to think my CBT therapist is living in cloud cuckoo land?

[othermother]

I actually want to tell her to just fuck right off!

She's very lovely and all that,but I don't think she has much life experience at all, and she's telling me that I am supposed to replace my negative feelings with positive ones. My main problem is my youngest son who has asd and he's extrememly challenging, and my biggest gripe is that my dh just cannot handle him and so I end up dealing with all his behaviours (on top of work, housework, looking after the other kids etc) and she expects me to turn my neg feelings round by thinkibng that dh "tries" to help.

I want to fucking knock six something or others (far too stressed to even remember the phrase) and ram them down his throat NOT praise him for fucking trying. I'm sick of being the one doing it all, and then now I'm supposed to feel I'm wrong for feeling angry and am supposed to find some positive somewhere out of all of this. I'm not best happy.

1)Ask her very very precisely how you get from producing some 'positive viewpoint' rationally but not feeling it emotionally, to really really feeling a change in how you view things.
2)Tell her that whilst you really appreciate her trying to help, you're concerned that she doesn't seem to be tuning in to your reality and trying to 'walk in your shoes a while'. Tell her you don't feel properly heard and understood and that she's jumping over several stages of therapy by trying to get you to come up with symthetic positive statements too early.
3)Voice your concerns over having a therapist who, your assumption is, may not have had sufficient life experiences and therefore can only apply a theoretical model, without herself having had the lives experience.
4) Emphasise that this is a social issue for you first and a psychological one second; that you actually need some practical support at home and you need some specific advice on how to get this - ie by managing your husband's lack of management of your child - or - how to get cheap housekeeping support/ specialist childcare, to relieve soem of the burden.

I think Number 4 is most important and I probably should have written it first. It may make an amazing difference to your mood if you just can get a bit of a break and all the other psychological stuff can more easily fall into place.

Good luck.

Hohoholepew--he seemed to find the strategies almost immediately helpful. Within days he was telling me what he was doing to stop himself from reacting to things that people may or may not have been doing or saying to annoy him. He uses a 'judge' system: if someone has perhaps said something a bit off, he asks himself if a judge would agree with the evidence that it was done on purpose to hurt him. This has been part of his problem: assuming that people mean to be mean when they say things without thinking. Sometimes they do but sometimes they're just being thoughtless and you can choose whether or not to let it harm you.

2ChildrenPlusLA, please do discuss it with your GP. Its always best to seek help or the problem could get worse. If CBT is not for you, your GP might be able to fix you up with some counselling that is not CBT oriented. It feels to you like it wouldn't scratch the surface, but it might help more than you think, at least its worth a try. And maybe some medication could help get you out of a hole and make you feel more able to try counselling?

Thank you Rene, but my personality doesn't suit CBT. I'm too awkward and argumentative. It would be a waste of everyone's time. In fact it probably doesn't suit most types of counselling. I'm not comfortable having other people 'involved' or 'interpreting' my life because my experience has been that all that happens is a lot of misunderstanding because rarely do they have the imagination to even understand what I am saying. I've been let down badly by such people in the past and they have caused me to become more withdrawn because it is clear they don't have a clue what I am about.

Unless the therapist is excellent and very experienced (unlikely to get on NHS) we'll get into circular arguments. They'll make me feel like a failure for not being able to 'accept' their help etc etc.

2children - CBT-type therapy might well be what you're looking for. It worked for my depression, but importantly that was after I'd sorted out the 'obvious' reasons for being depressed (reduced contact with psychotic family members, got somewhere warm and dry to live, etc), and I'd read a book on CBT and done the exercises. That didn't help in itself but meant when the therapist asked "So in this situation, what would you do?" or "Can you give me an example of when you feel X?", I had examples to hand and didn't spend half the session going "er, um, like..."

I was very clear I didn't want to go over the past and my childhood and stuff, and we didn't, although some things came up in passing. It was very much "What do you want to be able to do? What might happen whn you do it?" and looking for the hidden knots in my subconscious logic. The theory that depresssion can be a repressed emotion worked for me quite well as it became clear there are things that actually being angry is an acceptable rational response. So a combination of therapy, changing circs and meds (I still take ADs in winter) worked for me.

So obviously I don't know what your depression might relate to but I reckon fighting it on all three of those fronts might be worth it.

Thanks to everyone whp pointed me in the direction of training had a good look at the link.
It appears that there are 2 routes but being a psychology graduate or similar is a help.

What scared me, from a punters view point, is that is said once trained your case load could be up to 45 clients a week. Thats 9 a day.

IME and I know many senior accred,. BACP counsellors, they would totally freak out at anything like that caseload- 15-20 seems to be the max they will take on, otherwise they feel emotional overload.

OP- I do think that you andothers on this thread could be helped more, or as much from any combination of
*relationship counselling
*parent coaching/parenting classes and courses
*life coaching

Thank you notcitrus. You know me by another name btw so I hope you don't mind that you've given an unbiased post.

You'd agree that I was awkward and argumentative though - lol, but hopefully fairly sensible with it.

2children- I think that the fact that you feel you haven't been helped is in fact part of your problem, if that makes sense. Without knowing you at all, maybe the fact that you feel communication is an issue means you feel isolated.

Have you had any therapy at all where you have had to take action, and make changes, rather than just talk about it?

It doesn't follow that NHS counsellors are no good- I know many who work both privately and for the NHS.

If you pay for it yourself- arond £40 an hour- you can then choose who you see and move on if they aren't what you want.

You need to discover if your depression is caused by a chemical imbalance that might respond to drugs, from your GP, or if you have things in your life now, or your past, that are making you feel depressed.

As a start, what would you change if you could? Most depession will respond to life changes, once you know what you want to change.

Othermother it sounds to me like CBT isn't the right therapy for you at the moment.

purplepony That's the thing. I'm extremely resourceful. I have made all the changes I can. The ones that can't be changed, can't be changed iygwim. I would like respite from having to have to THINK so hard at all the changes I have to keep making to make life bearable, and you know, the rest, financial worries, SN child, mismanaged birth causing SN child, Social Services looking over my shoulder but refusing support, that I'm always freezing, and the fact that I've been depressed since I used all my resources staying as 'bright' as I could throughout my crap childhood.

I've had no therapy where I've had to take action it's true, but I'm generally a taking action type of girl anyway. I don't even watch television as I'm too busy taking action to have time to. A lot of my time is actually spent fending off 'helpers' if I'm honest because they are making things worse.

Sorry for saying NHS aren't any good. I have no experience of them, but I am guessing, for the same reasons I am fending off the other 'helpers' in my life, that they are highly qualified individuals with not anywhere near enough resources to assess need before they implement strategies, and therefore are likely to come out way way off and at best manage some kind of tokenism, at worst cause damage.

btw, did I mention that I was argumentative and awkward?

othermother - having had CBT therapy myself, I agree with others CBT does not sound right for you at all.

Maybe you were refered beause you are 'stresed' whch CBT can help but removing the cause of the stress is key and that means getting your DH to do some specific training in handling DS and maybe a sessIon or two at Relate to help you express to DH your need for support elsewhere in your marriage (i.e sharing household tasks).

I know that there are positive and negative experiences and some experiences are truly horrid.
Mabe the positive thing about truly horrid experiences are that they make us stronger? That's all I can think of tbh. Also they help us avoid negative situations in the future.

I finally plucked up the courage and I told my CBT Therapist about the 32 years of abuse that I suffered at the hands of my grandmother and disclosed to her that I felt it was finally time for me to talk about it. She said "Hmmm, and how do you think you could use a Thought Record to think about that differently?" :O

After trying to bring this up in 4 later sessions and receiving the same response each time, I gave up, left and found a proper therapist who was trained in something other than patronising robotic repetition.

I spent 18 months doing CBT, over and over and over and over....until I found an Integrative Therapist whom I worked with for 5 months (on and off) exploring what those experiences were for me and how they have shaped and affected who I am now so I was able to understand why I see the world in the way I do and work WITH that to manage my life and fears, not just do some pretend 're-ordering' of my thoughts and try and 'think about it in a more positive way'.

It's now 6 years since I finished with my Integrative Therapist and I've had NO problems ever since. CBT is a joke, it just tries to convince you to "shut up and put up" and bully you into believing you are the problem. CBT is a triumph of marketing but not a real therapy.