Mental Health When is it time to discontinue talk therapy?

[cj]

I have been going to therapy 1 hour a week for the last 5 months. I worked really hard at first and things got really crazy as I faced my past. The sessions where intense and I sometimes felt physically ill after them. But now for the last month I feel like I have run out of things to talk about with her. Our conversations seem really forced and just off? Hard to explain. The thing is I am seeing a psychiatrist at the same practice and I want to keep getting the same meds from him. Any advice on how I should approach the situation I have a therapy appointment Friday.


Thanks

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

Hey crimsonjunk,

I can relate. When I stopped using drugs and alcohol it was super tough. Things started coming to the surface that I'd held down for years, and I remember at least one time having to recover immensely from a session. I think that sort of pain is ultimately healthy, part of the process of digesting reality.

I think I've come to the sort of road block you're describing. Here's my take:

A lot of the time, when we actually start engaging in therapy, there are more than enough topics to keep us busy for a while. As time goes on, we move from the more imminent and painful topics to finer points of life. It can seem like therapy becomes redundant because as we're so used to having urgent issues put into perspective, once the urgent matters are appropriately dealt with, we almost think that there's no more. We're not used to being faced with anything but the most difficult dilemmas.

But there is more there. It may take effort to unearth these topics that more fine-tune us than replace sections of our psyche, but my intuition is that they exist. It may take a bit of a different approach. I can't quite put it in words.

So I might prompt you by asking, now that you're relatively stable, what your more specialized, but not insignificant, goals are. Maybe you want help with how to better treat your significant other. Perhaps you want to know what you have to do to go to college (if you haven't already gone). Or i could be that you want to gain closure and apologize to people you've wronged in the past, but aren't sure how to approach this.

I would urge you to open up a bit more to your therapist. Draw on the motivation it took for you to face the most difficult topics in the past when you first started seeing them. You're at another level now.

 

[feebleit]

I'm a newbie on here so what I say has very little credibility I suppose. However, I am in the same boat. I attend a psychiatry clinic that forces me to talk to a therapist at least once a month in order to keep receiving medication. I was told that as long as I have been diagnosed by a psych and have been prescribed meds, I could find a family practice physician that would be willing to monitor psychiatric medication and continue prescribing it as long as I was prescribed it and I felt it was working for me. Most therapists at psych clinics are not supposed to tell you this for whatever reason. I still go to therapy because my life is a mess and I think it would be a bad decision.

 

[silverwheel]

I have been going to therapy 1 hour a week for the last 5 months. I worked really hard at first and things got really crazy as I faced my past. The sessions where intense and I sometimes felt physically ill after them. But now for the last month I feel like I have run out of things to talk about with her. Our conversations seem really forced and just off? Hard to explain. The thing is I am seeing a psychiatrist at the same practice and I want to keep getting the same meds from him. Any advice on how I should approach the situation I have a therapy appointment Friday.


Thanks

I think you'd be able to switch therapists without it causing any trouble for your psychiatrist. I've seen a psychiatrist and a therapist at the same practice before, and it wouldn't have caused any problems for either of them if I had switched to someone else (this scenario never came up while I lived there because I liked both of them). Let the doc know just to be safe, but I can't see why it would be an issue.

Talk therapy is a tricky thing because it's so dependent on the personalities mixing well together. You either have verbal chemistry or you don't, and it can't really be forced. Sometimes when shit is really rough it doesn't matter and anyone will do because it's so urgent. But for a therapist to work for you long-term the pairing has to be right, and it sounds like this one just isn't a fit for you. Ask your doc if he/she knows anyone else they could recommend.

 

[neurotic]

Our conversations seem really forced and just off? Hard to explain.

i think i know what you mean, i have experienced this. talk therapy presupposes that you have a need/want to talk a priori, so when one goes to a session without this feeling, the session is plainly fruitless. when this (lack of things to say) happens i personally feel compelled/pressured to talk, so i don't waste a session or something like that, but i have found that this is foolish... because if one doesn't 'let go' of this, if one insists on 'talking' pointless things, then they won't leave the space for the 'real' things to surface and to be brought up. one will stay stuck on this 'step'.

so when this happens i might miss a session, or downright say that i don't have anything to say. simply saying out loud to your therapist that you feel like you don't have anything to say, might even surface something. you'll probably want to elaborate the "i don't have anything to say" and this ime usually leads to something to say.

you can express to your therapist also that while you have nothing to say you think it's not the time to jump off the meds, and i think they'll understand, if you're using the meds 'as intended', that is. i don't know your particular case though.