Dear Sesha:

You are welcome. I agree that you made the right decision to quit the therapist you saw because you needed her input, not her silence. Let’s look at what happened in therapy with her: “Mostly I talked intensely bad about myself and my life circumstances” – this is not different from when you are all by yourself thinking intensely bad thoughts about yourself and your life circumstances. In her silence, your own thinking was even louder than when you are alone. You needed your thinking to get quieter and her thinking to be audible, a thinking that is different from yours.

“She tried her best to listen to me but didn’t give so much input” – this might have given you the impression that what you shared about yourself was too difficult to process, too weird or heavy for a therapist to be able to understand. As a matter of fact, you wrote this yourself in regard to the therapy: “I felt especially ashamed how odd I was“- you figured that she wasn’t able to understand your… oddity, no matter how hard she tried, as if your oddity is too much to understand and comment about.

No wonder you “felt more and more uncomfortable in the session… (and) stopped it“.

In your original post, you wrote: “My head is filled with racing thoughts of self-blame, shame and worry” – these are the noises in your head, and they are loud.

“Also, feelings of loneliness and worthlessness suffocate me” – you are alone with those loud noises, loud blaming, shaming, worrying noises. Alone with such distressing, loud noises you feel lonely and suffocated. You need silence inside your head, so that you can breathe freely.

“During that year I felt more and more anxious in everything I was doing and with everyone I was working with. I got very anxious and paranoid of how other students, professors and even people outside of the university perceived me… I acted and talked weirdly and stressed” – during last year, the noises grew louder and louder. The noises were telling you that you are odd and weird and too much… and that everyone was well aware of how weird you were.

“I always feel uncomfortable in my own skin” – no wonder you feel uncomfortable being in the 24/7 company of a person you believe to be weird and odd and unacceptable.

“I am thinking a lot about my past failure at the moment. I attended two other universities before and failed. Now I am in my mid- twenties and still haven’t a degree or apprenticeship…  to think about that and how my peers are doing with their lives I feel so ashamed of myself. The self-doubt is also very present” – the noises in your head have a lot to say to you, an ongoing barrage of negative commentary about you.

“I feel like I know that the issue is my own destructive thoughts that hurt my mind. I’m trying to fix them myself” – I very well know such loud, destructive thoughts/ noises in my own head, it is only recently that I am experiencing freedom from such noises… finally that welcomed silence within my own head. In my life, the beginning of these noises was a very noisy real-life person, my own mother. She said a lot of negative things about me. Any such person in your life?

anita