To think therapy is for the benefit of others

i think if friends and family feel less stress around the person in therapy it's a benefit to everyone.a good therapist will enable you to know yourself better,provide coping skills and be less dependent on others.

Kind of. I started using my husband as a therapist in the sense that all my anxiety I was pouring out to him and he said he felt like my carer and didn’t want to be and I didn’t want him to be either.

What OP said was actually was exactly how I felt, with many of my therapists. What @Eyesopenwideawake resonated with me though, and is how I've managed to move past much of my trauma – but my therapists never actually helped me achieve that. It sounds as though it may have been an issue with modalities? That's one issue I have with therapy – it's very expensive if you go private, and yet there's little guidance for people in regards to working out which modality would work best for their particular issues.

Again, it's interesting to see how people are determined to paint those who have found therapy unhelpful as the problem, when that absolutely isn't necessarily the case.

A couple of aquaintances have had therapy which has been or seems to have been purely affirmation and this did nobody any good! Each was affirmed in their separate and very different view that they were quite right to withdraw further from any responsibility or interaction with the world and that everything was the fault of circumstances/ other people.

Both stopped trying for a ling time. One has now come out the other side, the other has become even more withdrawn.

One had a parental bereavement quite young and the other is probably neurodivergent but doesn't want to look into that.

The right therapy (and diagnosis in the second situation) would doubtless have been invaluable, but unfortunately there are a lot of terrible therapists, or at least qualified therapists willing to work with clients they are absolutely not a match for!

Why would you be combative and insulting to someone who's engaging politely and in good faith, and hasn't said anything offensive?
Personally, I've heard both DBT and ACT are good for people with autism and ADHD, and ACT makes a lot of sense to me, but there are no affordable therapists near me who use either. Happily, I seem to be managing well without it, these days.

But I do wonder why people take the fact that therapy hasn't worked well for others so personally.

My therapist said that the point of therapy was to do herself out of a job. So now I cry alone (mostly) but also I love therapy and recommend it to anyone and their dog.

@INX and @Sunnyphoenix I am really sorry for what you both have and are going through. I think you have both highlighted something important. Grief is incredibly hard and not a straight road but it is an entirely appropriate response to loss. It may become something else, such as depression which might need therapy or counselling but the rush to prescribe therapy for bereavement isn’t necessarily appropriate and it doesn’t need “fixing” (and can’t be fixed). I think friends don’t know how to respond or react to the changing nature of grief and want to provide “solutions”.

Julia Samuel’s book Grief Works has been recommended to me as a helpful book that is free from “solutions” and talk of “stages of grief” (a misinterpretation of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s writing on the subject) and other simplistic and rather alienating concepts. 💐💐

I have had some therapy, it didn't cure as that is impossible, what it did do was let me talk to an impartial person and not burden family and friends,who would have been devastated to see how much mental pain I was in. So you could say it helped those around me but not in the way you mean.

the therapist does therapy every day, the client is a novice. They can't lead it.

Absolutely correct, but only the client can know, and say, what outcome they are looking for.

No. My therapy is to help me. As a result of therapy,
I have challenged my DM about some of the thoughtless things she has said to me. She did not appreciate it but it was good for me to get a few things off my chest.

Yes!

It is so frustrating reading posts like this.
Yes, there are a few inept therapists about.
But therapy changes a lot of lives.
Loved ones can no more provide what a great therapist can deliver any more than a family member could give you surgery with no surgical training. If you were married to
an actual surgeon they still wouldn’t do it as they where an emotional connection to you, and need to stay calm and focused.
Trauma-relayed therapy with EMDR gave me my life back. And in therapy you have a safe space. You often don’t want to tell loved ones about upsetting events as they often get upset and sorry.
A therapist can talk to their professional supervisor about difficult cases.
I didn’t do therapy ‘for other people’ but it helped all of my relationships.
If you slice your hand open you don’t stick it out to a friend asking them to sew up for you? They are not qualified and feel an emotional pull towards you. In A and E, they will be assessed and seen by someone with the correct skills. Done badly and an infection can get in.
Why people thinks mind are different I’ve no idea.

My best friend had a similar situation with her narcissistic ex husband (yes, clinically diagnosed). I think the issue stemmed from the fact he found it impossible to see himself in a bad light and take any responsibility.
I think a lot of us know people like this who don't "believe in psychology" and think they are cleverer than everyone else, but to everyone else seem to be the most in need of therapy.

I might be wrong but I’m not sure what that’s what they mean.

my ex, for example, was just resistant to therapy. He had a serious mental illness, and couldn’t engage. He was in such denial that talking to someone about it made no sense.

we had relationship counselling towards the end and after 2 sessions the counsellor said she couldn’t see us as he wasn’t going to be able to do the work- she was right, it was a waste of money.

not everyone can do therapy, like any treatment not everyone responds to it. Or, it may not be the right type (I personally can’t imagine something like CBT is suitable for trauma)

my ex isn’t inadequate, he’s not doing it wrong - but he won’t benefit from therapy. All he can do is turn up and answer their questions, and that isn’t therapy.

So you are trying to resolve childhood trauma?

I work with trauma and this is how I describe it;

When something bad happens, a part of our mind gets the job of working out why it happened, for the express purpose of recognising and avoiding a similar threat in the future.

However, when we suffer a traumatic event (or a series of events) in our lives - especially early trauma - there isn’t always an answer to that question. Trauma can be so unexpected and undeserved that in truth we didn’t do anything wrong to cause it, and certainly couldn’t have avoided it.

The need to make some sort of sense of the experience can often lock us into that moment. A part of our subconscious becomes unable to move on until we can fully understand it and put it to rest in our minds. Sometimes simply letting that part of the subconscious know that it can stop looking for an answer.

Remedial hypnosis can be very effective at cutting the emotional ties with the trauma – you don't forget it but it no longer affects you, it no longer defines your adult life.

Why would I be an advertisement for therapy? I just think many of us have come across those who insist therapy isn't effective and it is usually because they aren't going there for the right reasons snd they think they are above the therapist and therapy itself. DBT is usually what those people need once they are in a place to.accept they need it.

For me personally, the practical and emotional support we received from the hospice nurses was worth its weight in gold and all we really needed.

Thank you, that's really helpful.

I'm sorry about your husband too 💐

No I didn't have therapy in the end, although like you, I wasn't completely against it or anything, I just simply didn't need it.

It was just the assumptions from others that of course I definitely would and they found it quite shocking.

I voted YABU because both counselling and therapy have really helped me, but I do totally get that MH issues can be a real strain on others. I'm absolutely sure when I was depressed I was no fun to be with at times, but that's partly why I got counselling. To be more fun, but also to HAVE more fun. To regain my lost sense of humour.

You say "everyone around the person suffers from less emotional fatigue and that stability makes it seem like the therapy is working to the person who is going every week."

What that says to me is, this person is measuring their mental wellness only by how others behave around them. Others seem happier? = I'm better. Others seem less happy? = I'm worse. That's not really measuring your mental health properly, in my book. Never mind others, how do YOU feel within yourself? The fact that a person is focusing on the mood of others rather than him/herself is itself an issue to be dealt with in therapy. It sounds like people-pleasing, which is usually a result of low self-esteem. Which is usually a result of emotional neglect in childhood. Hello, that's me.

I'm really sorry your therapy didn't seem to help.

"presenting in an objectively calm manner" and that I was dealing with past events appropriately

What had you hoped for from your therapy that would be different from that?

I don't think therapy is necessarily meant to make your feelings go away - more to help you process them in a way that's not harmful and enables you to continue with normal life as best you can. And if you were calm and able to manage things appropriately to get through the day, then it sounds to me like that was progress, of sorts? I don't think therapy is ever going to be a 'cure' for anything, any more than a paracetamol is a 'cure' for flu - they're both things that treat the symptoms and help you cope with them, rather than a cure.

But of course if you were hoping for something different then I can see why that disappointed you.

If you think you'd have made the same progress from talking to friends and family, then sure, you might be right - but it might also have had a negative effect on your relationships with them, and on their own mental health, which in turn wouldn't have helped you. So I wouldn't look at the therapy you had as wasted time, even if it wasn't quite the outcome you wanted.

I'm not convinced it's the actual therapy that makes any difference - just that everyone around the person suffers from less emotional fatigue

But surely the person who is having therapy would typically want their friends and family to suffer less emotional fatigue? For me, that alone would be a good enough reason to go to therapy.

Why would I want to put my loved ones through distressing, exhausting, boring, repetitive conversations that were all about me?! It isn't fair on them. I don't want them to be miserable just because I am.

Also, friends and family aren't remotely qualified to give unbiased, neutral advice. They're too close to you and they don't have any training in the techniques a therapist uses.

I'm very sorry to hear about your husdand, do you mind me asking whether you ever did have therapy for this?

My husband is in very last stages of terminal illness and all the way through this has been a constant theme from some of my friends. Actually they're not people I partiuclarly talk to about the emptional side of things (so hopefully not trying to stop me offloading to them) but it just seems to be an expectation that if you go through something like this then you will need therapy. Obviously it's been awful but I think I know myself well and at the moment see the emotions I'm feeling as a part of life rather than a problem to be solved. I wouldn't be averse to having therapy if I felt there was a need in the future but I'm worried that there's an expectation (from some people) that you have to have ticked the therapy box to be allowed back into society...

I'm fairly neutral about therapy, having never been myself. I think it can help some people, but I think over-use of 'therapy-speak' can be incredibly irritating and is sometimes used to justify/explain away bad behaviours (and sometimes to inaccurately pathologise natural, normal human emotions and reactions).

No, I don't think it's mostly for the benefit of others, but if someone is driving their friends and family away by forcing them into the position of unwilling therapist, maybe it can be for the benefit of both them and the people around them (which is still a benefit for the person in therapy, since it prevents them from scaring other people off).