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Therapy is a legitimate trigger for me and I’m tired of the assumption that it’s always a good thing. People making fun of it isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that people are talking about it so casually and I feel like no one takes my trigger seriously.

Like honestly it’s really triggering when people just casually say that someone needs therapy... people don’t know how horrible a bad therapist can be and I’m sick of it being put on such a pedestal.

I got triggered again today by people making casual jokes about therapy and had nowhere else to turn. To be completely honest, I haven't felt safe posting here at all since this thread. I have literally nowhere else to turn though so I'm basically feeling hopeless and at the end of my rope.

Sj, thank you for your reply. I have a hard time communicating and get misunderstood often, so it really helps to know that you also have some similar experiences. It's not something that seems to get talked about much, and I feel like a failure when I reach out here and just end up triggered and spiraling.

Bella, that is something I try to keep in mind, but thank you for the reminder. I'm autistic and have ADHD, so knowing that my brain works differently than most people's really helps me keep things in perspective.

Kizzie, I really wish I knew what would make things better. If I knew what I needed, I'd just ask for it. I'm lost and frustrated and alone, so I made an attempt to reach out and be honest about it. I didn't tell people not to make suggestions... I really feel like you're misunderstanding me...

I really have been trying to take things into my own hands... I've been doing it for a long time with little/no success, which is why I came back here. I've also really struggled to find groups to connect with. There's not much in my area. I'm really not trying to be difficult here. I'm just so frustrated and hopeless right now that I'm kinda wishing I just didn't exist.

Edit: Please don't respond with generic things like "I hope things get better for you". I know it's well-intentioned but it feels really empty and hopeless to me and I'm having a really rough time posting this stuff.

Like every time I post here I end up just feeling more hopeless and spiraling. Like right now. Currently I need support but it doesn't exist for me.

I guess this place is just too impersonal for the type of support I need. Every time I post here it feels pointless. I've never liked forum-style websites but unfortunately this is the only place where I don't get constantly invalidated...

The trigger is therapy. I can't get into the reasons. I'm so burnt out on trying to explain how/why therapy is triggering for me. I just need a community for people like me. I feel so alone in this, and I know people's reaction to me saying "I feel alone" is to tell me that there's "Someone out there who has the same struggles!" but it doesn't help me feel less alone to know that someone else I'll probably never meet is also probably silently struggling with this issue.

I guess I'm just complaining because therapy is an unavoidable trigger for me and I've got issues I'm trying to deal with and I'm a little tired of people trying to like...debate with me about it. Yeah it's helpful for a lot of people but therapy is basically completely off the table for me. So anyway I end up avoiding most mental health or recovery focused communities because I get triggered by the therapy talk and I just feel too broken to be fixed.

I'm posting here again because that's what's been recommended to me. It feels pointless though. I know what I need is an actual support system, but I don't even know where to start. I wish therapy wasn't a trigger for me. It just sucks to get triggered all the time over dumb things like people making jokes that boil down to "(Character/person) needs therapy" and then spiral into a depressive state where it feels like I'm just never going to get better.

Thanks for the recommendations Kizzie. I signed up for 7 cups. It's just really confusing and overwhelming and doesn't advertise a fee until you get to the last step. I just wish I could see the CPTSD Foundation's groups before signing up because it requires me to use facebook, which I never want to use again unless it's absolutely the only option.

There really don't seem to be any good support groups in my area. Just feeling really hopeless.

Thank you everyone for your replies. I think an in-person support group would probably be best. I'm just struggling to find the right one. There aren't many options in my area, and I'm very very skeptical of anything even remotely religious (most of this trauma was with Christian counselors).

To elaborate on the triggers, it's a lot of different things. Having a cold, distant professional asking probing questions is definitely part of it. But almost anything surrounding an appointment with a therapist can trigger me now because I've had so many different bad experiences with them. The call to make the appointment, showing up to the building, sitting in the office, having to fill out those sheets where you rate your anxiety on a scale of 1 to 5, the uncertainty of whether this person is taking me seriously or just brushing me off as a crazy person who doesn't know what they're talking about... That's why betterhelp wasn't too bad for me. But it's becoming clearer to me that I do need face-to-face support.

I'll elaborate if anyone needs better context, but I'll leave the backstory out for now because I don't have the emotional energy to get into it and still be able to articulate my current frustrations. Basically, I've had multiple bad experiences with therapy/counseling (it really doesn't matter what the title is as long as I'm sitting in an office with a "professional" asking probing questions about my mental health) and now I get emotional flashbacks so severe that I can't have a productive session.

I've tried betterhelp. It helped me a couple years ago when I was trying to come to terms with my newly diagnosed ADHD and autism at the age of 24. Looking back, I just needed someone to listen to me and give me some level of validation because my world had basically been turned upside down and I didn't know if I could trust my own perceptions anymore. Just having someone talk to me about these things like they were normal helped me to feel a bit more grounded.

Now, I'm having a really really rough patch in life. I don't know how to describe it. I don't even know where to start with it. I feel like things have just been building up for a long time and now I'm back at rock bottom with my mental health. I tried betterhelp again a couple months ago and it didn't help. It felt like I was just getting generic advice, and I think I need someone to talk to who really understands what's going on in my life.

I just feel like I'm at a dead-end. Everyone recommends therapy. It's become so popular now that there are memes for it and I can't even blacklist it properly because no one thinks of it as a trigger that they need to tag. I'm just so lost and frustrated, and I feel very alone in this. People understand that therapy is difficult and emotionally draining and sometimes doesn't work on the first try, but they don't seem to understand when I say that it's a trigger for me.

So now the thing that's weighing on me the most is the fact that I have this conflict and I don't know how to solve it. It's a vicious cycle.

Thanks for reading and replying, everyone. It's always good to know I'm not alone. 

Content warnings: School, failure, medication, someone else's suicide attempt, family issues, etc. Let me know of any others.



I went to college for 6 years. I had some good experiences and bad experiences, but mostly it just felt like the next logical step in my plan of life. I went to school til I was 18, I applied for colleges, I went to the one that accepted me, I showed up, and I tried not to screw it up.

I ended up screwing it up. Remember how I said I went for 6 years? It's not because I was going for a graduate degree. It's because I kept failing and having to retake classes. By my 5th year, I was VERY depressed and finally made myself go to the counseling department at my college. Talk therapy still didn't work for me, but I got prescribed antidepressants, which worked wonders. My energy was back up, and I was feeling better about myself. I was still struggling in school though. In the fall of my 6th year, I looked into psychiatric testing because I suspected I had ADHD and/or autism. I tested positive for both, and my entire life started to replay in my head, making sense of all my struggles, strengths, and surprises in life. Sometime in the middle of all of this, my dad started going through his second divorce and attempted suicide. I tried to be there for him, but I'd been dealing with my own suicidal thoughts for a long time and was pretty triggered by the whole thing. His ex-wife also decided to text me during this time to tell me what a horrible influence she thinks I am on her son. And then when my dad found a new girlfriend, the ex-wife tried to put words in my mouth for her own agenda.

Without untangling all the reasons this messed me up, I'll just say that it REALLY messed me up. I got caught in the middle of family drama that I had no interest in, and I was trying to work on myself with all this new information about how my brain works. (Also, American politics in 2016. Enough said.) I didn't have the time or energy for school. I just... 

I got VERY close to graduation. But I failed basically everything I was taking in the spring of 2017. I was so burnt out and felt like I was already failing horribly because of how long it took me to get this close to graduation. I was also realizing that I had never learned how to actually learn things in a classroom setting. I had just done my best to remember information quickly, do what I was told, and not get in trouble. I was a people pleaser, and when I stopped being able to please people with my academic achievements (around middle school or high school?) I stopped being motivated to even try, and I struggled to get passing grades. So I didn't graduate, and I didn't go back in the fall.

In the past year and a half, I've tried to pick myself back up and figure out "Where do I go from here?". I haven't answered that question yet, but I got an email from my college yesterday asking the same thing. They linked me to a page on ReUp Education's site with a few boxes to fill out. I felt somewhat at ease seeing the options that reflected my uncertainty about the whole situation. "I'm not sure when or if I wish to return", "Unknown academic standing", etc. But there's one box where I have to write my own answer rather than picking a pre-made option:

"Tell us a little about what caused you to leave school and why you're interesting in returning."

Man that's a loaded question. I can't even say for sure why I left. Because my family was constantly putting too much pressure on me? Because I was just racking up more debt and failing harder every year? Because I just couldn't handle everything life threw at me in 2016 on top of all the underlying issues I had? Because I never really wanted to go in the first place but I didn't have any other options?? And DO I want to return?? Probably not, but it feels like the responsible thing to do?

So yeah basically I read that question and tried to answer it and had a breakdown instead and ended up writing about the whole thing here because I'm a mess just thinking about it. I'm not sure if I'm looking for advice here, but it feels good to at least let it all out.

Checking out the thread now. Thanks, Elphanigh 

I do expect things to get worse before they get better. You have to take the work to mend the wound before it can heal, right? Today has been very hard though. People saying that a victim is making things up is extremely triggering for me.

It takes so much courage to speak up about something traumatic like that, and I'm endlessly disgusted at the people who keep pushing their irrelevant perspective about how it "wasn't that bad" as if THEY were the ones who had to process the trauma of being someone else's "dumb mistake they made when they were young". Words cannot express how much it sickens me.

Stuff like this makes me want to just go hide away forever and not talk to other people anymore, but I know that adopting ignorance to avoid problems just allows the problems to grow unhindered. All we can do is keep moving forward.