Oh god I got a discussion of therapy all over that poor person’s post about ADHD.....did not mean to spill quite that many personal beans but I queued it when I was tired and it posted before I noticed it was inappropriate.
I wanted to reply to the comments individually but I felt like I’d be disjointed about it and maybe some people don’t want their comment on one post blasted to 30K people on another post, so in a general sense...
I know there are different modalities to therapy -- I have no idea what mine were but I doubt it matters since it was twenty-five years ago and I was a child. Part of the problem is that the modalities which are clear-cut in theory seem unhelpfully loose in practice. I’ll look through a directory of therapists and a half-dozen will give different modalities from each other but talk about the same handful of therapeutic techniques, or address the same family of issues, or both. And most of the modalities both in the clinical and practical sense seem extremely unpleasant, so that is perhaps a Me Problem.
I end up asking myself, “What’s my goal in doing this?” and I picture myself sitting down with a therapist who asks what I’m looking to address, because that would help narrow down my options. But I never have a good answer. So I think, “That seems like an hour a week that could be spent doing something less expensive” and close out of the search window. Then a few weeks later I think “Well, that might be useful, I’ll look around” and the cycle starts again.
There are so many good uses for therapy, but a lot of what people say they use therapy for, I've done on my own for years, or am working on now and don’t feel like I need help. I don’t really have any problems identifying therapists who aren’t going to work for me for one reason or another, but it’s an issue if I can only tell a therapist what I don’t want to do. Saying “I’m not interested in doing roleplays” is fine as boundary-setting but if I can’t say “Because I want to accomplish this different thing” then all I’m doing is insulting someone’s profession, really.
So what’s left? Just the vague sense that other people I like and admire find it useful, and my experiences were very much outlier, so maybe I should try it again. But if I can’t identify why I should try it again, and if I’m going to be aggressively combative about it (which...I don’t want to be but I do know me) then all I’m really doing is paying someone to be insulted by me for an hour, and I can do that to people who deserve it more, for free, on the internet.
niennanir
The thing with therapy, speaking as someone who was a counselor for a period of years, is that it is a tool that supposes a baseline function. Going to Therapy when you have ADHD is very similar to being handed a hammer and told to use it when you have no arms.
I did want to respond to this comment specifically because a) that’s very validating and b) it means that if I do want to continue looking I guess a good place to start would be asking my meds psych, because he at least deals with adults with ADHD on the reg and can be like “Well, first we gotta get you some robot arms.”
I just like the idea of having robot arms, really. The hammer’s a bonus!
...my meds psych is a very nice man but he’s also super earnest and will probably not understand why I find the robot arms thing so funny.
