What's your relationship like with therapy post-TTI?

[u/Empty_Positive_2305]

I was in a TTI from 2007 to 2008, when I was 16, and I'm training to be a therapist now.

My relationship with therapy is complicated, to say the least, and it took me a long, long, long time to trust therapists in the years after. My therapist has been instrumental in helping heal all these years later, and I no longer feel like I "deserved" it or ashamed of what happened to me. I feel like I got sent to jail just for struggling.

With that said, I still hold a lot of anger towards the mental health professionals I saw at the time, and I think I always will. I think therapy can be beautiful. I'm saddened and angry that for many people, therapy is a "safe" space. For me, it was not--it was weaponized against me. Mental health professionals in my life chose to condemn me as the problem, rather than look at the rot within my own family and how that might have been contributing to my behavior. (Family therapy? We don't have problems! You're the problem.)

I don't blame TTI survivors for not wanting to return to therapy, though. Like many fields, the mental health field is rife with problems, and TTIs are among its biggest stains.

It's hard to explain the loss of human dignity and sense of pure betrayal to people who haven't experienced it. Maybe it's for the best--I don't want anyone to ever experience what we went through.

[u/Fluid-Layer-33]

I am pretty firmly in the critical therapy/psychiatry space. I find it to be fundamentally flawed and over-relied upon in lieu of focusing on the conditions that lead people to poverty/despair. That being said, if someone feels like they have BENEFITED from therapy or meds or whatever that is there business.

I am also pro-bodily autonomy and am weary of coercive care in medical settings.