CBT / therapy - what are your experiences?

[hanrhdjendjd]

Hi,

Long story short -

I am somebody with very good mental
Health usually and have never required therapy previously. I used to be head strong and know my own mind....

2 years ago I made a decision to relocate with my family which I wasn't totally okay with at the time but it seemed to make sense at the time for everyone but me . It was my choice to make it and I followed it through thinking and hoping I would be fine with it long term- I would just manage. It was in the best interest of my family and I did that thing where I put on everyone else's life jackets before my own. I thought it everyone else was good then I would be too. Well, I'm not fine with it and it's eating me alive every day. I miss home , I miss our old routines and the life we had before.

Moving back is not an easy option due to the expense and stress. If we did decide to move back it would be at least a year away ...meanwhile I have to live happily and not torment myself daily

Would cbt work in your opinion? Or other therapy? Or is this a situation in my own making and I just have to somehow deal with this?

I need to find a fresh perspective as people have a lot worse to deal with in life and I am very lucky and fortunate

From my and my friends' experiences, CBT was just 'ok'. I found it didn't go into the depth I needed and was fairly surface level. It was also via phone calls, which I didn't particularly like either. The wait list was horrendously long too! I'm now speaking with a counsellor face to face, which I pay for privately, but find so much more useful. Therapy is very personalised, though, so if CBT doesn't offer what you need, there are always other options to explore.

CBT was a load of crock. Rubbish. Felt like being taught to gaslighting myself. emotions are there for a reason, they are trying to tell us something, whereas CBT is saying STOP feeling your emotions and think your way out of them. I found it harmful in fact.

Whether CBT is effective or not in general, I don't think it sounds like the first port of call for your situation. I would start with a less structured type of therapy.

I didn't find CBT like the poster above at all.

I found it very practically focused and positive.

I also had psychoanalytic therapy and found that very confrontational and very unpractical.

This is my experience of CBT too. Self-gaslighting is an excellent description. I was basically given some photocopied worksheets and was left to complete them on my own.
It just became another thing I failed at which compounded all my feelings of worthlessness.

I went to some very experience CBT sessions in Oxford Circus and I found them useful. It provided me with a place to get everything off my chest, we went into my past to try and find the cause of my issues. I didn't feel gaslighted as others have said, nor was I given activities to get on with myself. If anything my therapist often blamed others for my issues. I've also had therapy on the NHS which was via the phone and was absolutely useless.

My advice - cough up the cost for private it's worth it. What's the harm in trying?

*expensive not experience

It provided me with a place to get everything off my chest, we went into my past to try and find the cause of my issues. I didn't feel gaslighted as others have said, nor was I given activities to get on with myself.If anything my therapist often blamed others for my issues.

This sounds great but it sounds quite far from standard CBT.

CBT is for people with mental health problems, which you do not seem to have. You are sad because a life decision has not turned out as you had hoped. CBT can't help with that.

@Mischance can you help me with any other suggestions if cbt isn't the right route for me?

For 2 years now I've been overeating, not sleeping and crying at everything . I feel like an utter failure and I just don't know how to get back to being me again. If we could move home tomorrow I would but I can't and I just don't know how to take back control

Don't patronise me. It was CBT. It involves the person being counselled actually talking about their problems at some point. And that aspect helped me.

I've had CBT countless times over 25 years, I'm still in exactly the same position as I was back then.

Saying that, some people it works wonders for. I've found if you 'connect' with your therapist that's even better, if you don't - it's a real struggle.

Good luck.

I wasn't trying to patronize you. I was just trying to manage expectations for people accessing CBT because it often won't be like this - especially via the NHS it often follows a fairly strict format:
www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/talking-therapies-and-counselling/cognitive-behavioural-therapy-cbt/overview/

Sounds like you need to let yourself go through a grief process and mourn what you’ve lost by moving.

So whatever type of therapy that brings your feelings to awareness, brings to light whatever is blocking you from feeling your feelings, and helps you feel them will be useful.

For me psychotherapy has been great at that. But the effectiveness of the therapy depends on the therapist, and the relationship between the client and therapist (i.e. how safe you feel to be authentic with them and allow your real feelings to come out).

So I would look around locally for an option (location, time, availability) that suits you, try it for a couple of sessions and see how you gel with the therapist.

We should be clear then what we mean by CBT. I had it privately and some of the descriptions don't match my experience at all. It was highly personalised, deeply relevant to my life, dud not involve suppressing emotions or denying reality though the focus was on moving on from difficult events rather than being stuck in them, which is what I wanted.

Well said. I 2nd this

Of course this is CBT! I've sat in some sessions with my son who has OCD and it was very much like Floorwipies described. It really helped him get the thoughts that were bothering him off his mind, he could speak about them. This was CBT on the NHS.

Therapy might not help you "take back control", but it might help you feel more OK with the reality - which is that you are not fully in control.

You moved and you left behind a lot, which you are now grieving for.

That might have put you in touch with a kind of existential anxiety that we can kind of ignore most of the time - i.e. that we are not in control and that grief and loss is baked into life and we can't escape it. Something happens in life to remind us of what we usually manage to ignore, and it can flood us with anxiety.

CBT would help you to try to control your thoughts and feelings when you feel anxious.

A psychodynamic or analytic therapy is hard, because it involves facing painful realities in the relationship with your therapist, but the firm setting does hold and support you in doing that, and ultimately you might end up stronger.

As I see it we can either go through life (1) trying to maintain an illusion that we can control things, or (2) we can face the reality that we don't, face the pain of loss, but develop the confidence that we can bear the loss even though it is painful. I think the second person is likely will feel happier and stronger in the long run.

I think CBT is good to help someone get enough control to function day to day and with that remit it can be really successful.

But I do think it side steps the central issue and dilemma of life, how can we feel safe when we are not in control and when pain and loss are coming our way.

Currently doing CBT via phone appointments and am definitely finding it positive. I am a severe case of social phobia, my goals are keeping my eyes open on the bus (which I did for the first time on Monday and checked the reality that people are not staring at me or other things), trying to make eye contact and in the future actually say hello or not freak out if a stranger talks to me. The difference was I wasn't able to engage fully before and was never willing but at 37 I am utterly fed up of feeling so anxious and at the whims of strangers (or the judgments I think they are making about me). I am taking back control and taking everything on board and giving it a good go. Simply if you're not willing to engage or keep an open mind then it will do nothing for you. It is not a magical cure all. It takes effort, you have to put work in.

This CBT is specifically to help treat my Social Phobia and that is what we're focusing on. I would most likely need something different for my other mental illness (EUPD, Depression). But I just want to feel less anxious so I am going for it.

Ok, reading back over the OP (definitely saw CBT and got too excited). You have made a decision you regret and are feeling regret. That is a perfectly normal feeling. You would only need CBT if you developed mental illness or anxiety problems from your decision.

Fentylipgloss That is my experience too. I have had decades (actually life long) experiences of anxiety and endless CBT sessions as this seems to be the panacea for all mental health issues according to most of the NHS GPs I have encountered. I am actually in a worse position with my mental health than before so CBT has done nothing for my recovery, even though I invested heavily in it, in fact I found it rather annoying and frustrating especially the typed CBT which is the only thing on offer in my area atm. Typed CBT seems so impersonal and robotic.

CBT is interesting - it is not about getting stuff off your chest, but about looking at the things that are triggering depression and anxiety and seeking ways of altering your thinking about it; ways to choose to think that help you to lead a happier life. There is a lot of form-filling - you are asked to record your thoughts and what triggers negative thoughts.

OP - I said that CBT did not sound the right route for you, but when you went on to describe how all this is impacting on you and your behaviours, it is possible that it might be. For 2 years now I've been overeating, not sleeping and crying at everything . I feel like an utter failure and I just don't know how to get back to being me again. This must be very hard.

How to access CBT on the NHS varies in different areas of the country; and there is often a long waiting list. But there are online courses and useful books that take you through the process so you can do it yourself, for example CBT For Dummies.

One of the reasons that CBT is flavour of the month is that it is relatively cheap for NHS services to provide.

CBT can be a bit robotic, depending on who you are doing it with. There is no element of "shoulder to cry on" - it can feel quite mechanistic.

It might help you to pinpoint the exact things that are making you sad rather than just a general sense that you regret the move. One of the hard things is that you might find that moving back might not be an answer as it could be that you would take your problems with you, and it might not actually be the answer you hoed for. Life back home will have moved on and people will have changed.

Maybe the first thing you need to do is to try and let go of the rose-tinted image you are carrying around of home. As long as that is firmly lodged in your mind it will be very hard for you to move on emotionally and start to find good things on the new that you can build on.

@Mischance

This does sound like this would be helpful - I don't want to talk over the move and what happened again and again bevyase I have already done this with my husband and it just isn't helping, if anything it is just making it worse bevyase it isn't changing anything and what's dne is done ....it's making me anxious and it's highlighting areas of anxiety in me such as

• where do I send my daughter to school . I've made my choices and am stressing that I haven't made the right decision for her first choice now.
• anxiety over the fact that my mum finds it hard driving to us (we are only 1hour away but she doesn't like driving) I feel like I've put this stress upon her by choosing to move . I feel like I was selfish moving away from her despite trying to do what was best for my family .
• I want to settle in here and make it feel like home without all trhe anxiety and doubt
• majorly anxious about my daughter making friends . To the point where it consumes my every thought . This also links to the school choice and me doubting if I picked the right first choice for her
• feel like an utterly awful mother for being so indecisive and regretful .
• feeing guilty for everything - being a bad mother bevayse I am indecisive (I never used to be!!) guilty that my mum has to drive an hour to us , guilty that im not round the corner to my elderly grandmother , guilty that I took my daughter out of a nursery she loved
• I was always so head strong and glass half full sort of person , so the doubtful , regretful and guilty person I have become is someone I don't recognise and that gets me down as I feel like I've lost myself
• I need to reach a point where I am no longer stressing about the above things so if we did decide to move back in he future I wouldn't take it all with me and the move would be for positive reasons and not negative

I'm considering buying the cbt for dummies book - do you think it is good and would it help for he stuff I've described above ?
Im so cross I've let myself become this sort of person

I’ve just paid £500 last month for a block of anxiety therapy with one of the best therapists in the country (supposedly). It was a mixture of different types of therapy and a bit of hypnosis. It was a world I’d never entered before and really didn’t know what to expect. I found it really wasn’t anything special at all and no different from something I could just have found on YouTube and done myself. I felt like the whole time I was there I was more analysing the cost of it and thinking it was a con than actually taking anything in 🙈 everyone is different though

Exactly this.

Filling out boring fucking forms and feeling a failure for not doing it right.

Psychotherapy has been a godsend for me.