Love is the secret ingredient to making therapy work

[Papa Coco]

I have a new perspective on life, trauma, and therapy. I'd like to share it to see if others feel the same way.

Love is the secret ingredient for true healing
I now see that love is the secret ingredient that turns horizontal path stuff into vertical path stuff. Horizontal path is anything we do that feeds physical needs and wants but doesn't move us forward emotionally or spiritually. Going to ball games. Buying a new coat. Working for money rather than passion. Etc. And the vertical path is when we do anything that does move us closer to emotional healing. Loving people. Charity work. Meditation and prayer. Random acts of kindness, listening intently to others who need to be heard, Etc.

I now believe that love is the secret ingredient that moves us forward emotionally and spiritually, and doesn't simply keep us churning on the horizontal treadmill of physical drudgery.

I say this because true trauma therapists know this. That feeling of love for their patients transforms therapy into healing. Any CBT therapist who I've ever seen has been just a talking head. They did me no permanent good. They kept me from losing my own battle with suicidality, but their cures were temporary. They didn't bring me any lasting healing. Why? Because the 6 that I've seen viewed their role as a job. I had a CBT once who, when he called me to talk about a scheduling issue and I mentioned to him that I was in a lot of emotional pain, he sternly scolded into the phone, "I work for money!" He routinely made sure I knew to keep my problems within the 45 minutes of session time. As sessions ended, his entire demeanor would change right before my eyes. When the clock hit 15 minutes to the hour, he just disconnected with me. It was time to give him my check and politely leave his office. That's what CBT means to me. They work for money. They see patients as their job. Billable hours. They say what they were trained to say out of old antiquated textbooks, and they keep patients at an arm's length. Good Trauma therapists, on the other hand, love their patients.

Love really is the secret ingredient in how people perform any job. True craftsmen make beautiful homes with clever attributes and charm, while simple builders just build to code so they can collect their cash. Chefs who love cooking make amazing food while cooks who are just there to collect a paycheck make food that's ...eh. It's alright.

My current therapist is a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT). He also works with other therapists to teach them how to do effective trauma therapy. On an internet search for his address, I accidentally came across some of the papers that he's published where he talks about the value of feeling love for your patients when you do trauma therapy. He believes, as I now also do, that love is the most important secret ingredient that turns talk therapy into a healing process. I'm going to see him today. I plan to start session by telling him that he just might be the ONE person on earth who truly taught me how to give and accept true, deep, emotional love with other people. I think it's only fair that he knows how deeply I appreciate his work with me.

Because of my own experiences, I wonder if CBTs have never helped anyone permanently. From what I've seen in my own experience CBT appears to be physical only. Horizontal path. It just keeps me on the treadmill for going nowhere fast. Without a spiritual component, physical healing is ineffective on any level. Even medical doctors who have a personal love for me give me better health than those who just see me as "their 10:00 appointment".  When love is present between the healer and the person who is in pain, healing can happen. That's my opinion. It supports my mantra: "There is a spiritual solution to every physical problem". Love that's spirit-centric is the electricity that makes the whole machine come to life and do its job. It switches us from the horizontal path of physical life to the vertical path toward emotional and spiritual maturity. The presence of love between two people is what differentiates a trained therapist from a gifted healer. A trained therapist makes money telling people what they should feel. A gifted healer shares the soul-to-soul love of the universe with people who really need it.

In my morning meditation yesterday, I saw clearly how trauma disorders come from feeling unloved and unlovable. That's it. The trauma doesn't cause the lifelong disorder. Feeling like nobody supports or loves us during and post trauma is what does the lifelong damage. We all want to feel loved. Not feeling loved does ALL the damage.

A therapist needs to give me what I came for: Love and support
I will go to a therapist because I don't feel loved or supported. I may not understand that when I walk in, but in the end, that's what I didn't realize I really needed. Therefore, what the therapist needs to give me is love and support. CBT doesn't include either of those components. It's like when you're hungry, you go to a restaurant. You go to the restaurant because you need food. But CBT is like a restaurant where all they do is talk about how you need food. "I didn't come here to talk about how hungry I am, I came here to get some food." CBT is an emotional restaurant that talks about food but doesn't actually feed you. CBT, by its very definition, is behavior modification. Judgment. It lacks the ONE thing I need the most, which is to feel like someone cares about me as a soulful person. I need to be loved and validated, not told how to stop wanting to be loved and validated.

That's my opinion. Therapy without love is just a waste of money and time.

Love can be scary, so it's good to be patient with the patient
I'm aware also, that when I first met up with my awesome DBT, it took him a couple of years of caring about me personally before I felt safe accepting his love and support. For those of us who are still bleeding from the wounds of bad love from loveless FOOs, it can be terrifying at first to feel like a therapist cares about us. My therapist respects that. He knows how delicate my ability to accept love is. But because he cares, he takes it slow and is not, in any way, intrusive to my emotional fragility. He cared enough for me that he allowed me a few years of being skittish around him before I began to truly see that his care for me was safe and honest.

I'd love to hear thoughts from you all, my trauma-peers, about whether any of this feels right, wrong, or partially on track.

[NarcKiddo]

I think this is really interesting. I want to think on it. Also, I have happened upon this post just as I need to go to bed. I will come back to it.

[Desert Flower]

Yes, this is very interesting Papa Coco.

I'm afraid that the way 'therapy' is mostly organised in our culture, this is a job for certain people (some of whom came to the job because they needed therapy themselves, and I mean this respectfully, I do understand). And they need to account for their hours, not get overworked themselves, attain certain results.
In my country, people in mental health care are called 'clients', not patients. I think this was an outcome of the 'free psychiatry' in the 60's and 70's, and they meant well by changing the term at that time, indicating people were not 'crazy'. But these days, the term has too much of a sound of an economical transaction to me.
And there has been a lot of talk I think that the therapist should not be allowed to get to close to the patient, also for valid reasons. But this has certainly ruled out the possibility of love playing a role in therapy.

I think this was actually one of the reasons I was hesitant to start therapy again. And I was a little dissapointed about my first therapy session (which was actually more of an extended intake), the therapist felt distant to me. And I came home feeling I would have to do all the healing myself. That the cavalry was not coming, the cavalry is me, like one of us said here.

In think in this world, therapy and healing became seperated too much. What we need is to resource ourselves with all the love we missed out on before and this would maybe be sufficient healing. While therapy, especially CBT, is too much about understanding ourselves (I think we understand ourself pretty well here) and then having to do the changing of our behaviour and our feelings ourselves.

Come to think of it, I think that's why I'm also on a spiritual (Buddhist) path, because yes I was looking for the Wisdom but also for the Compassion! Big deal. Not that the Buddhist path is easy, it's also something we need to do ourselves. So there you go.

And patience should be part of it as well. In my country, therapy is supposed to be over in ten to fifteen sessions or something, and I find this quite impossible and it puts too much pressure on the patient/client. These things take a lot of time to heal (if they will heal at all), and trust needs to grow. We have a saying: "Trust arrives on foot but it leaves on horseback".

So I think I'm just going to take the best out of the therapy, but not expect to be healed afterwards. That may have to be done elsewhere. And in that respect, this forum is helping me tremendously, because we get recognition here which is very important too.

Just my thoughts here.

This was a wonderful post to reflect on Papa Coco, very helpful, thank you!

[NarcKiddo]

I've been thinking about Papa C's post some more.

The notion that a therapist (or a doctor or an exercise coach) might have love for me at first struck me as bizarre. Desert Flower referenced the term "client" and does not seem to like it much. I actually like the term. I am a lawyer, so have been used to the term since I started. To me, the term balances  the power more. Yes, there is a commercial element built into the word, but I like that because it places me firmly in the driving seat. I can (and should) have expectations about what I will get for my money and my time. I am no longer the small child in school being taught things.

But would I, as a lawyer, have love for my client? Well, actually, yes. If I care about the outcome for them and I want to do my best for them (which I do) then that is a form of love, I guess. I have never thought about that before.

I feel slightly anxious at the thought of someone I employ having love for me, but I think that is because I grew up in an environment with a very warped idea of what love means. I was often informed I was loved (although even the language used was distant and third person. Never "I love you" but at best "I love my children" and more often things like "the mother hen loves her chickens"). Love as I understood it did not feel nice or nurturing. It was transactional - so it was interesting to see Papa C pointing out that a transactional relationship with a therapist was not at all loving!

I have lucked out with my therapist. I am not sure if I would go so far as to say that she loves me but I am sure she cares about me. She tends towards the "hands off" approach. She won't sit there in silence while I jabber on but she will never tell me what to do and is sparing with any suggestions. Her approach is very much to let me talk things through and work out what I think is best for me. I never had that as a child so her approach is right for me. She can be so hands off that I have occasionally in the past wondered whether I am talking into a void. And then we will be discussing something and she will refer to something I told her months ago. She is listening to it all and retaining it. She must care about me or it would be simply impossible to remember that stuff. It's not necessarily "big ticket" memorable stuff. And sometimes I will tell her I am considering something and she will surprise me totally by telling me she thinks it is a thoroughly bad idea and explain why. Then we talk it through. All of this may sound pretty basic but it is not something I have experienced. Any time FOO has retained information I have given it has always been used against me later. If I have told FOO I am considering something that FOO does not like I will be forbidden to do it (even as an adult my mother seems to think she can forbid me to do things). There is never any discussion about such things - if I argue back the threats of doom just get bigger and bigger.

I see evidence of caring from my fitness coach, too. Yes, he will prescribe things for me to do but we have a full and frank discussion about the reasoning. Where I have really noticed the caring aspect is when I have been ill. As much as anything he will make sure I am not doing too much. He will sit through thoroughly tedious exercise sessions. He's never just left me to my own devices and suggested I get in touch again when I am fit enough to do something worthwhile. Yes, I am paying for him to be there, but he likes working with me and has kept his prices on the lower side for me. So he would undoubtedly make a bit more money if he stayed away and left me to do the boring rehab work by myself (which I am perfectly capable of doing). I also feel able to talk to him frankly and the relationship is very therapeutic for me.

I'm rambling now so I'll stop but thank you, Papa C, for starting this thread. There's lots of food for thought.

[Desert Flower]

It's very nice to hear you found a therapist who's so good for you, NarcKiddo. I hope to grow into a relationship like that with mine. We'll see.

And very interesting what you said about the word 'client', how you find it empowering as I understand. It might help to see it that way. It also makes me realise it is little me who is used to being the underdog and from that position, I interpreted the word.

And I do hear what you say about the anxiety when it comes to 'love'. Maybe 'care' would be a better word and attainable too in a relationship with a therapist.

It's interesting how words have such different connotations for everyone, making them more or less helpful.

I'll let this digest for a while and see what it does.

 

[Papa Coco]

Great conversation!

Narckiddo and Desert Flower, you are bringing a lot of richness to this thread, and for that I am even more interested in the topic than when I wrote the original post.

There's no arguing that the topics of love and therapy both carry a great deal of complexity and a wide swath of varied interpretation. For those of us who felt abused by love itself, the EFs can be monumentally difficult to understand and control.

As I'd hoped, I'm getting good conversation to help me wade through what I feel like I know about love and therapy. It's all theory at this point. But because the topics of Love and Therapy are both so complex and multidimensional, it's difficult to really know for sure what I think I know about either.

I fall back on my favorite Flannery O'Connor quote, which is, "I write to discover what I know." Today, I'm writing AND reading to discover and clarify what I think I know about how therapy works in some cases but not others.

On a personal note, I see love as a soulful connection that can't be explained in human terms. It doesn't include sex or manipulation. Unconditional love cares for the people in its realm. Love is what I live for. The love I seek is soul-to-soul connection, which is what I did not feel for most of my life. All of my suicide attempts over the years happened when I believed with all my heart that nobody cared if I lived or died. So, I felt absolutely no desire to live in a loveless world. My own survival instincts completely left me. Dying was the only choice I believed I had during those times.


My lifelong sense of loneliness came from feeling like nobody truly cared about me. Desert Flower, your choice to change the word love to care was a really good suggestion. The love I seek is the love that I feel when I believe someone cares about me...and not as a paycheck, or a success story for their resume, but someone who cares about me because they value my feelings and struggles, and their desire to help is not tied to their income or job status.

Betty White lived to be a few days shy of 100 years old, and by coincidence, she also had a large population of rescued animals in her care. Other celebrities own animal farms too, but when interviewed about the animals, it's clear that they just like being known as a person who has animals. Having animals is just part of having the life they want to live. But  Ms. White took these creatures in because she cared about them. That may have been a major contributor to what helped her live to be a VIBRANT 99.99 year old human being in a largely unloving world.  Actors who'd worked with her had nothing but kind words to say about her, saying she cared about them, and was kind and loving.

That's the kind of therapist I have now. My T is far past retirement age and says he has no plans to retire ever, because his clients mean too much to him to just quit helping. Hopefully, like Betty White, that sense of connection to people in need will carry him into a very ripe age.

So, Desert Flower, I like your proposal to use the word care more than the word love. The two may have similar meanings, but care has no real negative stigma attached to it.

And on the topic of effective versus ineffective therapy, ultimately, being a therapist is job with a million traps and snares to fall into. They are heavily regulated by insurance companies and governments because therapists have the potential to bring a lot of abuse. My first CBT therapist, in 1989, when I was 19, was only given 10 visits by my insurance company at that time. On the last minutes of the 10th visit, he told me I should try becoming gay. He became oddly nervous, crossing his legs, and chattering in a higher octave than he'd spoken in up to that moment.

I was seeing him because I had tried twice to take my own life and I didn't know if I could survive without help. I was badly traumatized, and sex was one of the major reasons for my suicidality. From the age of 6 until 28, I seemed to be a magnet for men who thought I was an easy target. I was an attractive young man. Tall, slender, smooth skinned, long, thick full hair. I was kind, I wanted to be loved (good love, not sex love). I was quick to smile and quick to connect with strangers. I'm an ugly old fat guy now, balding and no longer attractive to look at, but I still yearn for closeness. I need to be cared about, or I go right back to wanting to leave the Earth if I can't find that kind of love from someone. But up until my early thirties, I seemed to come up on gaydar. I think it's just because I hadn't figured out what women usually know about not being too friendly with men. While I'm not, in any way, critical of the LGBTQ community, in fact I'm a fierce advocate for them, I didn't understand why I couldn't just make friends without having to fend off men shoving their phone numbers into my pocket, inviting me home with them for the weekends, and pinching my butt. I didn't know how to trust attention. I got so confused I wanted to die. Then my therapist's suggestion was to give it a try? Be gay? Maybe you'll like it?  That, in my opinion, was irresponsible therapy.

So, This topic is one that can go very deep into complexity. I'll bottom line the only thing I believe I know right now, and that is that I believe that if a therapist is given a chance to prove they truly care about their clients, the healing potential is greatly improved. We all just want to be loved. For many of us, we don't know how to accept that love, because various forms of love and fake care have been used against us, and our survival instinct is to stop letting anyone do that to us again.

I just want to believe that someone cares whether I live or die and is truly able to validate my own existence and feelings with me.

[Chart]

I stumble upon this thread after an exhausting day of therapy/neurofeedback, and a psychiatrist (the proverbial cherry if you will).

I'm in my third session of Neurofeedback with a therapist that seems to me to have descended from the sky... Her name, incredibly... Angela...

I don't know how to express this but I have NEVER felt so much "competent" love from any therapist. She very simply cares for me at a level I've rarely felt. AND she works like heck for me. She's already read the Neurofeedback book I'm also reading. She visits this forum to read what I've written (we discussed some technical corrections I need to make on thé Neurofeedback thread today). She experienced similar trauma in her own life, so she understands explicitly what I'm talking about. Her somatic knowledge is incredible. She prolongs our sessions without any reference to money or overtime or anything... I feel horribly guilty... She sends me useful links, literally gives me tools and equipment for the breathing training we're doing. She's told me I can contact her anytime if I need to. She is positive and supportive ALL the time. She's respectful and always asks if it's okay before doing anything like touching my body during the breath training. She totally understands that I struggle terribly to remember stuff like the terms used in Neurofeedback and the names of techniques and their origins... Can I go on?

PapaCoco, everyone, I completely agree, love makes therapy profoundly effective. I feel deeply loved by my therapist and it is helping me incredibly. I'm still struggling horribly with SI and fear and anxiety and guilt and did I mention FEAR... Every morning is a horrible struggle.

But good lord in heaven my therapist really really cares about me. I'm actually crying as I write this. I cried working with her today. (I didn't cry with the psychiatrist...)

Love is our evolutionary destiny. What other ridiculous reason could there be for existing?

There is another, parallel, spiritual road that runs beside our reality. The crossover between the two paths is Love. Not sex, not desire, not attraction... but Love. Pure, distilled connection between separate entities. Love.

Love is what we didn't get. And we didn't turn outward to fill our absence. We survived without Love or anything. But we're not meant to exist like that. None of us... no human on earth. Funny we still haven't figured this out.

Thank you PapaCoco, NarcKiddo, DesertFlower. I'm sending you love. Thank you Angela. I hope one day I can give to others as much as you've given to me.

[Papa Coco]

Chart.

I'm shaking right now. Your post is so beautiful. so well said. And Angela sounds like an angel. I feel incredibly happy for you to have gotten to be her client. I wish I could hug you and I wish I could hug her also.

Chart, thank you for chiming in on this thread.

PS: I'm currently sinking into an EF. I expect that if this year is like every year so far, it will last through the entire month of August, and then transform from a melancholy desire to be loved, into anxiety and dissociative fits of terror by November. (My assumption is that this calendar time connects me to back to school days when I was being abused at Catholic school for most of my childhood). But for whatever reason, this EF comes on me every single year, and no matter how much I try to muscle through it, my emotions become too powerful for me to control. This year's EF started a few days ago. This time of year, every year, grabs my heart and turns it into a squishy blob. I'm on the edge of tears all day and all night. I had nightmares all last night about reconnecting with my abusive elder sister. I woke up and have been an emotional mess all day.

[Desert Flower]

Yes, Chart, what a absolutely wonderful and powerful post! I'm so happy for you that you found such a great therapist.  She truly sounds like a gift. It's so important to be understood like that. It's incredible!

[Desert Flower]

Papa Coco, I'm so sorry you're having an EF and that you're feeling you're sinking deeper into it. And that you're feeling so bad. I'm sending you big hugs to so you feel that at least you're not alone. 

Your assumption that it stems from having to go back to school when you were young makes very good sense to me. I understand. In fact, I used to experience something similar.

- Trigger warning -
Every week, my abuser would go away for the weekend. And then on Sundays, somewhere between 16.00 and 19.00 hrs., he would come back. So my weekends used to be somewhat more carefree. And on Sundays, my anxiety would build enourmously. And after I had moved away from the abuse(r), this pattern persisted. And when the anxiety became too much, it was replaced by massive fatiques, headaches, pains in my body etc. etc. And for years, I never understood what this was. And many years later I came to think it had to do with being anxious for starting the week, going to work and not feeling competent about that and that may have been true as well. And for some thirty years, this feeling on Sundays would keep coming back.

Until I learned it does actually work this way. The pattern has become ingrained into our system and the body and mind keep repeating it. I'm writing this in hindsight, at the time I really didn't know what was going on. But I finally recognized why I was feeling this way. And it completely dissolved. This is neuroplasticity, it can be trained. And now, whenever I feel this way physically, I know it's a sign I pushing my feelings away and I need to feel them instead of push them away.

I'm not sure this helps. It may be different for everybody. And it may just be too overwhelming. Just wanted to let you know I understand and I care. 

[Desert Flower]

And also, Papa Coco, I forgot. I wanted to say I agree your therapist suggesting you'd try being gay was irresponsible therapy. Especially, when it was your last session with him and he had no way to make sure you were okay after. And it's like, after this is over, maybe you could hook up with him or something. It's overstepping boundaries I think. And it's horrible to know such bad things happen in therapy sometimes, where you're supposed to be safe and you're so very vulnerable. (That's why it's such a delicate balance between love/care and distance.) I'm very sorry you had to go through that too. Another safe hug. 

(And I was in a similar place before, always attracting unsolicited attention, there was something about me apparently. Got me into a lot of trouble.)

[Chart]

We are vulnerable and our programming and energy send out these signals. I too was long solicited by gay men. Because of my upbringing I never expressed how it really made me feel. I've always told women that I have a pretty good idea what they experience with men. Not 100%, but close. Thinking about this now I can remember multiple occasions where men tried to exploit my ignorance and absence of healthy limits. I was never abused, but several situations could have turned out very differently. I was lucky.

[Little2Nothing]

The therapist who encouraged you to try being gay was an idiot. I have found that there are many so-called therapists that ought not to be licensed. 

I have little tolerance for inept people who do more harm than good. When we sit in a therapists office we are extremely vulnerable and in the wrong hands more damage can be done. There is a power dynamic there that can harm if not used responsibly and ethically. 

[Papa Coco]

Chart, L2N, Narckiddo, Desert Flower, et al;

I need to make a quick disclaimer. This anxiety actually kept me awake all last night, worrying that I gave a wrong impression on this thread.  The truth is that I am a fierce supporter of the LGBTQ community: My issues with my first psychiatrist telling me I should try being gay had nothing to do with me taking issue with anyone's sexual identities. It had to do only with how desperately confused I was about my own personal sexuality. I don't ever want anyone on the forum or anywhere else on this earth to think that I am homophobic.

The rest of this is optional reading, in case anyone wonders why I was so mowed over when the CBT advised me to "try it out."

* * * TRIGGER WARNING: My backstory (in Blue Text) is about sex and my personal confusion around sexuality * * *

My backstory:
    My story is that my best friend in Catholic School turned out to be a narcissistic monster. We met at 8 years of age in 3rd grade. Within two weeks of meeting, I discovered that somehow I was his best friend. (Or should I say his best prey). My personality was as it is now, I was as friendly to everyone as I always am, and I didn't realize that, as he was progressing us through this relationship, he was systematically and progressively isolating me from the other kids. I just thought we were really good friends. In reality, I was being groomed. By 4th grade he would drag me off to the wooded part of the playground every day at recess and lunch just to talk. What was happening was he was learning his narcissistic craft by isolating me from all the other kids. I was completely unaware by the slow progress he was making that he was turning me into an outcast to the others. At 10 years of age, in 5th grade, he started early puberty, and I didn't. He started talking about sex. I didn't want to talk about it, as I had no sexual inclinations at all yet. I had started to like girls, but I didn't feel sexual, I just wanted to hold hands and be liked in return by a pretty girl. I was a romantic little guy, NOT a horndog. (Childhood crushes). He wanted to talk deep, explicit sex stuff.

    Spring break 1970, he called me at home every night and we'd talk. He was having feelings for someone but wouldn't tell me who. He'd bought a ring and was going to give it to someone, but he wouldn't tell me who. School resumed, and he acted differently. Not as close as always. Distracted. Then at recess he and his older brother cornered me. His older brother was there "for support." He then started to tell me a story of being raped by a stranger in the woods behind his house. I became instantly overwhelmed with anxiety. I didn't say anything mean. I just tried changing the subject as politely as I could. He immediately stopped talking about it. The next morning, we met up in class, he punched me across the face. He was bigger, stronger, and angrier than I was, so he batted me away from fighting back. By the end of that day, he'd nicknamed me Homo and started a very successful smear campaign, telling all the children and teachers that I was gay. This was a church in 1970. So I was immediately treated like a disease nobody wanted to get near, except for when they felt like beating someone up. As the years went on, his smear campaign only got stronger, and my sexuality became the long-standing joke of the entire school. Mom refused to let me out of the school to be with my friends in public school. She didn't care how badly I was being treated, and she said "No matter how bad it is, I promise it will be worse in another school."  Catholics had convinced me that God hated me. They hated me. I was disgusting to them. I'd already been isolated from most of the other kids for two solid years, so the next four years were just an absolute nightmare of having to defend myself from playground fights, unsupported by teachers and nuns who also hated little gay boys. I couldn't defend myself because, in 1970-74, I didn't know what gay meant. I thought it just meant I was not athletic, and girls would never like me. That's as much as I understood. How could I fight that when it was true? I wasn't athletic and girls didn't like me. So, I answered to the name Homo for the rest of my childhood.

I left Catholic school at 14 years of age and started in Public schools, where I made friends hand-over-fist for 4 more years. But the damage was already done. I still didn't understand what gay meant, but I didn't want to be beaten up anymore, so I buried that secret deep, deep inside me and lived the rest of my life in terror that someone, someday, would see what my Catholic church said they saw in me.

To be very clear: A person's sexual preferences don't affect me at all. I've always had close friendships with people of all kinds: Gay, lesbian, straight, and almost every race and size and religion. Once I learned what the word gay meant, I didn't understand why people hated gay people so much. It's always been my experience that the LGBTQ friends I've made were, statistically, the safest, most comfortable friends I have.

I grew into a young man who wanted a girlfriend but kept getting approached by gay men, so I truly lost all sense of who I am. The damage done to my sense of self was permanent. I was never going to overcome this confusion. Our sexuality is one of the single most personal things there is to each of us. I just wanted to know who I was. I thought I was straight, but the world kept telling me I was gay. I ended up blaming my suicide attempts on feeling like I was something I didn't want to be. At that time, 1970s and early 1980s, being gay was just a target for being beaten up. And I didn't know if I should own it, or run from it, or what. My personal identity was so confusing that, when added to the CSI I'd endured, and the odd periods of waking up in the classroom not knowing where I'd been for an hour in 2nd and 3rd grades, I just got too confused to know if I even wanted to live any longer. As a young man of 19, how could I ask girls out? If the world believes I'm gay, am I even allowed to ask out a girl? I didn't want to date men, and didn't believe girls could ever like me in any way. So...what am I? Who am I? That year, two of the boys I went to Catholic school with took their own lives. I tried twice to do the same. Life was too confusing for us.

At 19 years old, after two suicide attempts, I didn't reach out on my own. My manager at work became deeply concerned about my obvious depression and sudden attendance issues, and he ordered me to go to HR for help. HR sent me to a psychiatrist. So I did reach out for help figuring out who I am. I had just had that flashback of being molested at age 7, and I also just knew nobody loved me, nobody respected me, and I couldn't figure out who I was or why I bothered to keep going in life. And despite all my confusion around betrayal, abandonment and not knowing who I was allowed to love, the first psychiatrist I meet then tells me I should try being gay...and he's all nervous and twitchy and laughing nervously while telling me this.

Yeah, it was really complicated for me. I don't care who is straight and who is LGBTQ. I love people who are kind and safe, no matter race, gender, or sexuality. The confusion was in how badly I was abused for being labeled as gay, when I was in Catholic school. I was terrified all day, every day, and then when I grew up, I didn't know how to deal with men wanting to touch me. Was I about to be abused again? In the 1970s and 80s it was far more dangerous than it is now, (and I know it's still dangerous), to be labeled as gay. I was soooo confused. AND I've noticed over the years, that sexual identity tends to be more confusing in people with traumatic pasts. When someone was gay back then, they were told that God hated them. Their families threw them out. People didn't go to prison for murdering them... It was super scary. I wasn't offended, I was frightened. It was dangerous. I was confused. Who am I? If the world sees me one way and I see myself another way, what does that mean? Who am I if I can't figure it out myself?

My early therapy disasters
I sought help to figure out who I am. Rather than show me compassion and support, I got a barrage of quips and textbook quotes. Suggestions. "Hey, try this. Hey, try that. Hey, if you don't think your gay and you're afraid to ask out a girl, why not just be gay? That'll be $120. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out. Have a  nice day. Next!"  (That's my experience with CBT therapists).

In public high school I made a new best friend. He was so amazing. He was big, tall, broad shouldered. He was kind and funny. He protected me, and took me out of my shell and showed me how to have a good time with other teens my age. We lost track of each other when he went to college. I wasn't allowed to go to college. My parents forbid college. So I went to work in a factory. By 23 I was married and was starting my family, and my first mortgage. My friend left the state after graduating University and I completely lost track of him.

Our 10 year high school reunion he and I met up again. But he had bad news. He'd contracted AIDS, which in 1989 wasn't something a person could live through. That announcement was the day I found out that he'd been gay all along, but he'd never shared it with me. After the reunion I lost track again. At the 20 year reunion, it was announced that he had passed away in 1995. I felt so horrible that I had been his best friend all through our teen years and I wasn't someone he felt safe enough to tell me he was gay. I have no choice but to log it as a learning experience for me to never, ever behave in a way that would make anyone ever feel afraid to tell me anything important about themselves like that. 

So, it's important to me to tell this story now, because I don't want any readers of this forum to think I was disgusted by the label of being gay. I wasn't disgusted. I was in mortal danger. I was confused. I didn't want to be beaten up and called horrible names and ignored by the teachers who saw me as non-human after the label had been assigned to me.

I am a fierce supporter of gay rights. I tend to support small businesses, black owned businesses, women-owned business, and LGBTQ owned businesses. I want the world to balance itself out until everyone has the same rights straight-white-men have.

This thread is about therapy being more potent when the therapist expresses actual care for their clients as HUMANS not clients. A few days ago, when I told my current DBT therapist about how I've always cherished our therapy/client relationship, he stopped me and said, "I'd rather say our friendship. Therapist and client are simply our roles, but in the end, we are two people working through this together."

My current therapist has helped me to find peace with my confusion. I'm a gentle, kind, passive, passionate man. It's okay to be that. If people believe I'm gay, I'm no longer afraid for my life for being thought of that way. As long as I'm not afraid of being beaten up, I'm okay being called whatever you want to call me.

That first therapist did a lot of damage by adding to the confusion. He could have handled it more like a compassionate healer in the role of a therapist, rather than a clinical talking textbook who worked for money, and I was his workspace.

[Little2Nothing]

Papa Coco I never thought you hated gays by your statement. I can't  imagine you hating anyone. I was just appalled that a therapist would so egregiously cross a line like that. 

Thanks, though, for the clarification.