Anyone else tried everything recommended and still failed

I think professional help is misleading. Everything is not up to us and in our reach or up to us. I find that very insulting to say that to a battered wife who cannot leave her husband for financial reasons because she needs to shelter and feed and have medical care for her 4 children or else she will be homeless and her children will be taken away from her. When it comes to children a mother has one choice and that is to protect her young ones.

I agree with you that the solutions for some situations are not completely up to an individual and are not always easily within the person’s reach.

In the case of domestic violence, I would very much hope that other resources are offered and available to the person. Unfortunately, those resources might not be be ideal, they might only be the first step; temporary and not “great” options. A battered spouse with kids, here where I live, can call the police, who deal with the immediate crisis, and try to set the spouse up with “victim services.” Victim Services then offers information, emotional support, lists of financial and housing resources, employment assistance, food banks…Ideal options? No. Not at all. Better than being with the abuser? A shelter is not necessarily a pretty place. The good thing is that mom and the kids are safe. Employment counselling might be offered. The person might be fast-tracked to get into rent-geared-to-income housing. But in the end, the resources are suggested and offered, but the decision to say yes to that help \is up to the individual.

I can see how difficult decisions would be when a person must care for themself and then children on top of that. Victim services encourages the victim to take charge and make her (or his) own decisions so that part of the first steps to healing and moving on are empowerment to the victim.

Also, the example of domestic violence is a very complicated one. After months or years of abuse, a victim can feel that they simply cannot survive without the abuser. That is part of the abuse: to grind the victim down until they don’t have any self-confidence.

If this is your situation Waves, my heart goes out to you. I would encourage you to contact domestic violence support agencies in your area…victim services, women’s shelters, domestic violence counselling services, and the like. Be persistent. If this is your situation, you have strength you don’t realize…you have survived abuse and are still standing. That’s so important for victims to recognize. I hope my ramblings are not just more annoying and frustrating ideas to you. If you ever need to chat, drop me a message.

Take care.

No fortunately that is not my situation. Maybe a mother with children and children that is living with abuse can shed more light on the reality of their life with you. My experience has been that so called services are not what they claim to be. Fir example, counseling. It is talking to someone. It is not practical help. A counselor is not a contact for a job, is not a mother that will nurse you when sick, is not a friend that will come pick you up after your car died in the freeway, etc. A therapist sits there and listens and suggests distractions and activities that do not yield practical results. What we all need is practical help that has disappeared as we evolved into an individualistic society. While individuality is good it has cost us our community and compassion. Please spare me platitudes. I have heard them all and did all of them. What did I get. No the practical help that I need. In fact my so called pro bono therapist who was really a student in training dumped me after she was fine with me for meeting her hours for licensure. That was sooo not therapeutic and unethical. I do not have the heart to report her and ruin her career. I guess I am too compassionate. Sadly.

Waves I understand where you are coming from and I know you have been very badly hurt and I really wish there were something I could do. That said, I don't understand how therapy was supposed to prevent, for instance, your hit and run accident? Or stop people from abusing and conning you. Therapy cannot do everything. That doesn't mean it can't do anything. Therapy is not an all-or-nothing thing. I don't think you should give up on it.

Only an incompetent kind of professional would have said or implied that anxiety and depression are totally within your control. Brain scans of people with depression reveal physical differences from non-depressed people (this can be googled and there are reputable medical sites with information). And I don't mean neurotransmitter differences - there are actual physical brain structures that are different, for instance people with depression often have a smaller hippocampus.

That said, it has also been scientifically proven with repeated studies that certain types of therapy tend to help people with depression and anxiety. They can be as effective as medication. But of course this does not mean these therapies will help every single person or will "cure" them.

On a site like this and other mental health sites, we often get a skewed idea that treatment is ineffective, because many people find these sites after trying several therapies and meds and not getting perceptible relief. People on sites such as this tend to have have treatment-resistant depression. Whereas in the general population 60% of people are helped by the first medication they try. Probably in some cases this is the placebo effect. But there's still good evidence that many meds outperform placebos.

Yet I, for instance, don't seem to be helped much by meds. I've tried dozens. That doesn't mean meds don't work. They don't work for me. Therapy has worked for me.

I think Acy makes some really good points about progress versus success. Just because therapy didn't stop bad things from happening to you doesn't mean you made no progress. I'm really sorry that therapist dumped you (again totally unprofessional). Also, many therapies are ideally ongoing and you would continue doing the exercises and practices after the therapy ends.

I have probably recommended YouTube therapists to you before, but there are two I find really good: You might like The Crappy Childhood Fairy who talks a lot about trauma. Then there's Therapy in a Nutshell with Emma McAdam. I watch these two constantly.

I have recently found a website with some fascinating info about trauma and how it affects us, if you'd like i can share this with you.

Hello Lady

You put a lot of thought into your replies. I respect your opinion and concern. Yes there are empirical research to support tested therapies and there are brain scans to support biological differences in individuals with mental illnesses. The thing to consider when evaluating research are whether it is a statistical or clinical difference. Statistics is complicated for people to sort through. Why many companies will confuse people with a mass of data that they have trouble understanding when it can be stated simpler. In a nutshell a researcher can find a statistical difference with a large enough sample. Researchers are motivated to find statistically significant differences to keep their jobs and to get grant funding. There are published accounts of several researchers that faked their data. And that is just the ones that were reported. Then there was the lobbying of big pharma. They run medicine. That is not an opinion. It came from the mouths of doctors including my doctor who by the way said they are in SSRI too. I can only speak for how it is in USA and do not want to. be negative. All this is documented. Only research with significant findings get published. Hard to get research showing no effects published. Why because bull findings do not tell us anything and take up needed page space. Sorry about going on. And yes the placebo effect is a consideration but the bigger concern is the bias in reporting and the lobbying of interest groups that influences our mental health care. Research shows that much of psychological treatments are based on ideas called theories that people make up or no theory. I asked a psychiatrist once why EMDR works for PTSD. He said it is not that it works, it is that insurance will pay for it. I researched EMDR further and found out it was not so called discovered based on science. A woman was walking in the forest and thought how tracking your eyes back and forth yielded some kind of an effect for her and so she thought that could be used to treat trauma memories. And then research started and not with all supporting it and most studies with null findings are not published. Phew. This is long winded and well too long. I apologize. I just wanted share how my perception is based on looking at the the data, how research is conducted and presented, and how special interest groups have lobbied for their interest in the business of mental health. And here in it is a business. Sadly, people with mentally Illness with no insurance or resources are out in a cab at one hospital and sent away to another hospital. I guess this is like military. We can’t know how it really works and the truth unless you work in the field. It is frustrating because people are suffering and we can do better. We can be better.

Waves if what you are implying were true there would be no such thing as reliable science in any field, and that is simply not the case. I have taken both research methods and statistics at university. I am well aware there are a handful of researchers in Psychology (and in other fields including hard sciences) who were later found to have faked their data, but this is not the norm. And it's absolutely not true that a large enough sample will yield a statistical difference, since sample size is taken into account in calculating a significant result.

And yes, Big Pharma has been a factor in the medical sciences. But we are talking about therapy. Non-drug therapies like CBT and DBT are well established through repeated, controlled experiments over many years to be effective.

As far as EMDR it has been controversial among psychologists but it has consistently been found effective in experiments. Sort of like ECT-- they don't really know how it works, but they know it does. EMDR is endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, and they certainly know better than I do.

I have benefited from every form of therapy I've done, although some more than others. But again even a proven treatment will not necessarily work for everyone, or work as well. It may also depend on the sustained effort over time to continue using the therapeutic tools.

I am glad you trained benefits. That is what is most important. I hope you continue to have good health. 🌞