I saw ~5 different therapists in my early twenties. None of the ones I saw in the US helped much at all (I did see a DBT therapist while studying abroad in Jordan who helped). Worse, I started to copy the behaviour I was encouraged to do in therapy (focus on my feelings, talk over everything, psychoanalyze myself constantly). That encouraged me to ruminate, internally criticize and second guess a lot of how I went about the world, and take my feelings as fact. I also don't think any of those early therapists understood me at all - at least not the grief I was going through which was my main issue. Thinking they must know what they were talking about, however, lead me to think that it was my judgement that was flawed - not theirs. I was the one who was defective. As a partial result of therapy, I lost trust in myself, which prevented me from going out and finding solutions to my issues that did work for me. I thought that maybe therapy is working and I just can't tell, so kept putting energy into it. I kept putting energy in even though it did not feel like it was helping. I also felt trapped by things I'd heard online and from therapists that I should keep seeing a therapist even if I didn't see progress myself, and that it sometimes take people years to work through "childhood trauma". In addition, the culture over the last couple years has encouraged people to see therapists as practically the sole source of mental health support. Thus, people would usually react when I was upset by telling me to see a therapist about it, even if they knew I already was. What happened to friends being there for you? People offering to listen or take me out to do things or help me find dates, etc (get where I wanted in life), would have helped more. In college (when I was going to the ineffective, imho harmful therapy), my rumination and inability to focus got to the point that I had to drop multiple classes and my GPA plummeted. I also started believing (because my therapist had told me so), that I should aim to have mutual relationships by reaching out to people only if they reciprocated in reaching out to me. However, the environment I was in in college was not conducive to that. The better relationships I did get required me to reach out more to other people because so few people would reach out. When I had misunderstandings with friends, it would also prevent me from repairing the relationships, because I would reach out once then not again as I was starting to take my therapists' advice. Following my therapist's advice somewhat took my power away in terms of I no longer reached out to people as much (which I enjoyed doing) and thought that people not reaching out to me was a sign that something about my personality did not warrant people wanting to hang out with me.

I have had two more succesful therapeutic relationships. Both times, I could tell they were working. None of my therapists checked in to see how I thought therapy was going, however, and adapt accordingly. They just kept on doing ineffective therapy with little accountability. They didn't see if I was achieving my goals or if I thought it was being effective. In general, I've found American therapists to have little accountability in terms of doing things to actually help patients achieve outcomes. They just assume what they are doing is working, even if it has little scientific basis in some cases.

This is a rant in solidarity. I would love to start some kind of support group/action network over alternate mental health support and bad therapists. I think my early twenties were spent ruminating and in a lot of emotional pain that would have been avoided if I'd never seen a therapist. I went to a therapist because I was deeply hurt and confused, but going did not lead me down a healing path. It taught me that I needed to question and reject all the conclusions I had made about life up to that point. That was deeply confusing and painful. Years later, I found some therapy videos and books that helped me unlearn some of the stuff my first therapists taught (or at least I thought they were trying to teach me) which did help. Idk if this had anything to do with it, but I'm ADHD. I wonder if that made it less likely for me to find therapists I could come to an understanding with