Has Therapy Ever Made You Feel Worse?

I’m having a hard time with the shame of having a mental illness.

I hate that I need medication just to get through the day. Even though I know it’s an illness, it still makes me feel weak and broken. That shame sits with me constantly, no matter how much I try to reason my way out of it.

I recently started talk therapy again, and honestly, it’s been brutal. I walk into sessions already exhausted and leave feeling worse, more exposed, more raw, like I opened things I don’t know how to close again. People say that’s part of healing, but right now it just feels like pain with no payoff.

Opening up has never been easy for me. Vulnerability feels unsafe, but I’m trying anyway. Mental illness was never accepted or talked about in my family, and I carry a lot of childhood trauma that changed how I see and feel everything. Working through it feels overwhelming, like I’m too late or too damaged for it to really help.

I don’t feel hopeful. I mostly feel tired and ashamed.

I’m wondering if anyone else has gone through this feeling worse after therapy, ashamed of needing meds, stuck in this heavy middle. Did you ever get through these feelings? Or are you still here too?

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SammyJo · 51-55, F

I work, alongside my 'proper job', as a therapist for people with addictions.

Fair to say that, although everyone IS unique in the way they deal with their issues and what their issues are, they go through the same pattern of working through them. Most at different speeds and phases than each other.

People tend to get a little worse, as they process their issue (at the time) and the new perspective on it that therapy has given. That takes time, that can make it a touch more harder to deal with, initially, but they will come through it, eventually. Some quickly, some slower.

It's also worth saying, and it does sound obvious...and it does just sound like words...and what are words...until you have to listen and to do. Physical action/mental action/emotional action based on those words..

..and those words are that therapy is NOT and never will be a cure for your issues. What it WILL do is give you back your rational mind to make decisions, implement coping strategies that you have found that work (for you!) and that you should be in that 'funk' a shorter while than you have done before, because you recognise the signs and symptoms that get you to that place and how to navigate yourself around them.

Good luck.

🫂

SJD x

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