I have severe body dysmorphic disorder, GAD, bipolar disorder, and severe depression. BDD came around a time where I was also anorexic. I started to feel less than everyone because I was coming to terms with being gay also. Something I hate beyond words. The reason I”m contacting is that i feel I”m losing more and more grip of reality with every passing day but also have zero interest in wasting my time with therapy because there is no amount of therapy or no therapist who could convince me that it will ever get any better. To give you an idea, gay men message me all over the internet telling me I”m fat and ugly, that I can”t be gay because of it and many tell me to end my own life since it would be better since I”m too fat and ugly and look like a pig. There is not one thing ANYONE would ever convince me to like about myself and being gay isn”t a choice, I”m tired of people telling me I should consider therapy when It never worked for me and since therapists cannot change that I”m gay or that I look like this, WHY should I waste all my time and money going to therapy when there IS NOTHING, I MEAN NOTHING, they can do to make any of this any better. There is no bullshit POSITIVE thinking that”s going to not make me hate everything about myself or being gay. When you have spent almost the entire time you”ve been out (since 2007) being told that your life is worthless because of how you look means that PEOPLE will not get any better either. What should I tell people with the best ways why CBT is not effective for everyone. Not everyone also has 300 dollars sitting around to go to ONE therapy appointment that MAY OR MAY not work. Every day gets worse, but I know it won”t ever get better with how they are. Why do you feel the pressure to oversell the effectiveness of treatment at the expense of well-being of the patient? So many therapists do not care and just want money. So many use themselves as a well for people to almost figure out their own issues. I went to school for Psychology too- it”s become a joke. ALL ABOUT THE MONEY (From the USA)
I’m not sure I understand the purpose of your email. You sound clear and emphatic that you don’t believe in therapy, that therapists are only interested in it for the money, and since you’ve studied it you don’t believe in the science of psychology — that it is a joke. You also are unambiguous about having zero interest and not wanting to waste your time with therapists because nothing any of them could say or do could convince you that anything in your life will get better.
Yet, you took the time and energy to send this email to us. What were you hoping for with your email? This is curious because it doesn’t have a question, and doesn’t appear to be looking for help — certainly not assistance from a therapist. So why write to a blog called “Ask The Therapist,” when you have nothing to ask?
Maybe you just want to “Tell The Therapist” something. Maybe you want to tell a therapist that who we are and what we do are not valuable. That no matter what we do to be effective it wont work. That we are unable to change what is and thinking otherwise makes us foolish. In fact, it seems as if you’d like us to feel bad about who we are and what we do. That positive thinking is bullshit and that we should just give up. That we will never be effective because people don’t change.
It sounds like you want us to feel like you do. That is how it works, I suppose. When people are feeling bad they very often want to have others understand their pain by saying and doing things to create that feeling in others. There is a saying: “Hurt people hurt people.” The human tendency is to make others try to feel the pain we are feeling so that our situation, our life can be understood. I could be wrong about that in your instance, but without a question and with such clarity about how you feel it is one way to explain the contradiction of why you’d be telling instead of asking.
In my opinion one non-bullshit thing psychology has found is that if you don’t believe you can change you probably won’t.
Wishing you patience and peace,
Dr. Dan
