I can’t even tell you how many therapists I’ve seen in my life.

Dozens, easy.

I used to think therapy was useless.

What good does it do to talk to a stranger (who you’re paying) about my stupid life?

It’s not going to make a difference.

And, since I had that mindset, it didn’t make a difference.

At all.

I thought I was wasting my time.

And I treated them all like a friend anyway, not a therapist.

And they’re not there to be friends I found out.

They’re there to point things out that I don’t or can’t see in myself.

I would sit in an office with the therapist of the month and talk about how other people affect me.

The thing is, that was huge for me because I thought I was able to control people, and they me, through thoughts, so yes, other people, 1000%, shaped my feelings and thoughts and views on myself, because they just did with that delusion.

There’s no other explanation  I can give you.

Besides, don’t they just read the minds of everyone, like everyone else does?

(but I never articulated that, didn’t know how to or even that I had to)

I couldn’t even ever wrap my head around what I was experiencing to talk about it correctly.

I was being held hostage by my own mind.

Because the things that other people did directly influenced me and my behavior.

That’s just the way this delusion works, which I know now.

It’s illogical.

Because I thought that somehow, figuring out why I was being treated that way by someone, would help things click for me.

It would make sense and I could move on.

I could piece it together somehow.

But there was never an answer, never a resolution.

See, my Mom told me as a new teenager to never discuss the voices I hear with doctors.

I told her that I hear people talking at times and she told me they would lock me away and throw away the key.

So I was scared.

Terrified.

So I didn’t say anything.

Never said a fucking word about it.

And the voices, it’s hard to explain this, I knew they were in my head for decades.

I thought everybody heard this shit and it was just that no one talked about it.

So I didn’t think I even had a problem to begin with.

But then the worlds and words blended together throughout the decades and eventually I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t and everyone that had been in my life was just … gone.

I wish I would’ve disclosed the voices to another person or two at the time.

To a therapist especially.

At any time in my life.

But I was intimidated.

I was more ignorant than anything.

And that’s okay, ignorance can be educated.

Honestly it was so confusing that the therapists I saw couldn’t understand the point I was trying to make, they can read minds too, right?

They know what I’m thinking, why are they acting like this?

Why do they think I’m deflecting when I talk about my parents, or my brother or my current crush and their direct effects on me.

I’m not missing the point, they are.

I’m not the issue, they are.

I just literally saw no good in therapy.

I figured they’d just judge me and none of them ever understood me.

Maybe it’s because I was initially forced to go as a twelve or thirteen year old.

Maybe that just left a bad taste in my mouth or something.

But I never, ever thought therapy would ever be helpful for me.

Ever.

Until DBT.

After twenty some odd years of therapy with countless therapists, I met real therapy in DBT.

Therapy where my life was crumbling slowly inwards and I knew something wasn’t right with me and I knew I needed help.

I was becoming desperate to change.

Something in me had to change.

I think it was 2019 when I went to my first class of a six week Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) for DBT.

The psych doctor I had at the time didn’t know what was wrong with me but within a year span, I had gone from having  MDD, PTSD and GAD to having those AND BP1, ADHD, BPD and DA by the time I was in the IOP.

(and I still couldn’t see the SAD)

I had just moved to Denver the year before, so I had started over with doctors in the spring/summer of 2018, again..

So this psych doctor of mine at the time was playing catch up with the word vomit coming out of me in our many appointments.

The BPD diagnosis really hit me.

Because I did feel out of control.

But DBT saved my ass, period.

It opened up my eyes to a whole new world of life.

One that’s not so chaotic.

My marriage was horribly failing at the time, so my personal program really focused on doing what’s best for me and helping me learn better coping and communication skills.

Fucking gamechanging.

It taught me how to talk and walk through my emotions.

How to work with them, not against them.

How to hold space for things and allow yourself time to process.

How to comfort myself and be there for myself when others aren’t.

How my environment has helped shape me, for better or worse and how to cope with that.

How to fucking communicate with people even when I’m having big feelings.

That my big feelings don’t control me, I actually control them.

And the world is full of gray – it’s not all “good” or “bad”, things can be indifferent.

I had never heard anything like it.

You mean to tell me that things can be felt neutrally?

You don’t have to label things either “good” or “bad”, they can be neither?!

Or even fucking both?!

What?!

DBT was the first sessions of therapy that I really got down and dirty.

And it took years for some of the principles to make sense, some of them I still have a hard time wrapping my head around.

Honestly I would love to do another IOP like that.

I think the group setting made it more comfortable for me to share too.

It gave me an example of how others do therapy.

It was intense.

The people in that program with me, it’s like I got permission to focus on myself for the first time in my life.

I had always been so worried about my interactions with others, and other people in general because of my delusions, that I just left myself to wilt.

Afterall, I hated myself.

Why the hell would I take care of something that I hate?

And I learned that everyone else in there hated themselves for some reason too.

I wasn’t alone.

It was intense and messy.

Other people self harm too?

I was in the thick of it with that material for six intense weeks, rifling through my toxic marriage, the appalling behaviors I was exhibiting, and the lapses in judgement, I was trying to find an answer.

I learned how to open up in there.

How to express what I was feeling rather than shove it down and away like I have been my whole life.

In there I learned that how much I disclose, and how honest I am with myself and in therapy, has a direct effect on my progress.

Damn, that’s a tough one.

I have to be vulnerable in order to get better?

I don’t have to actively hate myself?

I’ve always prided myself on being “strong”.

I thought I was a well oiled machine.

In reality I was a broken battery powered toy car.

And I still didn’t talk about the voices.

At this point so many years had gone by since I had brought it up to my Mom, and I was so used to the chatter, that it never even crossed my mind to bring it up to anyone in that program.

It was an everyday, all the time living situation for me and I was immersed and engulfed in it.

The hallucinations and delusions were my world.

I was hearing my neighbors talk about me all the time in that apartment I was in.

But I was able to rationalize it to myself for many, many years.

Honestly I didn’t think that the voices were my problem.

I thought I had bigger things to worry about at that time.

(well, my divorce was really pressing at that time)

I had taken time between jobs and was receiving unemployment to do the DBT program my psych doc wanted me to do.

And even though my spouse at the time and I had talked about it, and he agreed me going through the program was fine, I was getting severely verbally pummeled at home every day about money concerns with me being out of work, even though we had discussed it prior.

Sort of my marriage in a nutshell.

I’d do something to try and better myself and he’d make me feel like shit and selfish for doing it.

And this was the last time he did that to me.

It was the last time I let him do that to me.

I knew something was wrong inside of me, I could feel it.

I just didn’t know what.

And I would tell my spouse that I was blacking out and hearing shit and he told me that I was making excuses and exaggerating.

But seriously, I was in a fucking pickle.

My literal sanity, or my marriage?

I chose me.

And I’m so glad I did.

I chose the new tools I had learned in my IOP.

It was the summer of 2019, not many months after my program, where I moved out of our shared rental.

But the voices were getting worse.

I moved into an apartment with myself and Bruce, and I was hearing my neighbors talk about me every single day.

Through the window, through the back door, in the foyer.

Everywhere.

I felt like I was being watched every day.

My therapist at that time was Molly (the therapist from The Waterpark Bridge entry) and she was convinced I had DID.

From my emotions rollercoasting extremely quickly and sporadically and seemingly changing personalities and moods, throughout our virtual appointments.

I could be laughing one second, crying the next, to rage to excited to depression all while talking up a storm.

I felt like I was multiple people screaming and stretching to get out of me.

She was the closest therapist to getting the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis and figuring me out before the big break.

Or at the mid-beginning really.

If only we would’ve had a few more months together.

Because after the waterpark bridge guided meditation, she suddenly had to leave the practice she was at and my insurance wasn’t contracted with her anymore, so I was alone again, and devastated.

That was the second time I felt like I really made progress.

But then I found another therapist who was in network but was the polar opposite of Molly.

Natalie was completely unhelpful and I would call her in the middle of psychosis freaking the fuck out about people breaking into my apartment and people putting cameras and microphones everywhere.

She would tell me that it’s not happening.

There’s no one there.

And that people aren’t after me.

I had to stop.

But they were after me, 24/7, 365.

I hung up on her, I can’t even tell you how many times.

I don’t even know how many times.

I honestly only remember doing it once, but I bet there are dozens more calls to her, from me, at that time in my life.

I stopped going to appointments with her, stopped my meds.

And then I lost everything.

Come full circle to the nurturing and caring therapists here.

I’ve been lucky to have the therapists I have here.

I found a gem of a non profit in this little town, and they work hard to help me work hard on myself.

And finding the right person is really crucial too.

And that’s not easy.

I’ve had so many therapists that I’ve dumped or fired over the years.

Usually for the wrong reasons in the past, but that decision led to better and better therapists.

It’s tough and exhausting to initially find someone to mesh with, but I can’t express my gratitude for even the shitty therapists in my life.

They taught me what I don’t want, what I don’t need, and they  made it easier to see through the bullshit in the future in others.

It’s so hard to open up too.

It took my life completely falling apart several times to admit that I should be really honest and get down to it in therapy sessions.

Like, I never thought therapy would make a difference in my life.

I thought they were all a bunch of idiots that just like giving other people their opinion.

But I see now that they are there to see the things I can’t see about myself.

Therapists, good ones, have a way of helping me better myself that I’m eternally grateful for.

I’ve been using my EMDR tools the past few weeks.

Since my current therapist reminded me of self soothing techniques a couple of weeks ago.

The last two therapists, since the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis, Hannah and then Sean, have been amazing.

Hannah was well versed in a therapy I had never heard of, and I can’t recall right now, but it was similar to IFS – which they both studied as well.

Hannah helped me walk through the beginnings of coming to terms with my psychosis.

Trying to wrap my head around what was happening.

But then she had maternity leave.

So I was transferred to Sean who was the EMDR therapist at the office I go to.

EMDR was another gamechanger.

It helps me release the physical tension and physical anxieties that comes with my mental anxiety.

It helps to reprogram my body and mind so I don’t jump into fight and flight every three seconds when an anxious thought pops up.

I’m so used to being in fight or flight that it’s seemingly my baseline, and that’s not okay with me.

I want relaxing and content to be my baseline instead.

And it will be, eventually.

Right now I’m working with Jessi.

Sean left at the end of the year so they moved me over to work with her.

She’s good so far.

I wasn’t a fan at first, but I never am a fan of any therapist right away.

She has good insight and is gentle.

I guess my point with all of this is that therapists come and go throughout life.

It’s the tools you take from them that help make you stronger.

Therapy is the epitome of radical acceptance.

You can’t change the past, but you’ll be a lot better off if you just accept most things in life.

That doesn’t mean you have to agree with any of it.

Validating someone means just that, validation, nothing else.

I’ve gone from therapy sucks, to I don’t know what I’d do without it, in just a couple of years.

-Keren