dd won't co-operate in therapy

[dogpeoplearebetter]

Hi all,
So my DD (almost 14) will not co-operate in therapy whatsoever. She is in therapy for a myriad of issues such as low self esteem, phobias, poor social skills and serious mental illness/mental instability but we've been through several therapists and none have really clicked with her. She doesn't feel comfortable telling most of them anything at all, because she fears they may tell us (her parents) about the issues she confides in them as well as a few other reasons I won't really go into now. She hates herself and creates personas of other people, she has imaginary friends that she talks to, but i think she's comfortable in her sadness because she just will not do anything the therapist tells her to do or take any of the improvements they suggest to her. She just thinks it will be fixed if she sits there and does nothing and doesn't co-operate. Therapy is expensive and I figure, what's the point if she isn't doing anything? AIBU to want to stop paying for therapy if she keeps this charade up/doesn't work on herself at all?!
Thanks

This sounds really tricky, OP. You do say she’s been around sad experiences all her life with a lot of death including best friends (ie deaths of young people). If I have properly understood the position, it is unsurprising that she is used to being sad. Unfortunately, it sounds like her experience of life is that it is full of sadness. This may have been acknowledged but if not, could the problem partly be that you are trying to “fix” what are in fact normal and healthy emotional responses and she is resistant to that?

@dogpeoplearebetter are you sure your daughter is the problem?

"I think she's comfortable in her sadness

She doesn't want to get better. She's not happy like this but she's been around sadness for so long she's accepted there isn't a way out and won't even think of a goal.

I'm pushing for her to have hope.

No, she doesn't talk to me, she talks to nobody."

If you stopped pushing her because "your version" of what life should look like, is not necessarily the same as hers, could that be less stressful for your girl?

Can you just take her out of school to decompress for a year? We did this with my daughter and switched to online schooling. We muddled through doing the bare minimum getting Ds, and meanwhile there was no pressure for her to do anything else except watch TikTok. At the end of the year she started to bounce back and get enthusiastic about life again

I refused to speak to the first therapist my parents sent me to as a kid. The second one got pure fiction stories and a smattering of insults in a language I knew they didn't speak. From my perspective at the time it felt like forcing me to go to therapy was my parents saying that I was the screwed up one and I needed to change, and that felt like absolute bullshit - everyone around me including them and their relationship was a trainwreck and not only did I have to deal with it, they wanted me to deal with it all while being happy and well adjusted so that they didn't feel as guilty and worried. Of course I wasn't happy and well adjusted, I was a traumatized kid trying to survive everyone else's crazy, and being sent to therapy felt like I was doing the best I could and was still being told it still wasn't good enough, I needed to cope better.

Was this interpretation fair and reasonable towards my parents? Probably not. But it was how it all felt to me then. Therapy wasn't helpful until I wanted to participate.

Are you going to therapy for youself? I think that's one thing my parents could have done to help shift my impression a bit.