A Timeline Of My Time In Therapy

Hello poppets,

How are you all?

This week as promised I’m bringing to you a timeline of my therapies and a rough idea of how they all went. As mentioned before I get a lot of comments and questions regarding repeated therapies and how on earth I managed to keep trying them even though they seemed to be ‘failing’.

In my last post we talked a little about not classing those ‘failed attempts’ as ‘failed attempts’ but instead looked at why we were classing them as those and what was going wrong.

Here I have for you a short and compressed timeline of the therapies I engaged in;
Its very important to mention again that my last trauma was my last assault at 17 years of age. Before this point I was being misdiagnosed and often treated for things I didn’t have and also treated whilst I was still in an abuse environment.

Back at School
Im pretty sure my first ever experience of therapy/counselling was at school. I mean with my track record with school i could just leave it there as why it was a ‘failed attempt’

My school had picked up on my behaviour and how I was very reserved and had started to wonder why. They picked and picked and eventually told me they would have to tell my parents if I didn’t tell them what was upsetting me. I ended up saying to them that it was my mothers current boyfriend that was the problem and that they couldn’t tell her because it would upset her.

You can probably tell where this is going.. Oh yes, they told her possibly straight after me leaving the office which you can only imagine what I had to deal with when I got home.

FAILED ATTEMPT 1 – Tick!

Counselling
I am going to put this all into one to really compress it. This section really spans from that first experience of counselling to moving on to my ‘first’ therapy which was NLP.

Its quite hard to explain but I guess you could say around my younger and especially first teenager years my behaviour wasn’t normal. I completely lived in my own world and had disconnected myself from the everyday to cope with what was happening at home. Safe to say by this point my main abuser had brandished me as ‘Mental’ and she was on a mission to prove it and to get others to prove it too.

For years I was prodded and poked at by doctors and counsellors who would try to get out of me why I was behaving the way I was. I wasn’t acting too out of turn which I guess is how I managed to keep myself out of being sent to hospital. I just sort of existed, not talking and being in an almost ‘numb’ state completely oblivious of the world around me.

NLP

My first experience of actual therapy was NLP. Id been moved to a small college program due to not going to school. Though I was now out of my previous world of living in my head at home it didn’t mean my behaviour had really changed.

My college tutor had inlisted some help in the form of an NLP therapist who between her and my tutor spent a considerable amount of time trying to work out what was going on.

Funnily enough my tutor had actually started to figure things out due to my main abusers behaviour on the rare occasion of seeing her. This therapy didn’t really remain as therapy as before long it became a mission to get me out of my main abusers care.

A Quiet Time.
Next I had a quiet period in my life. I was on top of the world after coming out of my main abusers care and life was truly wonderful.

It was only until I decided to go and look after a family member due to them struggling by themselves at home that things changed and oh how they changed!

Counselling
After my first assault I was left TERRIFIED and I mean terrified. I had no way of grasping what on earth had happened to me and I was left in a complete state of shock.

My GP suggested I have some sort of ‘help’ to support me as I still had to live in an environment where the person that assaulted me could appear at any time.

This counselling In particular I was put through an enormous amount of stress for. It took a long time for me to be passed to anyone. Endless phone calls. Endless trips to the GP and endless let downs.

When I was finally put through to someone I only attended one session before the counsellor had moved to another department and I somehow ended up being another number on another long list and had to wait again.

Counselling 2
I eventually managed to get to see another counsellor only to attend 3 sessions before I was told that I was now to old to attend the service and they didn’t realise how old I was at the time when I was first accepted.

I think we can class this one as failed! Oh dear!

Counselling/Not quite sure

I ended up going to some sort of private support/councellor which started out being a place for me to get some sort of support with moving out of my current not so great situation.

It was a not so good situation in itself as though my GP had sent me there due stating my current situation and listing injuries from my assaults It almost ended up feeling like I was giving a statement to the police where they were trying to figure out if it really happened or not. Not good!

CBT 1
By the time my second assault came round I was in a real mess. By this point I had developed full blown OCD. What a treat!

I landed myself in CBT therapy as by this point id been diagnosed with OCD and had something to work on. Unfortunately I ended up with a therapist In the form of a narcissist.

Oh no, really! He was a very strange man and I seemed to spend most of the time listening to his difficulties and how they changed his life for the worst.

On telling my doctor that there was something very strange about him they didn’t seem all that shocked and almost agreed that yes he was quite strange. Time for a change of doctor and therapist I think!

Counselling
During the time of my first CBT therapist I had also been given almost a ‘support person’ to help me with daily tasks as my life was so consumed by OCD. They were suppose to be there to help me around the house and support me with general needs and the emotional side to what was happening.

Unfortunately the person I was given was extremely unreliable and often didn’t even turn up. The stress of not knowing if they were going to turn up one day or not all became too much to handle and I had to cancel the support.

CBT 2
This was my final therapy and miracle really. Somehow with a new doctor I found the CBT therapist that completely changed my life.

THE END!

I hope this gives you a rough idea of my experience with therapy and support and I’ve really tried to highlight the main and key ones in my life and those that had a real impact on my state of mind.

Truly if I had listed everything you would be sat here reading it all day. I have so many more ‘little bits’ of therapy’s meetings and support and stories of being passed around and dropped. I also had lots of other forms of help when going through the legal system for my abuse which came alongside my first CBT therapy and thats just another story of failed and unhelpful ‘support’ too.

The main point of this post is to show that to get to the place I have now it wasn’t an easy ride. I don’t want anyone to look at my story and see my recovery and think that they can’t do it as they’ve had failed attempts with therapy.

I feel so much for anyone that is currently in this cycle of being passed from pillar to post. It is extremely disheartening when it has taken so much courage to get to the point of wanting help.

All I can truly say and can’t say enough is please just keep pushing. Take time for yourself and look after yourself after these unsuccessful attempts but do not brandish them as failures they’re just a learning curve and a point to go down another path.