It's good to talk...?

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After an exciting and stimulating weekend spent celebrating the F's Birthday, I came back down to Earth today with a mild hangover and an early rise for my first 'focus for therapy' session at my local psychotherapy unit. This was basically one of four fifty minute sessions which involve talking through your troubles, what's bothering you, what's hindering you, and working out the things you'd like to deal with when it comes to your   real sessions.

So I braved the pissing rain for the 30 or so minute walk, and met with my (also female) assigned therapist. Now, I don't know about you, but I always seem to lose the capacity to say exactly what I mean and mean exactly what I say at these things. She probed with a load of questions to prompt me, but compared to my usual abilities to talk for England, I was mute. I also found myself so churned up that I started worrying that I must sound like I was absolutely fine, something and nothing, or that I was a lost cause and they'd decide I wasn't suitable for psychotherapy anyway.

Laying your present and past history out for a complete stranger isn't much fun. And people with mental illness have to do that a lot, many times over, so each sodding individual therapist, psychiatrist, social worker and mental health nurse can make their own notes. About you. Where do they all go, those notes? I dread to think how many tomes about my life exist on dusty shelves all over London and Berkshire thanks to my mental ill health.

They also ask questions which, if I knew the answer to, I wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. This week was all about current worries, how I see myself, and what my major issues are. Next week its onto the past. Oh joy. It'll be fun trying to squeeze that into 50 minutes. I jest a little, of course. I'm more than grateful that the local CMHT have gotten me these sessions so quickly (quickly in the the scheme of the NHS, anyway) and that the therapist herself seems like a nice sort. Even if she was sat a comically great distance from me during proceedings.

It's not the first time I've had therapy or counselling, of  course. I've had DBT, a special combination of group and one-on-one talking therapies aimed specifically at those with BPD. It didn't do much for me as turns out that's not my primary issue, but it stopped me wanting to harm myself quite so much, which is hardly a bad thing. I also began intensive psychotherapy at the Tavistock in London a couple of years ago. I waited over ten months to get an NHS spot there, and then a month after beginning to pour my heart out three times a week, I went hypomanic, and AWOL, thinking I was utterly sane and having a wonderful time of it. I didn't know this was hypomania then, but in hindsight that therapy wasn't really for me: it involved laying on an actual couch, like in the movies. If you've never done it, there's nothing weirder, at least when it comes to talking therapies...

So here I am at the start of a new chapter, wondering what the next few sessions will bring and what therapy they might decide is best for me. Now I just have to stick at it...

What are your experiences of talking therapies? Has anything worked for you?