Buckle up, folks. It’s gonna be a long one, so strap-in and strap-on!

I like to think I was one of those people who started going to therapy before it was cool. If you’re a therapy hipster like me, you’ve probably been going to therapy for about a decade. Yep. That’s right. I’ve been in therapy roughly a decade. I first started going when I was 16-ish and I’ve taken a couple breaks in between. The breaks did not work out great and I should really keep going to therapy despite what my shame thoughts tell me… but I digress! At 16, I found a therapist that I ended up seeing for a long-ass time. Like, eight years long over the course of a decade — if you include the fruitless couple year gaps I took. Then, last year in February or March, I had to stop seeing her.

I’ve mentioned that I started going to a mental health agency for services, which means I had to give up my therapist of roughly eight years for one at their agency. All because American health insurance is a farce and a capitalist fever dream. ANYWAY, she sucked. Like, majorly sucked. Worse than every therapist I’ve ever spoken to, and I’ve talked to a lot. When you get to be as mentally fucked up as me, you end up talking to a multitude of different counselors/therapists/social workers/psychiatrists/psych nurses/ etc. and by far, this lady was the most appallingly incompetent mental health professional I’ve ever had the misfortune of talking to.

Why was this lady the worst? She misdiagnosed me with PTSD. She convinced me over and over again that I had it, despite my discomfort with the diagnosis. When I finally accepted it, she had me start doing trauma therapy aimed at PTSD. Every session I had to answer the same several number-ranking questions and try to “improve” my score. Right afterwards, she would tell me my score this week compared to what my score was last week. This put a lot of pressure on me to try and get my scores to go down and ended up being very stressful.

Part of the whole deal was the two of us watching a video about this kind of therapy. It was fifteen minutes of people crying with gratitude that they finally felt better and that this very treatment had changed their mindset completely. She told me this PTSD was what had been getting in my way, why I wasn’t truly getting better. Of course, this gave me a lot of hope and motivation to continue. One day, as we kept going with this “treatment,” she told me she had met with her supervisor between our sessions. She said because I hadn’t been physically abused during my childhood, I no longer qualified for this special, “life-saving” type of therapy. Instead, she was going to give me a more “specialized” version of therapy, that she assured me was supposed to be basically the same thing we had been doing, but aimed more towards my specific trauma.

Okay. That’s very alarming, but okay.

So we keep doing the same unhelpful, discouraging, demoralizing treatment with the number-ranking system. Every week I’m filling out a paper from this enormous stack of homework worksheets she mailed to me. The worksheets went something like this:

“Name a problem you ran into this week. Name a thought you had because of that problem. What can you do in the future to not have that thought? Do you feel better now? :)”

It was the saddest excuse for a therapy exercise I had ever seen. You mean to tell me this is supposed to help my PTSD? This is the work that is supposed to help my scores go down? I feel like I’m in therapy kindergarten and at this point, I’m already a decade deep in treatment. It was a complete and utter joke.

Still, I stuck this out for months. I thought maybe it would take some time. Maybe I would start to feel better eventually. The fact is, I didn’t; not at all. It finally weighed on me enough that I gathered the gumption to confront her about it. I made notes about how this wasn’t helping me. I made a plan to talk to her about it all on my own. It’s not like I had a second therapist to help me through how to talk to my current therapist — and believe me, I wish I did. It’s always a bad sign when you want to call your old therapist to talk about your new therapist — but at the time, I was so defeated and desperate that I nearly did.

So I’m feeling really brave and hyping myself up to talk to this woman about how I feel and that this isn’t working and I’m dreading our sessions, blah, blah, blah. When we meet, I can’t even start my spiel before she tells me she had another super-secret meeting with her supervisor. She solemnly tells me that they agreed that I don’t have PTSD.

What. What? WHAT?!

I don’t have PTSD? So you misdiagnosed me? So I’ve been wasting my time for months and feeling WORSE? I was devastated. It was invalidating, sneaky, and I didn’t trust her at all. She then proceeded to tell me about a completely different group therapy that they offer, but I would have to commit to hours a day, three days a week, for A YEAR AND A HALF. They only offered enrollment like once a year so I would’ve had to wait to sign up. This was her solution. To pawn me off to group therapy that was weirdly obligating.

Needless to say, I requested a new therapist from a supervisor there. When I told her everything that happened, she said “I just need a moment to process this.” I finally felt validated. She seemed mortified. Good. They gave me a new therapist, and I still see her now.

She has the same name as me, which makes the front desk ladies even more unpleasant to deal with when I say “I’m Rosie here to see Rosie.” and they look at me like I have two heads and ask me what my name is, like I didn’t just tell them. Rosie’s nice. She’s a social worker but she mostly just sits there and makes little understanding comments while I vent and sometimes cry. Which is a vast improvement, but nothing like my OG, decade-long therapist.

So why stay? At this agency, I get a peer support person. Her and I get along great and she takes me out into the community. It’s fantastic for a shut-in like me.

(I try not to dwell on how sad it is that I need that kind of help, because I would inevitably spiral into the ground about how pathetic I feel…)

ALSO, they also offer a personal trainer to take me to the gym and I like her a lot. Where else am I gonna have access to something as amazing as that? These services have been super helpful, and a huge privilege to find. It’s just the reliable therapy piece I’m missing. I wish I could use these services and see my old therapist, but unfortunately the health insurance gods that be won’t allow it.

So I’m at a crossroads right now. Do I continue to get sub-par therapy or do I give up the community services to go back? Now that it’s winter time, I’m starting to struggle a lot between the dark, the cold, and the end of the school semester. I wish I could call my old therapist and ask her what to do… oh the endless irony. A little too ironic. Don’t you think?

If you’ve read this far, thank you for doing so and I deeply wish I could give you a sticker or another fun prize.♡

And lastly, Krysta — if you’re somehow reading this, fuck you.