The emotional cost of therapy..

[DavidUK]

Hi everyone, I'm going to say right up front, I wrote a lot here so feel free to chop it! 😆

The first time I had therapy was 25 years ago. At the time I was working in medical sales in London. I was selling surgical instruments for keyhole surgery into most of the top NHS and private hospitals in London.
I'm 50yrs old now, so back then aged 25 I was trying to persuade people like Prof Magdi Yacoub (pioneer of heart surgery techniques who performed the first heart lung transplant etc) that regarding cardio thoracic surgery, "you don't want to do it like that, you want to do it like this!"
Funnily enough I encountered what I termed a 'credibility gap'. Very few of these surgeons were happy (most were very unhappy!) to take advice from a kid who hadn't been performing surgical procedures for the last 30yrs minimum as they had.
In order to try and improve my chances of getting my 'foot in the door' and frankly keeping my job, I was searching for help.
That's when I encountered NLP ( Neuro Linguistic Programming) for the first time, as it was back then in the early days of Tony Robbins, motivational speaking, personal growth and empowerment. These guys were using techniques straight from the therapist's couch to empower people in a variety of different fields. It seemed to me that using the communication skills of building rapport, empathy and trust in my hospital sales environment would be very similar to the ways in which the early NLP developers Richard Bandler and John Grinder had used the same techniques to help 'treatment resistant' clients in a therapeutic setting.
So I managed to convince my boss at the time that investing £5,000 in my NLP training as well as providing me with other learning materials such as books, tapes and seminars, (not to mention all the time off work I would require) with a few tweaks here and there to convert the techniques from therapists couch to 'operating theatre speak' would be a great investment... and if it worked for me and I was also able to disseminate the knowledge to my sales colleagues a good deal for the company too.

NLP at the time, especially in business, was pretty new and mostly unheard of. The premiss behind it being that it's not necessary to offload all of your 'stuff' during therapy, which requires the client to re live everything albeit in a therapeutic setting. Instead of viewing this as 'cathartic' as some schools of thought advocated, the NLP view likened it to being a victim in a court case, who in order to obtain justice must face their nemesis repeatedly and in so doing causes themselves further damage by virtue of having to re visit events that they really shouldn't have to.
So NLP required no, or only the absolute minimum of, personal history from the client to the therapist.
A large part of my training was taking the role of therapist or client and working through our own 'stuff' while being overseen and coached in a safe environment. This for me was the 'free by product' of wanting to sift through a whole lot of information in order to glean maybe half a dozen ideas which I could take back and use in my business setting. For me the goal was developing long term trusting relationships with surgeons, to enable 'win win' solutions for my company and ultimately benefit patients from the very latest medical advances on offer. (Suffice to say that from a business perspective, it worked!)
Throughout my training process I also got to work on some of my own issues, paid for by the company! And whilst this definitely helped me to a certain extent, the rather 'sanitised' approach that the therapist really doesn't need to know anything about me in order to facilitate healing seemed to me to still leave something on the table in terms of efficacy.

Fast forward 25yrs and arriving at my current home in April , a hostel providing temporary accommodation for formerly homeless people, joint funded by a local charity and the local authority, I was offered free counselling to help me deal with the trauma of living and sleeping on the street continuously for the previous 2.5yrs and intermittently an additional 8yrs prior to that.
This counselling takes the client based 'inner child' model of "I know you're in there hiding somewhere kid, and we're going to try and get you out so we can help you" approach.
For me it's like the polar opposite of where I was 25yrs ago. I've spent an hour a week, every week, for the last 6 months doing nothing but dragging up my 'stuff', looking at it, talking about it and inevitably re living it as part of the process.
'Luckily' for me I can pull down a kind of 'bulletproof shutter' between me and these events in my mind which shields me from the vast majority of 'crap' that is attached to my 'stuff' 😂! (if only I could bottle, market and sell these 'shutters' on Amazon for $99+shipping and a lifetime subscription for repairs! 😂😂 !) My 'shutters' were probably paid for by my medical sales company investing in so much NLP therapy for me!
I say 'luckily' for me, because paradoxically the goal of my counsellor is to gently peel back the layers of my psyche, rather like an onion until we reach the hiding place of my 'inner child' at which point (as in the traditional sense of peeling onions!) presumably the floodgates will re open and an ocean of tears will spill forth.
And metaphorically once I'm dried off, wrapped in a warm towel and given a hot drink, the glowing cheeks of my youth will be beaming with vulnerability once again, and I will be restored to a utopian child like innocence ready to face the world and get the '💩kicked out of me' all over again...
Usually following each counselling session on a Thursday evening I would spend all day every Friday and possibly into the weekend, lost in a fog of recollections, flashbacks, anger, blame etc..that I'm sure will be familiar to a proportion of people who read this.
If you are picking up on some 'resistance' in my willingness to do that then I suggest that your 'sensory acuity' is pretty much 'on point'!!

But here's the thing...in the past 6 months since being here in the hostel, I have felt overwhelmed and wanted to leave on a number of occasions. In fact were it not for the wonderfully empathetic staff and the unconditional support and encouragement from my counsellor, I would be guaranteed 100% right now sleeping in the doorway of the Salvation Army again and, from what I can hear outside my bedroom window as I write this, it's pouring with rain!

So for me the question is.. "Is the emotional price of counselling worth paying?"

When a couple of months ago my parents offered to pay for me to have a private mental health assessment at a Priory Group clinic to primarily establish what role medication might play in my recovery, I was given a written assessment and for the first time in my life a formal diagnosis of CPTSD with Secondary Anxiety. (I have never felt more relieved to be called 'mentally ill' by anyone at any time in my life! 😂 And with a nod of the head to those who say, "you're not ill", I get that too...👍)

I was prescribed by the Consultant Psychiatrist Venlaxafine as well as a minimum of 20 sessions of EMDR and told "there's a good chance you'll never be fully 'cured' but hopefully you will regain enough control to lead a 'normal' life again."

At the same time the Consultant said to me, "I am not going to tell you what to do regarding your existing counselling, as I'm sure you have probably built up a healthy, empathetic, therapeutic relationship. It's just that our experience of talking therapies tells us that recounting experiences of trauma in cases such as yours can often be detrimental etc etc"..
He didn't need to spell it out for me, he was only confirming what I had learned 25yrs earlier, and in a nutshell he was saying, "ditch the counselling, it's hurting you, and will be detrimental to the beneficial effects of EMDR".

I already knew that there was some pain involved in seeing the counsellor. But as a kid I played loads of tennis and I would get a lot of blisters on my hands through hours of practising with a sponge ball against the wall of my house.
When this happened I used to go into the garden shed, find the small bottle of surgical spirit my Dad kept there and some old rag, peel off the loose skin covering the blister and pour the liquid over the raw flesh underneath. The fumes would bring tears brimming over from my eyes ( please believe it was only the fumes! 💪😂😂) and it's fair to say that it stung... a lot!
Did it stop me playing tennis? No.. did it help me to become stronger in the long run? Yes.. If it had been necessary to do something even more drastic/ painful in order to allow me to carry on playing without taking a break would I have done it?.. Probably not... Because there comes a point where the reward isn't worth the pain.

Are the rewards from having a counsellor listen to the worst details of every bad deed I can ever recall undertaking, and not judging me, not telling me what I 'should' have done or what I 'must' do differently in the future, worth the pain of re telling them?

For me yes, absolutely, every day of the week and twice on Sundays. It's a price I am willing to pay for unconditional support, caring, compassion without wavering etc etc..

Today I have so many things that are potential 'triggers' for my anxiety and they have built up over years, layer upon layer...some of them I try totally to avoid, some I think are worth trying to tolerate like the surgical spirit (fumes 💪😂!) because the reward I get from being able to sit in a cafe drinking coffee like a 'normal' person, for me outweighs the fear that I might be, 'taking up a place of someone else who deserves to be here more than me'.

So in my opinion every therapy, medication, social scenario, workplace drama has a cost.. And we decide as individuals which ones we are perhaps 'able' or 'willing' to pay and those which we are not...

I hope that my experience may help others to make choices which benefit them...

😊🙏

[Kizzie]

Hey DavidUK, glad to hear you still believe that the pain (of therapy) is worth the gain, I do too.  I wish it weren't so, but I've come to believe that the only way to deal with the pain and grief is to work through it. It does take knowledgeable & caring treatment and support for CPTSD (relational trauma response), and unfortunately that's in limited supply around the world at the moment. It sounds like you have a some people like this in your corner though -    

I wanted to suggest that there is a section for personal journals if you care to start one - https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?board=61.0.  A lot of member have journals and use them for longer/chronological  posts like this one. 

[DavidUK]

Hi Kizzie thanks very much for your message. 
Unfortunately for me the layers of different types of trauma I have experienced mean't that eventually my whole life became avoidance behaviour. When people asked me if I had 'symptoms' I would say, "no" because I just had lifelong habits. Trying to avoid all triggers simply isn't practical so I try to pick the struggles I think I can win, whether that's therapy or anything else..

Thanks so much for the suggestion of a personal journal! That sounds like a much better place for me to put these long posts which I have written! I'm still finding my way around as this is the first forum of any type I have joined so apologies for my clumsiness..

I'm so grateful I found this place.. I spent too long wandering around on my own..
Thank you 👍

[Kizzie]

No need to apologize   

It's nice having a tribe - no more wandering around alone