Posted by baseball55 on October 12, 2013, at 19:56:35
In reply to Re: being challenged in therapy, posted by SLS on October 12, 2013, at 15:32:28
I did dynamic therapy with a p-doc for eight years. It was an amazing, unforgettable experience. I still see him for meds now and still feel very close to him. I felt like I was never in my life so well understood.
I did a CBT group and found it useless. My depression and suicidality went back a long, long way into my childhood, which I had buried completely. IN CBT they kept wanting to attribute symptoms to some contemporary event and accompanying thought -- like my boss looked at me cross-eyed, so he must hate me and I'm a failure. But I never thought things like that. I liked my job, felt good about myself as I related to the world, for the most part.
But I would become disabled by hopelessness and thoughts of suicide. Dynamic therapy forced me to uncover a lot of defenses I had put up to avoid dealing with my childhood and adolescence and all the trauma I had experienced.
After working with my p-doc, I began working with a DBT therapist. This is so much more helpful than CBT. It's less about identifying negative thoughts and more about learning to accept and learn to regulate negative emotions. The emphasis is on learning to be mindful and practice self-compassion. Which isn't so different, actually, from what my p-doc always said about reparenting myself.
But even with DBT, I found that, when I was depressed I couldn't use it and when I was okay, I didn't feel the need for it. Now that I've been feeling more stable, I find the DBT more helpful in keeping me stable.
The one downside, for me, of dynamic therapy, was that I had intense and sometimes overwhelming transference issues which occasionally caused more problems than they solved. We did work through it. But it took a lot a time and a lot of tears.
poster:baseball55
thread:1052045
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20130930/msgs/1052091.html