To think therapy is for the benefit of others

I think both things can be true. Therapy can genuinely help some people, but it's also okay to say it didn't help you. We shouldn't dismiss either experience.

I'm glad your son is well supported, and I hope that the therapy is helpful for him! It's really interesting that you've been told therapists need specialised training for autism – I've read that certain modalities work better, but not that. It does make a lot of sense, though.

It's interesting you mention the navel-gazing aspect – that was how I ended up feeling in therapy at times, and it just wasn't helpful, or what I was looking for.

I don't think therapy can help with physical symptoms

Yes, it can. I've successfully worked with pain and tinnitus. Once someone has been signed off for no further medical treatment but are still feeling pain then therapy can deal with the emotional triggers.

(I personally can’t imagine something like CBT is suitable for trauma)

Going by my own experiences, you're right, it isn't. CBT actually did me a fair bit of damage in that regard and set my recovery from depression back quite a bit. Looking back, the practitioner was probably not adhering to best practice, though, to be fair.

I do think that therapy is brilliant for some, but does not work for others.

@OtterlyAstounding my older son is autistic and it affects him quite seriously, although he functions well ... on the very surface. He's going for therapy now (recommended by his outstanding support worker, who ought to be paid the same salary as Elon Musk in my view) but the therapist is trained in autism and his support worker said that non-specialized training would be useless and possibly damaging for him (as it was for my ex-H).

You mentioned you were AuADHD. Could it be possible that if therapy didn't work for you, it's because the people were simply not right for you.

Although as I say, for some people any therapy just doesn't work. And for others, the real deal is honestly very challenging and often unpleasant, even if you do learn a huge amount about yourself, others and how to handle situations and life from it.

One thing that concerns me is that therapy usually concentrates on the person in therapy, and some sorts are more navel-gazing than anything else. I do wonder if all therapists focus on getting people to really take responsibility for themselves and the impact of their actions on others as well as otehrs' actions impacting on themselves.

I think therapy isn’t right for some people but that doesn’t mean that on the whole, therapy is a waste of time. It depends on the person and the therapist and also whether it’s counselling or actual therapy.

I’ve had counselling 3 or 4 times. The first counsellor was brilliant and she helped me enormously through a very difficult time. She eventually retired and the other 2 or 3 I tried after that were just a waste of time. They kept trying to uncover some deep rooted trauma which just wasn’t there - I just needed a neutral space to unpack my anxieties around this one very difficult phase in my life.

I’m sorry therapy has not helped you OP.

I don't think therapy can help with physical symptoms. Either it is somatising, in which case you would need many years of deep work (probably psychodynamic) to completely restructure your personality organisation or it is not and you need to see a pain specialist to help you cope with the pain. The problem is not all therapy is the same and you need to find the right therapy for the presenting issue. But it's not always easy to nail down what the issue is (that also needs the right person doing the assessment) and most therapists will take on any client and won't advise you to go elsewhere. So it's hit and miss. But I agree with you that therapy can be for the benefit of others and that's a good thing. Some people really do need to deal with their own stuff rather than making the lives of those around them hell with their poor behaviour (I don't mean you here, just a generalised comment about some disturbed personality types).

You sound impossibly uneducated

I did some CBT over the phone once. I would never have got that specific advice from my family and I’ve never forgotten it.

Gosh, this is a narrow view.

How about it also offers an objective view, one that isn’t bogged down in family dynamics and biased?

Perhaps someone doesn’t have any family to talk to?

Perhaps someone wants professional advice because their family support is useless?

Not something I have direct experience of. But I do recall a study that was carried out on groups of people following a traumatic event.
Those who were told they needed therapy and were waiting for it did worse than those who weren’t told they needed it and weren’t waiting. They didn’t return to work and reported themselves as being depressed and anxious far more.

It does feel a bit of a tick box sometimes. In work we must signpost sources of support and the in house dial a person service every time there is an attendance management meeting. So we can discharge our duty.

So when it becomes an expectation and people are told they have been traumatised and should not expect to get better I think it can be counterproductive.

Plus in my experience a lot of very troubled and low resilience people go into delivering therapy as it’s a world they know.

I am sounding like an old and outdated generation I know and that’s true too. I’m not sure when we all started the adulation of trauma and victim mentality. I don’t see it as a good thing.

more reading on it here: https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/therapy-today/2026/articles-march/research/

lots of research points towards the quality of the therapeutic relationship being the critical factor in what makes therapy successful. So the idea of magic bullet therapies or the really directive therapies like CBT or EMDR being better than “just talking” isn’t accurate. The therapeutic alliance and the clients desire to change are the top two factors to making counselling successful.

No, not the therapist's word, but therapy isn't about the therapist any more than healthcare is about the doctor/nurses/allied health care professional - this is what the individuals got out of therapy.

It was an autocorrect - I typed psychotherapist

@Soggybogdog It's like Schrödinger's trauma. I either have it or I don't and I apparently have no way of knowing. Which makes it just sound like nonsense

I am not saying this is the case for you but I've encountered two situations where extreme trauma very early on, certainly pre-memory, have had profound life long effects.

It seems that brain development is plastic in infants, but not infinitely so.

Not sure physiotherapists are best placed for this

No.

Transference, countertransference is real.

Understanding child development, how the brain, emotions and personality develop when things go well and when they (significantly) don't means that a good well trained therapist understands the possible divergencies from relatively healthy thought patterns, resilience and emotional life.

They can also keep a necessary balance between closeness and distance. Getting emotionally involved is disastrous to the therapeutic relationship.

Joe the electrician or Helen the lawyer might listen and care but they really don't have the training to understand what's going on in therapy or how best to guide someone through the sometimes very difficult process of facing heavy emotions or buried trauma / shell shock, or the process of forming new and better patterns of interaction and thought.

My beloved daughter died aged 24 last October. Totally unexpectedly. The scale of my loss and trauma and grief is impossible to over state. I had very strong suicidal ideation, terrible intrusive thoughts and flashbacks to the day of her death that left me vomiting.

I have been having psychotherapy since January. And EMDR since May. My grief is still overwhelming but the EMDR in particular has slightly softened the spikiness of the trauma. I can’t imagine a time when I will ever feel anything approaching happiness again. But I am no longer having consistent suicidal thoughts (they do occur, but are not constant) and I am moderately functional. I credit the quality of my therapy with the fact that I now eat solid food again and brush my hair and teeth each day!

I do think there is a wide range of therapists out there though and some are really not very good.

So you're making unfounded assumptions about random strangers based on people you know? I find it ironic that you're accusing others of being combative and obstinate, considering your own comments on this thread. I'm not sure why someone saying that therapy was unhelpful to them, although they can see others benefit from it, has set you off so much, but I'll leave it there as clearly it's a personal issue for you.

I disagree it gives people the tools to cope and learn new things and also overcome obstacles they may never of knew how to

As I said, many of us have seen patterns where people who are known to us, and therefore we know traits of their personality on every day interactions, have said similar. Our familiarity with said person lets us know that they are generally obstinate in their interactions, particularly when people disagree with them. So we know them as combative to anything they perceive as a challenge to their worldview, and they also report that therapy is ineffective.

I'm not defensive, I'm just mildly offended that without knowing any details whatsoever, the first two responses to me assumed that I was doing therapy wrong, or didn't stick at it, followed by other negative implications, none of which are true. Since then, you've cast a number of unpleasant aspersions, including just now implying I must have been obstructive.

In actuality, I was actively wanting therapy to help me deal with the lasting after-effects of CSA and being trafficked as a minor – but it's interesting to see the way people immediately leap to the idea that someone must be uncooperative and obstructive, rather than that the therapy they engaged with just didn't resonate with them in a way that was helpful.

There's a strangely defensive, almost cult-like attitude around therapy at times, with this immediate jump to blaming an individual instead of considering that the therapists or modalities may not have been right for that particular person.

I think you feel defensive and that is why you feel like that about what I am saying.

The truth is that people like this might actually benefit from talking therapy more if they accept that they are being obstructive to their own progress.

Unless you have the therapists word for this, I wouldn't believe it. This is one of the ways people weaponise therapy simply because nobody knows what goes on in solo sessions. No decent therapist would ever disclose this information to a 3rd party.

Couples therapy is different. There an abuser can manipulate the therapist. That's why many therapists do not believe that couple's therapy is ethical.