfair and painful and violent things that happen in this world. How we survive them and move past them depends a great deal on what we decide to do about them. There's a concept in DBT called "radical acceptance", and it's essentially the ability to say to yourself "this thing sucks, but it is the truth of my reality at the moment, and I accept that". Fighting with our own reality is what causes a lot of pain and suffering.

The thing your entirely unrelated crises have in common is you. I don't mean they are your fault - not at all - but I do mean that you are the one who is (to a certain extent) holding onto these things as crises.

Something people do: we don't notice when the crisis has passed. So, your landlord comes in with no notice and screams at you. I can see how that would feel like crisis. But then your landlord leaves. The crisis has passed. It's very hard to actually acknowledge this when it's the thing that is happening, because the crisis point is big and terrifying. But you aren't in that event 24/7. You live in an environment where the (sucky) reality is that your landlord is a major trigger for you. And that isn't good for you, doesn't seem ethically right, and there is no apparent recourse.

But it's reality. If you can accept it, it's not going to be a crisis all the time. It will be at a crisis level when he surprises you - or you might find that you actually can adjust to that as well. You won't know if you hold onto it as a constant crisis.

Reality is: you had a really bad experience with the mental health system - and I don't mean to be diminishing it by calling it "really bad" - it was awful, unfair, terrifying, and has stayed with you in very real ways. But it happened. It is not happening. This is kind of at the center of a lot of PTSD work. Getting the events of the past to be part of our history, not our present.

Life is a series of risks, and mental health care isn't exempt from that. I think you'll need to get to a place where you are willing to try again with a new therapist, or new therapy, even though it is a risk. It's really, really hard, I get it, I do - but you can only control your own actions and responses, not those of others. And until you feel ready, there isn't going to be anyone who can prove to you that they are the right person for you. But when you feel ready, you can find someone who can offer the treatment you want.

Have you ever thought about trying a group, or DBT? Or even getting DBT tapes and working on them on your own? It helped me a great deal with the "why me" stuff.

 

[Sunset]

I think you're misunderstanding things. It's not "why me" in that sense. It's more a mismatch between the world as I experience it and the world a lot of treatment seems to presuppose. It's that a lot of times I'm coming up with a sense something is off. And I'm being told no, that's just your PTSD talking, you need to relax and not react so much to things, you're seeing it wrong. I'm being told I'm paranoid and I see people as too black and white and see predators too quickly. And then later events prove I wasn't seeing it wrong, and if I'd listened to my instincts rather than trying to apply all the not worrying and getting better stuff I wouldn't have been in trouble because I'd have been able to head things off earlier.

It's like when I was younger and being called paranoid and told I needed to work on the issues that were making me go out of my way to avoid a violent ex. When that wasn't true at all, but that's what I got when I sought help for the stress it was causing me.

And ironically, when I have taken steps to accept what is going on, that seems to be when I have the most trouble. Because most professionals tell me I'm being too dark, it's not possible for things like that to keep happening, that I need to accept that the world is better than what I'm saying. That I'm needlessly stressing myself out over things that almost certainly won't happen, even though such things have happened repeatedly.

(And as an aside, what made it so horrible with my landlord was that he was giving notice - and he'd deliberately pick times when I would be in the house and none of my roommates would be. And I didn't feel safe leaving him alone around my kitty so I had to be there.)

 

[Sunset]

Anyone? That's my big problem with CBT/DBT stuff. I understand the idea, I really do, but then every time really bad stuff has happened in my life I've been told I'm overreacting and seeing things too black and white and overthinking and everything. And then I listen to people telling me that and I get hurt because it was just a bad situation but everyone was telling me it wasn't and it was all my PTSD making me think it was bad.

 

[joeylittle]

It's more a mismatch between the world as I experience it and the world a lot of treatment seems to presuppose. It's that a lot of times I'm coming up with a sense something is off. And I'm being told no, that's just your PTSD talking, you need to relax and not react so much to things, you're seeing it wrong. I'm being told I'm paranoid and I see people as too black and white and see predators too quickly. And then later events prove I wasn't seeing it wrong, and if I'd listened to my instincts rather than trying to apply all the not worrying and getting better stuff I wouldn't have been in trouble because I'd have been able to head things off earlier.

Well, I do think you're a very black and white thinker. Do you agree? I'm not being specific as to how you read people, as you say above - but your sense of what every therapist/doctor has told you is this: you are hearing them say to do exactly the opposite of your instincts; and they are (according to you) telling you to do it to the extreme. Just your use of the statement, "you're seeing it wrong" puts you and the therapist in the black/white right/wrong dichotomy.

You also say "a lot of times". Now, as a challenge to that description, what's a good definition of a lot of times...say, 5? Can you name five separate events in which you experienced telling them one thing and being told back that the opposite was true?

I'm honestly not trying to be horrid to you. But I suspect the reality is more complex than you are painting it. I suspect you have had some really shitty interactions with the profession, and you were put inpatient against your will, which is terrifying. But - and it's just my opinion - I suspect that sometimes, you've had some cognitive distortions (all/nothing, black/white, mindreading, and catastrophizing are the ones I see) and unless you become willing to examine your symptoms and challenge them, you're not going to get anywhere.

By the way: I'm a catastrophizing mind reading black and white thinker myself. Now, about a year after really learning to challenge those thoughts and dismiss their associated feelings, I can honestly say I'm much more able to really do the hard work in therapy.

 

[Sunset]

I was actually not put inpatient against my will - I was instead forced to go home to a very bad family situation by being told I would be both forced inpatient and kicked out of college if I didn't, as well as having confidential information told to my manipulative mother.

I'm curious where you see the cognitive distortions? One of the things is, having abuse in a therapeutic context, many of those very same terms were used to justify abuse. I mean, "you're seeing it wrong" is hardly my phrase or something I'd use - it's just my paraphrase for being told that this or that cognitive distortion is what's going on when you say you don't think x or y is good or appropriate.

I'm willing to examine my symptoms, but what I've seen in therapy isn't examining them so much as substituting the therapist's view for my own. And I'm not willing to do that. What I need is an explanation of, say, what separates black-and-white thinking from just plain deciding someone is bad news, or catastrophizing from being in a very bad situation.

Stuff like, say, explaining the landlord situation and being told I'm catastrophizing for saying I can't do what multiple lawyers had told me I couldn't do, would be common. Or earlier in the situation I might say, I feel like he has something after me, and being told stuff about mindreading and whatnot - when later on it became painfully obvious to everyone he did have some thing about me.

Or same thing when I said it's really important to me to be able to go to a church of my faith on sunday, but I want to see my family and they don't support me and make it hard, and suddenly I'm getting jumped on for using "should" statements, when all I'm doing is trying to be Catholic the way everything I've learned has said - and that one specifically I felt like stemmed from the therapist's views on religion.

I guess I feel like...I've been told most of my life my thinking is bad and distorted. If I weren't so oversensitive, if I didn't insist on seeing things so black and white, if I weren't always seeing the worst, if I could just let go of those nasty ideas of what's right...you get the idea. And I feel like I'm just finding my feet where I can say no this is bad and I want out and I don't care how many people tell me it's ok I know it's wrong. And then therapy tells me about all these distortions, but they don't explain how I tell the difference between the "distortions" I've spent lots of time being told I suffered from that were used to keep me in abusive situations and that I still struggle with sometimes, and the distortions that are causing problems now...