Thanks, Florian - that actually means a lot.

I think the damage to me isn't so much from therapy being ineffective. It's from getting blamed for it not working. Some of that comes from in therapy - being told that "therapy is hard" when you've been pushed past what you can handle, or being told "you're not trying" or "you're not ready to get better" when you actually are trying. A lot of it also came from outside therapy itself, but from seeking support in other places and being told that I wasn't welcome if I wasn't in therapy because if I wasn't in therapy I was just whining and not actually trying to get better. Or being told that my descriptions of treatment that were further traumatizing weren't valid and that I was doing things wrong by criticizing the experts, or even that I was harming other people because my criticisms and search for the answer might deter other people from getting the help they need. The whole thing came together to form a big mess that said "If you don't get better in therapy, it's all your fault and you don't deserve any help from anyone else." There might have been a nod to the concept of fit, but there wasn't any real acceptance of the possibility that the professionals could simply be wrong.

I suspect for me, the current insistence that cognitive behavioral therapy is apparently the treatment for anything and everything did not help. (Seriously, it's a bit ridiculous - I always suspicious when a new treatment seems to work for everything under the sun.) For me, CBT was an almost perfect mirror of the language my mother and others used to convince me that the problem was really all with me. Getting away required pushing back hard on a world that was insisting if I'd just fix my distorted thinking I'd realize how much she actually loved me and everything could be worked out.

I know I asked, directly and multiple times, what the difference between a cognitive distortion and a rational reaction to a bad situation was. The question was always dodged, and I was redirected back to whatever distorted thinking pattern the therapist wanted me to learn about. To me, all that talk about distorted thinking was just too much like the justifications I'd heard for abuse, and therapists were always dodging the question and changing the subject when I tried to get an explanation for the difference. But my unwillingness to put my objections aside and just go along with what the therapist wanted, with no real explanation of how it worked or why it was different or any attempt at talking about my own problems with it, made me be considered difficult and resistant. The message was very much that, since I was in therapy, I needed to suppress my own concerns and my own desire to keep myself safe and just do what the therapist said.

I'm starting to see other research, now, that suggests that there are other cases and people in the profession are starting to realize it. There are other people like me who end up with a giant pile of diagnoses, heavy drugs, and not much else from the mental health system. Studies that specifically look for trauma in people often find it, but it's not uncommon for therapists not to look, and your standard depression or anxiety treatments tend not to work unless the therapist is specifically trained in dealing with trauma. Most aren't. But I think the public perception is still that just seeing "a therapist" will overcome everything.