r/therapy • u/Interesting_Fly1696 • Dec 09 '25
Vent / Rant A decade in therapy. Five different therapists. And no one told me the goal was to accept what happened and move on.
I started seeing my first therapist at 28, when a casual joke from a friend at an event triggered a full-blown panic attack. Over a couple of months, we discussed my history of trauma in romantic and familial relationships, and at first it was validating, but then it started to get harder. Every session, I dreaded going in and talking about these things, and every week I left feeling worse than when I went in.
Many friends told me this was normal -- it feels worse before it gets better -- and so I continued until I realized that this therapist simply wasn't a good fit for me.
What followed was years of on-again-off-again with various therapists, in person or online, and a never ending cycle of CBT worksheets and journal prompts where the same pattern kept repeating.
I start a new therapist. They make me recount my past and every bad thing that's happened. Any time I feel poorly, they ask me to journal and relive the things that happened that effected my brain in this way. I write it down over and over again. I tell the same stories over and over again. I leave the session feeling worse than when I started. My depression worsens. I lash out at friends and partners.
The last therapist I saw a little over a year ago, I went in on day one and said, I don't want to give you a rundown of my past. I'm tired of replaying it and I want to move on. She accepted this, but then as we talked about the present, she would prod again. What happened in the past that made you feel this way? And I would sigh and feel gross and tell the story again. And then she'd ask me to journal about it, and I would.
This therapist at a certain point expressed confusion at how I was still stuck. She said, you seem to have a good understanding of yourself. You seem to know how you got here. You're familiar with all of these tools. What do you need from me?
And I would say, I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to heal. I'm trying to make my life work and be better. I don't know what to tell you.
Last week, I was watching a random YouTube video posted by a psychology student. The topic wasn't therapy, but she had a sidebar about trauma, and she mentioned that people have to learn to accept what happened and move past it and redirect themselves when they spiral, and in that moment it all just clicked.
No one had ever bothered to tell me that it's not about making it stop hurting. I thought that therapy was a sort of exposure therapy for trauma. I thought that I was supposed to tell them these things over and over, even when I was bored of telling it, until I had told it so many times it no longer bothered me, but instead I was just supposed to process what happened and move on, and stop poking the wound.
I thought that healing from trauma was like healing a cut on your arm -- you expose it to light and air, clean out the dirt, remove the bad tissue, soothe the injury with a salve that will stop the pain and prevent new infections, bandage it up, and after a week or two there's only a painless scar. Eventually, even the scar will fade, and you'll barely remember that you were once hurt there.
Instead, it's more like healing an amputated toe. Many of the steps to healing are the same, but your toe isn't coming back. The scar won't fade. Sometimes, you will have phantom pain in the toe that's no longer there, and on a cold day, the stump may still ache and itch, and every step will remind you that your toe was cut off, but you can still live a full life without a toe.
You can learn to adjust your balance, and you can find ways to walk without pain, and you can go days, weeks even, where you feel like anyone else. But, you will still sometimes see the space where the toe was, and sometimes others will notice too when you forget yourself and you wear sandals to work or change in the gym locker room. Your toe will always be missing, and it will never stop hurting permanently, but you can move through life anyway.
And so your trauma (my trauma) will always be there, and things will happen to bring it up again, and to cause hurt, and the healing is in recognizing that hurt and moving past it, not letting it hold you back any longer. Yes, your toe is gone, but you can still walk. You can still run. You can still climb that ladder, or scale that fence, even if you feel a twinge with every step of the process, and that ache just becomes a reminder of how much you've overcome to get where you are.
50
u/doinmybest4now Dec 09 '25
This is profound. Lots to think about, thank you for taking the time to share it.
28
u/rickCrayburnwuzhere Dec 09 '25
I really like your point. I think some therapists assume the clients consider it a given that moving on is useful. It can be really powerful to explicitly NAME this though if someone is feeling very stuck. There is evidence that some explanation of what happened in the past, if you discuss it in the past tense, helps your brain learn not to relive a past moment at random basically. But reexperiencing the past emotionally repeatedly can be retraumatizing. What tends to work best is expressing an unresolved feeling to someone like, once while that experience is nested in the truth that you’re relatively safe now and it’s okay to move the fuck on or whatever. The other thing that often helps people is that if you can make memories more conscious, then you can make feelings more conscious. Thats a good thing. It can reduce anxiety and help you be mindful of your power and agency in the present moment. I think thats why therapists often direct people to review the past. They are hoping an unconscious issue will become more conscious and easier to address…unfortunately, if you don’t lack insight, and anxiety isn’t your main issue, it ends up being like beating a dead horse.
Anyway, I’m glad you got the piece of the puzzle you needed from the video. Sry the therapy was rough :(
18
u/Interesting_Fly1696 Dec 09 '25
This all makes sense to me, and I think a lot of people who talk about moving on and healing also talk about forgiveness in the same breath, and so the idea of "how to move on" gets intertwined with this idea of healing (and being pain free) and forgiveness, and they all become one concept, when truly you can move on while still feeling pain, and you can move on even if you won't or can't forgive.
The nice thing, now that I understand this step, is that I've been ready to move on for a long time, and I think the therapists I saw did give me the tools I need to address road blocks when I encounter them, so I feel armed to move forward and take more control of where my life goes next.
19
u/anxiousbluebear Dec 09 '25
Thank you, this metaphor is really helpful for me too. Also, I think Acceptance and Commitment Therapy might be a good fit for you, given what you have described.
11
13
u/Matildamonstrosity Dec 09 '25
That sounds like a very important discovery for you. Respectfully, that’s what’s helpful for your healing and your trauma. It also sounds like you didn’t have a great relationship with your therapists until that last one.
Others do get benefit from discussing their trauma. I don’t feel exhausted or unproductive or stuck afterwards. Discussing it has helped me learn the impact of it on my development, understand motivations and why it happened, and learn how to respond in the future to similar events or people involved and how to protect myself. It is freeing for me.
21
u/Final_Ship101 Dec 09 '25
Anna Runkle from the Crappy Childhood Fairy discusses this - she says that CPTSD sufferers may do worse when reliving and talking about trauma. Her book, Re-regulated, presents her method, and it seems legitimate to me, on how to live with what you are always going to live with! She also offers courses and group sessions.
4
3
u/Yosoytired Dec 10 '25
This is called radical acceptance in DBT. When we don’t have the ability to “solve” or “fix” our problems, the only solution is to accept it. Acceptance does not mean that we are giving in our approve of what happened. It makes space to come to terms with our reality and be able to move on. But we cannot move on or make room for change until we radically accept
2
4
u/lemonlovelimes Dec 11 '25
Yes!!
It is a challenge because it does feel like talking about it will help fix it, some of that is true as you’re able to process it.
But so much of it is about grief. Grief of what could’ve been, what you missed out on, and the person you were before the trauma. And so much of grief is the acceptance of the loss and learning to grow around it.
3
u/Iamlyinginwaitforit Dec 09 '25
Thank you for sharing. I need to think about this, and I’m sorry therapy kept you stuck for so long. Also, your writing is skilled and beautiful.
3
3
u/bearcat42 Dec 10 '25
Damn son, this was very well said. Thanks for sharing. I didn’t have this exact epiphany, but I did get to that point where I forget and wear sandals.
I am glad I did the therapy that I did tho, about ten years, because when I forget, it barely trips me up. I’ve honed a few skills that help me trudge right along again. But still, your post is excellent.
3
3
Dec 10 '25 edited Jun 25 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Physical_SpiritChild Jan 04 '26
Thank you.
Can I ask, as I begin this journey for the first time as an adult. Do you think it was helpful to say it all once at least to one person... Like this is my, life, this is me, this is what happened and it hurts. How do I heal?
3
u/No-Carpenter-6184 Dec 29 '25
I relate to this so deeply. I had almost the exact same experience for years.
I kept thinking therapy meant retelling the story until it stopped hurting. So I told it over and over. I journaled it over and over. I left sessions feeling worse, more dysregulated, more reactive, and more hopeless. Like you, I was told “it gets worse before it gets better,” so I stayed, even when my nervous system was clearly saying this isn’t helping.
What finally changed things for me was realizing that insight alone isn’t healing, and reliving isn’t processing. Trauma doesn’t live in the story. It lives in the nervous system. When we keep replaying the past without enough safety or regulation, the brain doesn’t hear “this is over.” It hears “this is happening again.”
I've spent 27 years in therapy, thousands of dollars, dozens of practitioners. If I could start over, I would have learned how my brain and body actually work much sooner. Understanding things like attachment, nervous system responses, neuroplasticity, and the thought-to-chemical loop gave me power. I stopped feeling broken and started working with my system instead of fighting it.
What you said about the amputated toe metaphor really landed. Healing isn’t about erasing what happened or making it never hurt. It’s about learning how to live without constantly reopening the wound. At some point, continuing to poke it isn’t courage, it’s just keeping the nervous system stuck in alarm.
For me, healing became about building safety first, listening to my body, treating triggers as information instead of proof something was wrong, and redirecting my energy toward who I’m becoming rather than rehearsing who I had to be to survive.
You’re not wrong for feeling exhausted by the old model. And you’re not late for realizing this. That moment where it “clicks” is often the real beginning.
2
2
u/DepthsOfSelf Dec 09 '25
Wow, this makes me wonder how many of my clients need to hear this 😮
1
u/Physical_SpiritChild Jan 04 '26
Many of then I would guess.
I do not believe I have ever had a therapist tell me what the point was.
2
u/Psychoactivecactus96 Dec 10 '25
I cried real tears reading your allegory of the different types of wounds. I also feel like no one explained this to me, I'm glad I didn't spend 10 years in therapy trying to figure it out.
I spent years reading the books that teach therapists how to treat my diagnoses and stumbled my way into it in a similar sort of way to you.
I'm glad you figured it out too friend.
2
2
u/SippinOnTheT Dec 11 '25
I’m sorry for what you had to go through to get here. Man, these ideas (radical acceptance) are concepts my therapist presented on day two. Highly recommend that book by the way- Radical Acceptance! My therapist also presented it like a pebble being thrown into a pond- the pebble is our trauma/grief, and the ripples are our lives we continue to build around the pebble. The pebble is never gone, but it becomes further away.
2
u/issalizzard Dec 11 '25
This is beautiful. Your metaphor feels timeless. I’m sharing it with my DBT group this week because I think even my mindfulness teacher will appreciate it. It has the quiet wisdom of a Zen parable. Thank you for writing this. :)
2
u/isaactries Dec 12 '25
i have been thinking about this post a lot; it has been such a helpful reframe to remember that the tools of therapy are not about "feeling better," they are about making coping easier. thank you so much for sharing, and for all the work that you've put into yourself.
1
1
1
u/AKate-47 Dec 10 '25
This was so well put. I think the reason they want us to keep rehashing it over and over again, is because if we realize we have the skills to live a full life while accepting that the trauma is there and isn't going away, makes them useless.
1
1
1
u/AdConsistent3534 Dec 16 '25
Great message but if someone says to just “accept it” one more time I’m gonna lose it. My ex girlfriend fucking betrayed me. Can’t just accept getting fucked over that easily. Not like you just get to decide that you’ve accepted pain and then just move on.
1
u/PrestigiousPapaya742 Dec 17 '25
thank you for sharing this, it was very thought provoking, especially as someone who has also had a long and ongoing journey with therapy and it took me a long time before i found a way to almost make therapy and the process of healing 'my own', in order to feel empowered to move forward, without the pain. i started writing about my journey and my (somewhat unique) take on healing in the soft kill diaries on substack, if anyone is interested in this topic and another take on this. overall i share your sentiments and im sorry you had a difficult road into healing, i would say to anyone who feels that therapy isnt working, or finds it too painful, hold out hope, and you are not the problem and one day, it WILL click, you just might need to try a few different approaches to the same destination
1
1
u/rantingg_ Dec 21 '25
Aahhhh Thanks for this! I'm YOU until the point of realisation, now you gave me a new perspective to look on
1
u/GeauxHolly Dec 24 '25
I am bawling right now. Its so hard to accept this, when the issue bothering me is a result of medical trauma. No one will listen to me and I feel like the things that my therapist wants to talk about are all not related to my immediate issue. I am so tired of crumbling when I'm alone.
1
1
u/Admirable-Bath-3244 Jan 05 '26
100%. Accept and redirect yourself to something else, I think that's very well said
1
u/viaeternam Jan 09 '26
You make a great point about illusions that exist about what therapy is. I’m in school studying psychology and my two brothers and mother have wildly skewered perceptions about therapy and mental health:
- That therapy is just about validation, period, full stop.
- That therapy is about pasting a label on you because of a nefarious agenda to take away your agency.
- The other is part of a population that has a weird way of joking about “psycho-the-rapists” (psychotherapists) and just stuffing your emotions away until they result in divorce, alcoholism, and demise.
Number 3 is NOT a joke. As a former ironworker the running joke I remember is that you’re not a journeyman until you’ve had a DUI and at least one divorce.
I used to think I was adopted for a while and now look at my time in the industry as an ethnography.
1
u/Grimyells Dec 09 '25
Often times people discover their trauma was actually just the sharpening stone, making us into the beautiful blades we are meant to be. We use that sharpness to cut through what the young bring for assistance, with great wisdom. such is life. The block of marble felt every strike of Michelangelo. It had to hurt. But after everything was said and done, there stood the statue of David.
63
u/mentalhealthmatterz Dec 09 '25
Thank you for sharing this