Counseling

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-17-2005
Counseling
31
Sun, 06-19-2005 - 11:58am

I think it was this board where I posted a while back and everyone automatically suggested counseling as if it was the solution to everytihng. Well, I tried it, again, and I maintain my stance on counseling. It was such a horrid experience, I am still trembling. The whole situation just baffles me. I look around me, and everytime I see someone who goes to counseling, or suffers from depression, it seems like those people are verbally coddled. Told that they can't help what's happening to them. They can't help the way they feel, they shouldn't have to take responsibility for anything that's happened and basically, they can't do no wrong.
Then there's me. I was depressed in my late teens, but don't feel that way anymore. Nowdays, I do a lot better emotionally, and I am a perfectly functioning person. But like everyone in this world, I do have some bad days where I might feel down and not so peppy. Or I might feel like locking myself in a room and crying for a while. It seems, though that the thing to do would be to go to counseling. That's what our society says you are "supposed" to do. Forget just accepting that bad days and crying are part of life. All those doubts I have about counseling being nothing but making money by convincing people of their misery makes me a horrible, horrible person. So I ignore all of my feelings about counseling and just be a good girl and go like I am supposed to.
I don't know what it is about other people that makes them so "not responsible" for both the way they feel, and for any abuse they suffered; but yet when it comes to me, I am responsible for it. I must "stop blaming" my parents for the physical and emotional abuse and "take responsibility" for the way I feel about it. But yet, tell ANYONE else with depression to take responsibility and stop blaming, and you become the most intolerant person ever!!! Is it because my parents were not divorced? Because they had money? Is that why the abuse was okay and why I must get over it? Why are others in the mental health field coddled and pampered with "aw you poor baby, you didn't do it" when I get found guilty? They might as well put the scarlet letter on my chest. God!!!!

I don't think I have ever encountered more abuse than in counseling. Even when I was a child, the physical abuse was not as bad as the emotional abuse in counseling. The scars fade. The abuse is apparent in a situation like that and it's easy to know what you're mad about. But in counseling, it's so tricky. They refuse to let you be your own person. Who you are is all these textbook labels. You can't survive without them, and if you think you can, then you are in "denial". If they want you to have a certain problem, you have it, no matter how well you know yourself. It's like an abusive relationship where they convince you to be so down that you don't even know you can make it without them.
In group therapy, it's even worse, because on top of al the manipulation, you get verbal abuse from the other people, and if you try to defend yourself, you are intolerant against their "disease". They play the disease card to get away with being the most heinous, rude, verbally abusive, subtly murderous people ever.

I will never have anything to do with the mental health field again. It isn't for me. Thank goodness I am not the vile person my counselor thought I was. Thank goodness I have enough mental and emotional strength to rise myself up when they try to beat me down into thinking that I am worthless without them.

Please think twice before insisting someone get counseling or else they are nobody. It isn't for everyone. And if you think it's for everyone, then it appears you have been suckered into their way of thinking. They won with you.




Edited 6/19/2005 3:06 pm ET ET by dragon709

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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-17-2005
In reply to: dragon709
Tue, 06-28-2005 - 7:46pm

"To me it's not anti counseling, it's just not for me"

Exactly. I hate how "not for me" translates into "anti-therapy".

Like we're all just plotting against them or somehting.

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