Last night, for whatever reason, I remembered that once I discharge from here they’re probably going to make me go back to therapy. This resulted in me low-key crying for at least an hour. I hate therapy. People think that it doesn’t work because I have a bad attitude. They don’t take the time to listen to how deeply invested I was in it, and the massive sacrifices of time and money I made for it, before I finally concluded that I hate it. All it does is leave me traumatized, broke, and exhausted, with therapist after therapist concluding that I’m a piece of 🤬 who they can’t work with anymore. They don’t even offer a referral because they actually think I’m not trying. Imagine pouring your all into something and still sucking so bad at it that they literally don’t know that you’re even trying.
A while back I had an actually okay therapist (who promptly had to fire me due to an insurance issue) and I overshared the following on Facebook:
I feel like maybe I could deal with a text-based service. One thing I hate about therapy is that I come in with what I want to talk about, and they constantly cut me off and interrupt me and then the session is over and I never get to get out what I wanted to say. They can’t interrupt a written text.
It turns out that these things are awfully expensive, however, and they don’t take insurance. Also, it wouldn’t address the fact that I always seem to inadvertently ruin my therapists’ lives.
https://www.verywellmind.com/cerebral-review-5201188
Part II
I had to turn my phone in earlier so I just uploaded what I had and now I’ve completely lost my flow so I’m not going to edit what I wrote this morning. “Cerebral” is the name of a text-based therapy company that’s cheaper than TalkSpace. I did also want to add that the book Dr. X gave me months ago included a section on “neurofeedback” which I would actually see a benefit to. This is the quote:
Dr. X said I just needed a therapist that understood that the only two interventions he’s ever found that worked for me were active listening and validation. He said he would pass the message along himself when the time came. I think I might do better with a male. I’m not sure why that is and all the explanations I can come up with are highly sexist, but my gut says I’ve had too many female therapists.
Above all, I want is a therapist who is guaranteed not to overextended themselves and burn out and take out the result on me. Who won’t ever decide that I’m actually a terrible person deep down. I’ve never found that in any lasting way anywhere but this hospital, which is part of why I’m so afraid of leaving.
Part III
I read an article about TFP once and sent my social worker an email about it:
Unfortunately, after searching my google activity for this ancient article, all I could find was that I read it on August 9, 2019, it was on the site “www.bpdcentral.com/blog/“, the name of the article was “My Journey With Borderline Personality Disorder,” and the site has now been shut down and redirects to a new site for parents with the misfortune to have offspring with BPD. I remember clearly that the article was a mini-memior that described the author’s miraculous recovery that she made working with a therapist who she re-named “Dr. Adena” for writing purposes, and that this therapist practiced Transference-Focused Psychotherapy.
I looked into TFP in August 2019 and got this email from a kindly bigshot:
There are currently people in [your area] who are training in TFP. When you think the time is right for a private referral (I’m sorry that I don’t know anyone on an insurance panel), please feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do.
So obviously that’s not gonna happen. But I’m probably going to look back on this article someday when I’m reflecting on Types Of Therapy That Would Be Acceptable To Me and it will be good for me at that time to be able to remind myself why I didn’t go for it.
I wonder what IFS is; for some reason I think I’ve heard good things about it…
It really doesn’t matter, since I have no money and I’ll be at the mercy of insurance. I guess it’s not so much that I doubt that therapy could work; it’s that the only kind available to me will be cheap therapy. I hate to be a snob but it’s my psyche on the line.
I’m going to call it a win that I’m thinking about outpatient treatment at all and try again to go on with my day.
