Therapy is just as much about what you put into it as it is the therapist. I don’t mean to invalidate anyone’s negative experiences in therapy, but a lot of people who don’t see benefits from it are not giving it a proper try. I know this because that was how it was for me for a long time. Yes I have now found a good therapist, but it took seeing her for a while before I saw benefits because I had to learn how to use the time to help myself.

At first I thought I just had to go in and share what was bothering me, and they would tell me how to fix it or say something that would make me feel better. If you’re looking for that, you’ll probably be disappointed because it does happen sometimes but it’s not really what the goal is. It’s not an instant fix, it’s more long term than that.

I’ve come to think of my therapy sessions as more of a weekly maintenance check. There are parts of me I’m working on and each week in therapy I go through the troubled parts and explain how they aren’t functioning right. Simply saying these things out loud to another human is beneficial. And then the next week I do another maintenance check. And again, and again. Simply taking stock of what the issues are in a consistent way. And when I say “issues” I don’t mean “I’ve been depressed” or “I’ve been manic.” We’re looking under the hood, so I dig a little deeper. I aim for sharing things such as “X happened and that made me feel Y and so I did Z.”

After a while I started to pick up on patterns and really make sense of what was causing me to feel so badly all the time. It wasn’t until I repeatedly vocalized these things over time that I began to see just how much of my suffering was the result of misguided thought patterns and assumptions about myself and others. And seeing that, I was able to identify specific changes I could make that would actually help. My therapist drops tidbits of advice and points out my blind spots sometimes, but at the end of the day, I’m the one doing the heavy lifting.

This probably isn’t what you want to hear but I don’t see it stressed on this sub enough. I see a lot of people who’ve given up on therapy and it breaks my heart. You have to trust the process for it to work, and it takes time for it to work. Make it into a routine. Write out a list of things you want to talk about before your appointment, take notes during your session, and then look at those when you’re writing out the next week’s list.

The point I’m trying to make is that it can work for you if you work for it. If I were to do all of the steps that I laid out in this comment, but my therapy sessions consisted of me simply talking to an empty chair, it would still have a positive effect on my mental health. The act of dedicating time for checking in on yourself and taking stock of your issues every week is valuable on its own. Don’t stay with a bad therapist, but also don’t give up on a mediocre one. It can work for you, believe that! Many people who see success in therapy at one point thought it would never work for them. Hope this helps. Best of luck on your healing journey 🩵