I get that therapy works for millions of people.

I get nobody wants to believe therapy itself truly just doesn't work for some.

I've heard all the excuses.

"bad therapist fit"

"bad therapist"

"wrong modality"

"wrong level of care"

"stopped treatment too early"

"patient wasn't ready"

"patient didn't put in enough actual work"

"patient went in with a bad, resistant attitude"

and many more.

I've never heard anyone who believes therapy itself just doesn't work for a smaller percentage of people. Whenever you try to propose this idea, everyone jumps to tell you why therapy in general works and why you need to keep trying

well, in my case

I've done 17 modalities over the past 16 years across four different states in all levels of care (hospital inpatient, residental, php, iop, and op) and have done fully in person therapy, fully virtual therapy, and hybrid therapy, and I can't even count how many therapists I've had. The shortest time I did one treatment for was 5 months and the longest time I did one treatment for was six years. But even during that six year period it wasn't the only thing I did. To this day, all the therapy ive ever had was either completely ineffective or made me feel worse permanently for the rest of my life. I still have debilitating symptoms from failed therapies years ago.

"have you tried" "have you tried" "well have you ever tried"

yes, i have tried.

I think it's time to stop blaming me or the therapists and just come to the true, most logical conclusion at this point

by good life i mean having good things in it (good health, social circle, romantic partner, finances, etc.) not symptom-free. please do not reply saying you had a bad childhood but life got better. it's not the case for me and any advice from someone like that does not apply to me.

i did not have a good childhood. i did not have good pre-teens years. i did not have good teen years. i did not have a good college experience. i did not have good post-college young adult years (in the middle of these). i experienced (and documented) trauma from every aspect of my life in every phase of it. the people that made me miserable, right from my parents to peers, are all thriving. i will not have a good experience of my twenties since i will spend them unfucking my life, even in the case that i don't go through worse. i will not have a good experience of my thirties and beyond thanks to climate change. that's it, that's my "life". i feel like i will spend every waking moment grieving never being able to live a life at all

Like what kind of crazy asshole creates this kind of place where humans have such great suffering and pain and horrors? Who would create this fucked up game? Not wanting an answer to this, just venting) Life is just so unfair and so hard for so many people.

I’m really angry. I’m also grieving heavily. The life I didn’t get to have/thought I would have by now, not being able to develop into myself, losing my youth to survival, losing my parents/family etc. I know a lot of us are experiencing this.

I feel like I am in the glacial period of my life wondering if the sun will ever come out again while I watch others around me be in summer. I don’t want to begrudge them their happiness, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous and it wasn’t making me feel bitter. The 20 something year old new nurses that are in the same position as me with the rest of their life ahead of them when I am already 35. The women on my unit who are closer to my age who are married/just married with children and that’s all they talk about. The friend groups who make plans with each other… It all makes me feel like absolute shit. My therapist is suggesting I approach the younger ones from a “mentor” perspective. Maybe I am a dick, but I don’t want that. I want people my age to relate to.

If you struggle with feelings of being significantly behind or feeling like your life sucks compared to everyone else’s, how do you not be bitter about it? How do you keep yourself from slipping into that?

F22. When I was little—for at least four years—a boy my age used to stalk me and threaten to kill me.
I don’t want to go into the details, but for most of my childhood, I didn't leave the house. I was terrified. I would watch other kids playing outside my window, while I couldn't even bring myself to go into the garden.

The situation only "ended" because he was expelled (because of me) and then moved abroad. Life went on for him, but not for me.

When I was in high school (15yo)—seven years after he was gone—I found out he had returned to town. Something must have snapped in my brain, because I became paranoid; for four months, I shut myself in my room with the shutters down because I was convinced he was staring at me from outside (I live on the third floor of an apartment building).

Whenever I try to be a little vulnerable with someone, it seems like the issue is taken lightly or mocked; the only person who doesn't do that is my therapist.

I know that if it had been an adult doing it, things would have been different. Still, I don't understand why the matter is so often downplayed.

I feel like i have a hard time accepting who I am because i’m waiting for the next traumatic thing to change me. It affects how i make all my decisions.

I’m tired of feeling this way. The overwhelming sadness. The emotional loneliness. My body aches from carrying so much and I just need to get it out because I feel it eating me up. Tired of crying. Just straight up tired of it all. Thank you for letting me get it off my chest. Back to the waterworks….

Life is an awful place and everything makes me numb, anxious, sad, angry, and afraid.

Things that should bother most people don’t seem to bother anyone.

People legitimately love animals and say ”I want to be one”. No, you don’t! Animals are killed, eaten alive, and have to travel miles in very harsh conditions to find food. They end up being dinner or they end up starving to death at some point. If you’re born in a farm you are locked in a cage and tortured until you die with members of your own species.

We live in a world where people have to kill and force others to suffer to survive. It is unavoidable. That’s what I see nations as. Groups of people killing other groups of people and forcing their own to participate in the process in some way.

We are trapped in a void that is not favorable to us. We are enslaved to our bodies, genes, circumstances, and environments. A lot of our decisions are made for us and when we think we can decide, we have to manage every little thing. We are hardwired to survive and to protect what little we have against an indifferent, cruel, entropic universe where everything is destined to fade away, decay, and die over time.

I don’t know how anyone sees this place as a good place. I see everything as awful. A lot of that is trauma based. I was held against my will in a psych ward and attacked by one of the patients there. But I was always afraid of people and I didn’t trust anyone for my whole life. Everything made me feel dread and pain. For my whole life I felt dread and pain and then when I do one thing that doesn‘t I feel empty and numb.

It baffles me how people legitimately believe life is a good thing. I mean, I can understand on a cognitive level how they can enjoy their lives. More power to them for finding something to live for or continuing in spite of it all. I am legitimately happy for them. I just can’t feel the same. I genuinely hate being alive and I view each day as a prison sentence. Every time I go to sleep now I say “that’s one less day I can have to be alive”

I wake up from my bogus nightmares and jam myself into the food-processor of my morning routine. In the quiet moment right before I start work my mood is black. All morning while I'm compelled to work I feel like there is no hope and no harmony anywhere, and that such things must be made-up and fanciful.

By midday and eventually, when my shift ends, I find that I usually feel, if not good, then better enough to feel like I can maybe survive. Why can't I ever wake up that way?

Back when I was riding horses we'd trailride out onto Crown land or wherever; then, having reached the half-way point of the route which they knew well, the horses would perk up because they knew they'd soon be back home with snacks and stuff. They would get all cheeky and want to run then. Am I a horse, please advise

This is what pisses me off, its not that i dont want to heal.. its more of "how".. i mean thats what the block is.. my specific trauma how do i fucking heal it, step by step.. give me the instructiins and ill do it, no problem atall.. but it feels like im working this shit out alone and thats whats diffucult/feels impossible

Does anyone else's default expression look like an 1000 yard stare / spaced out?

Its a combination of stress, exhaustion, being overworked / doing too much, and not getting too much sleep, as well as too much staring at a screen all day. It gives me an intense expression, which makes me look like I'm about to be smacked in the face with a football or spaced out / on something.

I told my friend the other day I didn't want to finish up his food, but I kept spacing out and staring at it, which made me look very intent on it, so he asked if I wanted it again.

Not the most important interaction, but you can see why this is bad if someone asks if you're okay, you say you are, but you look like you just have witnessed a car accident or something.

I feel like my expression is more natural and warm with some good sleep, eyedrops, massaging my eyes, being healthy / hydrated, and also taking some time to do breathing exercisesbefore I go somewhere, whether it be to the bathroom, on a walk, or whatever alot, do alot of side hustles

Idk I feel like us with trauma and ptsd tend to do this because its already exhausting to balance work with everything else, so the emotional regulation of facial expressions and body language is hard

I don't know a better way to phrase it : rush culture. My nervous system being constantly in overload I just can't keep pace with the whole "rush with your car in traffic for work in the morning, drink tons of coffee, smoke a pack of cigs a day to stay productive, then rush back in traffic towards home in the evening" thing.

Every time I did work I was constantly pressured to rush every single task I had to do at the detriment of quality. Managers never cared about quality, all they wanted was an excel spread shit that said "we produced a lot, we will get a lot of money". Even in farms where I worked that mindset still applies, yeah, even in outdoor jobs that you'd imagine would be slower paced.

Traffic. Omg I hate traffic (bet everyone does). Every single time I take the car anywhere I've got a queue behind me for driving the speed limit, everyone's seemingly a state secretary needing to attend an emergency meeting or something.

Groceries, same thing. So many people, everyone in a rush too, all the time.

Idk if it comes from corporate culture of profit, car culture, both, something else entirely?

But I'm so exhausted of it. I wish I could live in some Amish town sometimes. Just a place where cars don't exist for a start. When I say no cars I also hate trains, planes, all these noisy metal boxes that we've become slaves to. I try to go for bike rides but alas all it does is make me get grazed by speeders who get irrationally angry the second they see a bike on the street.

People who live in (real, calm) nature places don't know how lucky they are. I wouldn't mind the isolation, I have no friends anyway. Just a stranger in a town of strangers.

I need to vent and I feel this seems the right place. I have cptsd over many kinds of abuse I had to endure in life, but one that always haunted me since my childhood is bullying, being excluded and being ridiculed for my differences and appearance, I'm autistic so naturally I always been weird compared to neurotypicals I didn't get diagnosed until I was 12 so for most of my childhood I was different, most kids didn't like me and thought I was weird and I had no idea why, after being diagnosed I had to be put in special ed and it isolated me even more from everyone, my special ed teacher also abused me and the school staff didn't believe me. Anyhow what also didn't help is I didn't fit under the beauty standard, I have a thyroid condition and I take after my dads side of the family who are all very plump so I always was chubby and bigger than others my age, I was bullied for being "fat" and "ugly" for quite a few years, at school and online, many people don't believe in cyberbullying but I experienced it and in some ways it affected me more than the bullying I went through at school. the worst was when I was 14, this 26 year old man and his girlfriend made a page online to ridicule me, they were mocking me for having autism including using the R word, mocked me for posting about my depression issues calling me an attention seeker and they mocked my appearance I could be considered goth/alternative, this is when I was a babybat, still new at expressing myself so my style was very messy and not flattering, and I had a big chubby face so of course I was not seen as attractive, I was also not at all photogenic back then so my selfies made me look even uglier, this guy kept making posts and comments on how ugly and fat I was while his girlfriend and his friends joined in, they pretty much turned me into a meme for their entire community of trolls to laugh at, all adults. I begged them to just take down the page and expressed that my life was truly already hard and that I was bullied at school, they didn't care it only amused them the more miserable I was the more they laughed they called me a "crybaby" for genuinely getting suicidal thoughts and posting about my distress. this guy treated me like I was not even a human just because I was "ugly and fat" I think one reason this situation especially affected me is because this was a full grown adult man, it wasn't just a stupid ignorant child or teen who wanted to be cool it was an adult who thrived on humiliating and hurting me who was barely 14, also he and his girlfriend were both abit alternative themselves not goth but kinda scene/emo looking, you would think alternative people would all stick together but apparently not if you are "ugly" these aren't the only alt people that mocked my looks, I remember a few other instances of "alternative" people making fun of me for being fat, ugly or bad at makeup. I'm considered quite attractive now ever since I was 16 I had a glow up, learned to style myself well and as I reached adulthood I glew up even more not that id say I'm gorgeous now but I look decent enough that I'm praised very often and even starred in a music video by an official signed artist because he loved my looks. having a glow up made me see the difference in how you are treated when you are better looking, when I was "ugly" I was treated horribly or ignored mostly, but as I got better looking not only did people treat me better but more also wanted to talk to me and befriend me, I don't think of this too often but if I see something that triggers it, I will get ptsd for several days...I literally couldn't even sleep last night because I had this on my mind and started crying. I don't know if I could ever truly heal or forget. My life is better now, I have good people in my life and I make sure to avoid situations that could cause me to be bullied but this is still a trauma that never left me and when it comes back I feel like that child again, and to this day I often still think of myself as the ugly fat subhuman due to the way I was treated, despite being seen as attractive in the present.

My therapist wants me to start EMDR next week.

What has been your experience?

Also- what should I be prepared for? Flashbacks, fatigue, being more emotionally raw than usual? something else?

TW CSA

Hi, my dad raped me when I was younger and when I told my older sister she messaged my mum and said I was a crazy feminist and Im lying. She is really close with our dad. But that was several years ago and now Im being invited to meet my niece who is a toddler and I'm not sure if I should go simply to be a good aunt or if it will make me have a nervous breakdown. She says she wants to make ammends with me but that she still doesn't believe me about being raped. She says she wants to be my 'safe space.'

What would you do?

Kinda lame Pete Walker said in his book that narcissists are hopeless and cannot be helped… doesn’t that just kind of confirm the worst fear that they’re broken and unlovable deep down and this type of language as a therapist/authority would just make them worse?

This is probably an odd question, but I'm wondering if there could be a correlation. I'm a 24 year old woman in the US with extreme driving anxiety and no license. I also live with a controlling mother who would not give me driving lessons in high school when all my peers were learning, which I think exacerbated the issue. But I have no idea why I struggle so much with driving. I was in a few crashes as a kid and my father used to get drunk and drive around with me in the car, but my CPTSD isn't from an incident on the road, its from my father sexually abusing me. I'm just wondering if the heightened fears around driving could be related to the CPTSD? Could it maybe be related to hypervigilence? I don't understand why its so difficult for me.

Also, if anyone has experienced this and overcome it, any advice would be appreciated. I can't live independently without a license and I desperately want to move out, but it feels hopeless.

In a handfull of months i will have to face him and what he did to me. I will have to say it out loud to a room full of people because he refuses to admit he is guilty.

I hate him and i know i am strong enough to face what he did to me. But my body does not want to cooperate and everytime the last few days someone talks to me about it i want to shut down.

My eyes fill with tears and my throat closes, i wish i could will my body into not being scared at the sound of his name.

My mother will have to be in court as well for what little she knows and i wish she didnt have to. I hate her so much sometimes, she keeps talking about what happened to me even tho i scream at her to stop so many times. She tells me i never said anything as a kid because i was scared of him.. when really i was scared of her. No child should come home from having a part of them broken to their mother calling them disgusting names over the actions of a grown man against a small child.

I hope i am strong enough and convincing enough to make him stay in jail.

I wish little me didnt throw away so much evidence, i just wanted to be free of it.

This would be a small win to be believed for once.

Please god let me be convincing enough.

I am tired of bad people getting away.