Perhaps it will be different this time

Every other time I've been in therapy, I haven't been there to work through any specific problem. I was in therapy because I was depressed, anxious, starving myself, cutting myself. But there was never any specific problem to work through, which I expect is a significant part of why it was so unhelpful. Despite many professionals often telling me that my problems were physical/biological/chemical, they also insisted that I be in therapy. I guess the idea was that it would help me cope while I waited for drugs that worked. While it did largely function as a waiting room, it wasn't particularly good at helping me cope. I had to fight therapists who wanted me to do yoga to relax (makes me anxious, hostile, even more uncomfortable in my body), relaxation tapes/guided meditation stuff (makes me anxious, makes my body feel even more like a foreign intruder than usual), slow conscientious breathing (more likely to start a panic attack than end one), "reframing" my thoughts (i.e. "maybe she didn't respond to my letter because she hasn't received it yet, not because she hates me and is too nice to tell me to stop sending annoying letters;" frustrated me with their lack of nuance), affirmations (it frustrated me with their blatant lies and lack of nuance, I found it unethical, it terrified me because I used the reverse of that method on my way down), and so on. Most of the time, therapists would keep pushing these things despite my objections that they didn't work and even made things worse. They were never willing to discuss why these things didn't work or adjust their tactics at MY objection.

There was talking through problems, too, but that meant skirting the issue: I wasn't depressed because of these problems and distorted thoughts, I had these problems and thoughts because I was depressed. All that talking through issues seems a waste, since most of those issues disappeared once I got on some drugs that actually alleviated the depression and anxiety. Some of those "problems" and distorted ways of thinking even helped me cope with the depression and anxiety, I had deliberately put them in place for that very reason; getting rid of those ways of coping before getting rid of the depression and anxiety always seemed dangerous to me. I was given many assurances that, by letting go of those double-edged coping methods, the depression would abate. They said the depression wouldn't go away until I let go of those ways of coping. But then the drugs started working, and I felt better, so I didn't need those ways of coping anymore, and I slowly quit them.

There were a couple things that never really got resolved in therapy, that might have actually been useful to resolve. When I was un-depressed, I pushed these things far enough to the corners of my mind that they didn't cause any trouble, though they were still upsetting. In therapy, I don't think it would have been possible to extract the things that would continue to be troublesome from the things that wouldn't. None of them are things that were problems before I got depressed. There wasn't really any indicator of how these things might have been different from the others. No therapist would have been helpful in figuring out what would linger once the depression left, because they thought all of my problems needed resolving; none ever thought that un-depression would make any of these problems vanish as thoroughly as they did. (In a lot of ways I am still weird in the ways I was when I was depressed, but it is now mild enough not to be a problem for me. My intensely crushing pessimism was a problem when I was depressed and I am still a pessimist when I am un-depressed, just not to a problematic degree. Although some mental health care professionals would, I suspect, disagree. And others might disagree that my un-depressed pessimism isn't crushing.)

Perhaps now that I have actual discrete problems that I want to solve, which seems to be what therapy is more useful for, therapy will go better this time. I will have to lay down the law. "These are the problems I am here to solve. This is something many other therapists have wanted me to solve. I am not addressing it because addressing it will cause more trouble than it is worth and will solve nothing, and because what they have seen as a problem is not something I have found particularly problematic. When I say 'stop' to a particular method of therapy, you need to stop or discuss with me why you think you should continue, but the decision should be left to me. I won't refuse to do things just because they are painful, but I will refuse to do things that don't work and that make things worse. I will let you know when you cross this line, although I may not always be able to be assertive about it. It is not okay to take advantage of my meekness." (That bit about stopping, it makes therapy sound like rape. I do not think this is an unfair comparison, though the extent of awfulness may differ greatly, though not always.)