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Whenever people hear my story they immediately think that I should see a doctor or a counselor, but I don't believe they do anything special other than to make you talk and give you some placebo medicine.
This "situation" I went through sounds traumatic whenever I talk about it, but it's been a while since it happened and I learned -in some ways- to deal with it.
I don't think I should see a therapist, but has anyone ever seen one and did it really work for you?
I'm thinking that, perhaps, you have one or more erroneous impressions about "therapy". In the type of therapy you're describing the answers DO come from within you -- all the therapist does is help you to identify, clarify, define, implement and evaluate them.
By the way, don't minimize or under-estimate the value of the "all the therapist does" part. It's a whole lot more difficult than it may seem.
i was in a car accident before and it messed up my knee. I went to physical therapy and the therapist got my knee back in 100% tip top shape in about 8 weeks. It worked for my knee!
Whenever people hear my story they immediately think that I should see a doctor or a counselor, but I don't believe they do anything special other than to make you talk and give you some placebo medicine.
This "situation" I went through sounds traumatic whenever I talk about it, but it's been a while since it happened and I learned -in some ways- to deal with it.
I don't think I should see a therapist, but has anyone ever seen one and did it really work for you?
It works ONLY if you find a good therapist. There are psychologists who specialize in trauma. They won't drug you, that's not part of their practice. They should be able to evaluate you to see if you have any unresolved post-traumatic stress, and the good ones have effective and efficient techniques for resolving that. It's not all talk-therapy. The innovative counselors have non-talk-therapy techniques as well as more standard fare. You can Google "counselors" and "psychologists" + "trauma" or "trauma therapy" in your area, and put together a question sheet for when you call them to see what they do.
Trauma is a specialized field in psychotherapy, and most therapists AREN'T trained in it. So a lot of people end up wasting their time getting nowhere with therapy, because they're with the wrong therapist.
I saw a psychologist for a few years. Weird/mixed experience overall. I certainly wouldn't judge the effectiveness of therapy in general based on this one anecdote, and I am under no illusion that our experiences (our meaning OP and mine) are necessarily at all comparable. That being said, here's something about what I encountered: the guy I saw was recommended by a friend of my mom's (I was 19 when I started seeing him, so I was still pretty likely to overvalue parental advice). I sought his counsel due to issues with panic attacks and anxiety (my first panic attack was something I'll never forget...onset occurred while playing poker at Turning Stone Casino...but I was such a poker junkie at that time that I stayed in the casino for another four hours or so, because I couldn't bring myself to walk away from a hold'em tournament for which I'd pre-registered...all the while my heart was racing/beating irregularly and I was shaking...I still have to wonder what the other players thought. No one said anything until I told someone near a slot machine as I started to run towards the hallway/parking lot; I remember being wished well as I began to sprint away from the guy. He probably thought I was on something more than a few cups of coffee (which I partially blamed for the panic attack, along with sleep deprivation and the stress that casino poker caused me). Somehow made it ~35 miles to a Syracuse hospital ER after the tournament (I couldn't sit still the entire ride...I kept opening and closing the window, had to fight the urge to open the door...don't even want to go into further detail about this memory), where I spent the night).
The physical aftereffects of the above were so bad that I first went to a cardiologist and gastroenterologist, as I was experiencing frequent heart palpitations (even on days where I didn't feel acutely panicked) and horrendous acid reflux (when I felt as though I had the appetite to eat at all). The experiences with the gastroenterologist, a man by the name of Timothy Wacker, could fill an entire other post. That guy was incredibly inept (wack, you might say). He memorably told me after one test (barium swallow?) that I had the stomach of an elderly woman. Said matter-of-factly and with no additional insight...thanks, Doc.
Anyway. For the psychologist (and to Pinkmani's point about different kinds of therapy, I'd say that this guy was kind of out of the classic psychotherapy mold...definitely wasn't CBT, I can say that much) I wound up seeing from maybe early 2006- mid 2009, I'll say this:
Pros:
--I liked him personally. Engaging, intelligent (Yale grad IIRC), witty--for a solid couple years, I enjoyed spending an hour with the guy (the appeal began to wear off during the last year or so). We shared some interests and we definitely shared some political sensibilities. I met him for lunch a few times "off the clock"; while he may have made those arrangements almost as an additional act of therapy (because he was concerned about my general reclusiveness during this time period), I don't think he would've done this with someone he didn't like. Obviously a psychologist has a stake in at least pretending to care, but...in any event, I don't think his general enjoyment of our interactions was a front.
--There was therapeutic value in simply making the trip to the office every week, or twice every three weeks. I was struggling mightily with anxiety during the majority of this time period, and anything that could be done to get me out of the house had to be considered beneficial. Otherwise I would've just sat around playing online poker all day (which did nothing if not exacerbate my anxiety, for what it's worth)
--The guy made me hot chocolate at the beginning of each session, and the stuff would compare favorably to anything you'd get at any coffee shop. Best hot chocolates I've ever had (whipped cream and all) were courtesy of him. Not exactly part of the job description, but a nice gesture, and appreciated.
Cons:
Many. Where to start....
--The guy was rather egomaniacal and incredibly judgmental for someone who's paid to listen (above all else). I may have appreciated or at least not taken issue with some of his freely shared political opinions, because I tended to agree with those. But just as he'd throw some rapid-fire political one-liners out there, he was equally prone to throwing out hasty, almost flippant observations on aspects of my life, and these observations tended to be about as accurate as a throw of a dart may be. His saving grace was that he often managed to inject humor into the situation, which typically prevented me from contesting his opinions with much vigor (and sometimes I was so depressed that I just didn't have the energy to argue).
The most annoying of these snap judgments proved to be when he quickly came to the conclusion that my father was somehow a dark force who deserved culpability for my current predicament. The airing of this opinion became a recurring theme as our sessions wore on, much to my chagrin. I have SOME ambivalence about my father, but malicious he is not, of poor intentions he is not. The shrink basically had him pegged as an abusive alcoholic, which I would take some pain to argue against any time he'd run that speculation by me. He'd accuse me of apologizing for his (imagined) actions, or being afraid to "out" him for what he was. I was afraid of many things at that stage in my life, but protecting some false image of my father was not one of them. I tried to explain that I felt there were other experiences in my formative years that could've been somewhat damaging, but he wasn't interested in hearing about them--I'd almost say he was scornfully dismissive. He'd made up his mind that my dad was a drunk malignant ******* who, IDK, beat me daily as a kid I guess. I still don't quite know what even gave him license to begin these imaginings...I'm sure I made a couple half-criticisms of my dad, but "occasionally distant" and "somewhat enigmatic" are a far cry from "actively destructive". My saying that he had a few beers daily became contorted into his having a serious drinking problem. Sigh.
--During the time I saw this therapist, I was also seeing a psychiatrist. They would talk, and both would tend to start their conversations with me by reporting that they'd spoken with the other. So while it was good that there was interaction, what I don't think the therapist/psychologist ever actually told the psychiatrist in the course of these dozens of phone calls was that he didn't really believe in what the psychiatrist was doing. The psychiatrist I was seeing had me on Depakote/Lamictal (mood stabilizers) as well as your benzodiazepines for anxiety. Therapist never really agreed with the fact that I should be taking the former class of drugs; but beyond that, there would be times when he'd express doubt about all psychotropic drugs and about the entire practice of psychiatry. While I shared some of his skepticism, especially as I started educating myself on the placebo-ness of antidepressants (which I had briefly been prescribed) and gabapentin/Neurontin (which I was at one point prescribed for anxiety), I felt like his implied "us vs them; psychology v psychiatry" mindset wasn't really helpful, especially as he concealed it from the psychiatrist I was seeing, phone call after phone call. But however unhelpful such a mindset may have been, it was dwarfed by:
--the unhelpfulness of the actual advice I received. Basically, I looked at our appointments as a chance for me to drink hot chocolate in a comfortable chair and talk about miscellany for the majority of the hour; that we did those things was why I continued to see the guy for 3.5 years (as I remember the timeframes). When it came to actual life analysis and life advice, he had little. He kept telling me to get a job, and he'd frequently tout the benefits he gleaned from some summer job he'd had between high school and college. I'd basically say, "Great, but if I'm having a panic attack half the time I get behind the wheel and make the oft-futile attempt to get to my few college classes, how am I supposed to take on an additional burden? I can't even handle the ones I have now." The idea from his perspective was that succeeding at a job would help overcome anxiety in general...and that was basically all he had. Sure, he'd give little pieces of life advice for different specific circumstances (some of which I found pretty off-the-mark), but when it came to some actual big-picture strategy, there really wasn't any. Getting a job was going to be the magic bullet. Not the worst advice for the average person, but for someone who was still seriously struggling to get through the average day, it seemed like he was skipping ahead a couple steps. I'd tell him I couldn't make it to my college campus half the time because I'd have a panic attack en route, and he'd say...keep trying. Professional advice right there. But when you get right down to it, what can be said? What is a therapeutically effective approach to dealing with severe anxiety, from a psychologist's standpoint? I don't know if there's any approach or "battle plan" that would be considered standard practice...if there is some generally recommended approach, I doubt it much resembles what I received. Sure, we tried a little hypnosis and the occasional breathing exercise, a couple stock components of the psychologist's bag of tricks, but there never seemed to be a rhyme or reason. "Hypnosis next session?"--just seemed so haphazard.
In sum...well, I really have no idea how to even begin to summarize the whole experience. "Could've been better, could've been worse" is as much as I can say by way of encapsulation.
Last edited by Matt Marcinkiewicz; 12-14-2013 at 04:11 AM..
Reason: added two words...guess which ones...nah don't torture yourself, heh
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my possibly more than two cents
