To think therapy/counselling is not the answer

[onlytheace]

It is almost always suggested to people as something that can help them deal with problems, process trauma and generally be happier.

However, I think a lot of it is nothing more than the comfort of offloading to someone neutral in a “safe space”- it isn’t that they do anything special, it’s just sharing feelings. Yet they charge up to £50 a time.

Happy to be told I am BU but probably won’t agree!

unicornfarts validating a person can be helpful.
For example when I first had therapy I sobbed on the sofa saying that there were people 'who'd had it worse and never needed therapy' (my mother's voice...). The counsellor replied that what mattered was not what a person had been through but how traumatised they were that mattered so i 'deserved' my place on the sofa. That counsellor was never a 'yes' person and certainly challenged me to look at my responses and behaviours in ways I didn't always want to but which was ultimately very helpful to me. She had a sliding scale and when I couldnt pay at a crucial time it went on a reduced tab. Restored my faith in humanity tbh. I have also met some howling horrors of counsellors too. Like any profession.

it's complicated and i'm bit worried to write more because obviously this is a completely open public forum and anyone can read it but yes part of it is something like that and part of it is something that can be changed and that was the whole reason (for me) of me being there at that project. sorry to be vague it's just a difficult thing to try to write about on here. if anyone has any ideas i would 100% appreciate them by PM if possible/if anyone can spare the time i would be ultra grateful bc i want things to change so very badly.

Disclaimer: I have a BA in counselling. I am not a counsellor.

Something like 80%+ of the success of counselling is made up of the relationship between counsellor and client. The rest is the techniques used and (I suspect) plain old luck. You can in fact get much the same result by talking to any old person if the relationship is right.

Counsellors spend a LOT of time training. In the main school of thought, you are taught to be a kind of mirror for the client, reflecting themselves back at them so they can take a step back and look at themselves, then decide what, if anything, they want to do. This is why friends and family don't work as well, because they generally have their own agendas, both benign and potentially less so.

More proactive therapies such as CBT do not do this, they have much more practical approaches.

If you'd spent 1-3 years at university and/or 450 hours doing unpaid supervised work, I suspect you'd charge for your time too. Yes, what you're essentially providing is a neutral space and a focussed relationship, but it's not something you generally get from anywhere or anyone else. I think that says more about our current culture than counsellors.

IME just talking to someone didn't help. The right therapy fixed a difficulty I had as a result of a trauma in the space of five months. This is after more than thirty years of suffering. So I would say YABU and I'd like to see you try and argue you aren't.

Sometimes one just needs someone to listen and then give you the understanding one needs to move on from whatever it is. Sometimes it's too painful and one can't see beyond the present issues.

Btw it was all free.

OP, you are being very goady or maybe pretending to be stupid as I'd like to believe no one would be so cruel as to sneer at those who haven't been as lucky as you as to not need some help.

I'm sorry, onlytheace, but you are completely wrong about this. Therapy is absolutely not just having a neutral person to talk to. I have good friends who play that role in my life and it is absolutely not the same as a therapist who can diagnose your issues, ask you the correct questions and offer the correct thoughts to help you explore them fully, and then work with you on ways of actually changing your thinking and responses until you have actually freed yourself from some of the problems you have been experiencing. CBT literally changed my life by helping me overcome pretty serious anxiety by working out the root cause and helping me replace my repetitive patterns of thinking. It's a work in progress and I will probably return to my therapist at some point because my mental health is, like physical health, not a straight line but wibbles up and down.

I actually do not think that talking cures are the be all and end all, and a lot of people also need a solid dose of medication or could benefit from simple things like time to think - but it was the CBT that broke through with my issues and to say it is a scam and that it's an MLM con is absolutely ridiculous.

A priest or vicar with appropriate training can also play a similar role but good ones know when to refer their flock onto an appropriate health service. They'd also be completely inappropriate for me because I am not religious so I don't know any in that capacity.

ballerini - The six sessions of CBT available through an IAPT or similar service is a CBT 'light' originally designed for short interventions to help get mild-moderate anxious and depressed people back into work. It looks at the immediate - how to address current problems.

Decent CBT can be lengthy and does involve looking at the actual genesis of negative core beliefs and thought processes.

That can't usually be done in 6 sessions unless it's very straightforward e.g ' my boss said I didn't do this well last year and now I feel anxious all the time at work'. If it's more complex and deep rooted than that, the CBT offered by a primary care NHS IAPT service often won't touch it.

Which is why a lot of people now think CBT isn't helpful. It can be extremely helpful - if you get full CBT.

OP, you keep coming with your same original point without acknowledging the many posts (including my own) that tell you exactly how therapy helped. Do you not believe us? Do you think we've been tricked? I don't understand how you can hold the same opinion given the masses of responses here that provide evidence against what you believe. There's the odd post where it hasnt helped but then chemo doesn't work on all cancer patients - that doesn't mean it's not a life saver for some. Also there are bad counselors just as there are bad police officers, teachers, priests, lawyers etc. Doesn't mean there aren't excellent ones who do their job amazingly.

Year - if you say just talking to someone didn't help but the right therapy fixed things what was the difference? No worries if it's too personal to answer, either way i'm glad to hear that it made a difference.

Yes, what you're essentially providing is a neutral space and a focussed relationship, but it's not something you generally get from anywhere or anyone else. I think that says more about our current culture than counsellors.

That's a really good point, MadeleineMaxwell - but I think that in previous iterations of our cultures there were a lot of people who needed the help of that neutral person and didn't have access to it.

The relationship counsellor I went to with EA exh wasn't much cop though as she fell for all his pretence. That said I now know you shouldn't got to counselling with an abusive man.

flowers - you can PM me if you like. I might not be able to help as my preferred specialism is working with violent and disordered offenders but I can have a think.

I had 2-3 years of counselling on and off after a traumatic marriage breakup.

It helped me to own my issues, dismiss others and to distance myself emotionally from it.

Counselling very much has a point to it. It’s wrong to say it’s just sharing, they help you to deal with problems and give you the tools to do so whether it’s CBT, or whatever.

A family member is a counsellor and they have to have hours of counselling themselves to get all their own issues dealt with. She went to Uni to get qualified. She’s very perceptive and intuitive.

My training as a therapist has (so far) taken over 10 years and cost me in excess in excess of £20,000. Although the most expensive years are behind me ( I won't have to pay for another MSc and I no longer have to do unpaid placement hours) the expense will be ongoing as there are professional and ethical requirements for regular CPD, clinical supervision, indemnity insurance, membership of regulatory bodies, my own personal therapy, not to mention renting and maintaining treatment space , a phone line, conferences, professional publications to keep in touch with research and much more. Taking all that into account £50 an hour seems like very good value.

Asking how therapy works is like asking how the human body can be healed - the mind is vast and complex. I have upwards of 150 books trying to explain it! Just as some physical ailments can be cured by a paracetamol and a nap whilst others require years of medication, surgery and specialist care so some people might be helped by sessions of CBT and others might require years of psychoanalysis.

From my personal experience of therapy I can tell you what I have found transformative - being given time and space to work through the grief of my unhappy childhood without being told I was irrational or over-reacting, having someone name, acknowledge and question my deep-seated self loathing was the first step to recognising it, understanding it and eventually losing it. Also being able to say some of the terrible, negative feelings I had repressed for decades in a safe space where I couldn't hurt anyone and didn't feel judged was empowering. I can honestly say that it completely changed my life and I am a much happier, more balanced person now.

Therapy doesn't work for everyone but when it does it can be transformative and worth every penny.

I loved counselling, sitting and talking about whats in my head, to someone neutral who wasnt shocked/angry etc

I wish I had the money to go every week, I could only afford 5 sessions, as you say op it isnt cheap

Great info MadeleineMaxwell

And thanks for the info MrsGrahamNorton - I realised it wasn't full on CBT as they called it 'low level CBT' or something like that when I got signed up - I was already in fulltime employment though so it wasn't about getting me into work. They must have thought I didn't need much help when I signed up.
I don't doubt full on CBT would be much more beneficial.

Nobody knows your own experiences better than you do. However sometimes someone else needs to help you “see the wood for the trees”

The trouble arises when it's not just another perspective but damagingly rude and repeatedly and completely wrong.

Then it's like what someone else said an MLM. 'You are not compliant enough' or 'What do you expect if you're not trying'.

The lack of accountability is staggering. Also how if you talk about therapy being rubbish, which it can be, then you are the problem. It's not just me. I'm in contact with many others who feel the same way.

then no therapy in the world would change those circumstances.

This. It doesn't help with circumstances and seems to deny their existance.

An individual can have counselling if they so wish. I was responding specifically to someone who said they couldn’t have seen their priest for counselling because their DH was abusive. I was pointing out that she shouldn’t have been seeing anyone for counselling with DH if he was abusive

only my entire point was that I didn't realise that my ex was abusive until I had counselling, because my upbringing (abusive dad) had normalised that kind of behaviour. So a priest would have been no good to me even if I'd sought help as an individual, because I thought my problem was depression so I'd not have sought help from them in the first place. I doubt the NHS would have referred me to the church! As it happened it turned out I had reactive depression which disappeared when I left my ex. You seem very determined to dismiss the positive experiences that people such as myself have had despite many of us acknowledging it doesn't work for everyone.

I don’t believe it’s a cure all but counselling can work wonders. I dread to think what my life would be like now had I not invested in 6 months of counselling.

My problems weren’t terrible but I was stuck and horribly unhappy. Therapy helped me process awful experiences and challenge some ingrained beliefs which were total codswalllop but making me miserable. I clicked with my counsellor from the off and trusted her. It was difficult at times and a few times I almost cancelled my appointments but I was given the time and space to process some horrible things in a neutral environment.

I think I am quite emotionally intelligent but I could never have explored the issues - and resolved them enough to move on - by myself. I think my counsellor worked miracles tbh.

ballerini - yes, the initial funding and aim when it came out a few years ago was designed by the government around the time of benefit cuts being brought in to get people who had been on benefits with anxiety and depression back into (or into for the first time) work cheaply for the government (they wouldn't say that but that was what it was about).

There is a huge gap now now of people that are being failed because a few sessions of IAPT CBT just won't be enough but they will never be eligible for secondary MH input because they are functioning.

I moan about this at least once a day!

I'm funded by the NHS to work with offenders not because the government or society cares about them, but because they cost a lot of money in Police, prisons, probation, not working, cost of social services input etc.

If you're struggling with your MH but working, not an immediate risk of harming yourself or a risk/cost to society - you don't get a great service I'm afraid.

It's shit but our general attitudes towards MH need to change before the government and society does.

OP
Why does this matter to you so much? Counselling is an option not an obligation. There are some situations where people may feel more comfortable talking to a neutral third party but that may not be something that everyone wants or needs.

It is a matter of fact that for some people counselling provides benefits in improved mood, better coping strategies etc. For others it might not be the right approach. The NHS physio recommended a particular set of exercises for my back which made it worse rather than better so they tried a different approach. Even for physical ailments the same treatment doesn't always work for two different people with similar looking conditions.

OP, have you considered therapy? It could really help with your negative and goady attitude. Sometimes we lack insight to realise just how unpleasantly we come across to others.

There are a lot of things being conflated on this thread.

Firstly the terms therapist and counsellor are not protected titles and could mean anything - from someone who has done a short course to someone with multiple relevant degrees at doctorate level.

There are also multiple approaches and they should be used at the right time for the right person based on a decent shared understanding of the problem. This should be drawing on as much evidence as possible (and yes our evidence base about anything to do with mental health isn't perfect because our brains are a lot more complicated than other parts of our bodies). So someone might come for trauma therapy and the best approach might be trauma focused CBT (tf-CBT) or EMDR. Or other approaches such as NET, which don't have sufficient evidence to make it into NICE guidelines yet. But a good therapist will assess this and if they can't offer what they think is best, they would refer on. This should always be within a supportive and collaborative relationship (these factors are very significant). But 'Having a chat' is 100% not an evidence based approach to processing trauma (or most things that therapists might help with). Often when things don't shift it is precisely because the therapy focus has shifted more into a chat like territory rather than focusing on strategies and theory driven practice.

CBT is often used as a catch all term but if you analysed it, you would undoubtedly find a whole host of stuff going on that wasn't really CBT, or was a diluted version. And even if it is CBT in principle, it doesn't mean it is necessarily 'good' CBT. If you gave me some nails and wood I could probably knock up a rudimentary bench. Give a carpenter the same tools and I'm sure the results would be very different, even if on the surface we were both building something with wood and nails.

There's no reason why someone in an abusive relationship shouldn't access therapy. But if they are still at risk, then the type of therapy would be adapted. So you wouldn't do work around processing traumatic things that have happened, but you might help them to see that they are entitled not to be treated this way (and leave if they choose to) by helping to build up their self-esteem that has been chipped away by their partner.

Therapists would never do therapy for their friends - it's against various codes of conduct to have personal relationships with clients- for a host of different reasons. It's completely not the same as having a chat with your mate.

Also i'd just like to point out that I don't work privately so have no vested interest in pointing out any of the above. I do agree that there is poor access to government funded psychological therapies in many areas, to the detriment of everyone, including the many who cannot afford to pay. But for those that can, why should they not also be able to choose to access a paid service, like any other service we might pay for?

flowerslemonade by talking I meant I've talked to friends a bit and dh a lot about the trauma but nothing changed. I still felt as I did. Then I was referred and then referred again and had EMDR which worked perfectly. I'd say I'm 98% clear of the effects of the trauma.

If the patient is the one whose behaviour is outside social norms, do therapists ever tell the patient that they are the one in the wrong?

They get you to look at and think about your behaviours unicornfarts They also ask you about how you think other people involved feel and may suggest alternatives to how you perceive something.
They don't tell you directly that you are wrong. It's more about getting you to think rather than just have a fixed idea.