Anti-therapy

I don't believe in therapy the way atheists don't believe in God. I've tried it, and seen how it does not in fact change anything. I have been to the full range of therapists: the kind who tell you that you are lying, the kind that tell you how you feel, the kind that ask you questions and find all your answers wrong, the kind that tell you all your problems stem from the past, the kind that think mentioning the past means you are clinging to it, those that talk more than you do, and those that barely speak.

I cannot even say they had a negative net impact upon me. There is just nothing there. Like drinking tap water, there is no substance, no nutrients and aftertaste. Their faces blur together, pointless endeavors who neither made the chaos inside worse nor improved it. Each was unique, yet their names elude me, each as faded as a movie I might have seen once with a single good scene in it.

My life continues on, old bad habits surging up into a relapse, old fears giving me the regular anxiety attacks, old trauma lingering unwanted in nightmares. Therapy, well meaning and kind people online say. Go to therapy. Get help. The assumption that therapists have any real interest in helping someone is as naive to me as the thought that blowing fluffy dandelion seeds will grant a wish. When I was very young, I do remember putting that level of hope into things, people and God. I remember believing.

But belief is expensive, and experience is a costly instructor. I'm broke. I am broken. It is a better use of time to accept these two facts than to try to manufacture a salvation out of an idealized concept of a profession.

I am not an angry atheist. I am an exhausted one.