Therapy is literally too hard. Just had a session where I decided to be honest and actually talk and i feel embarrassed and anxious i want to forget about the whole thing. Its just way too difficult. Im better off talking to myself. I dont think im gonna show up again this was too hard. I feel stupid.
Can ppl w avoidant tendencies relate? Or anyone at all?
That's kind of how it goes, to be honest. It feels unintuitive because the commonly-held idea of therapy is that it will make you feel good or better, and that is the end goal, but the process can be bloody painful. You leave some sessions feeling better, lighter; other sessions leave you exhausted, drained, and miserable. Those sessions are quite important.
In therapy, we try to figure out the root causes of our suffering. And then we deal with those things. As you can imagine, those things tend to be painful, unpleasant, difficult to deal with; if they weren't so, we would've dealt with them long ago, without therapy, and they wouldn't be causing us pain in the present. Those painful things have been repressed for months or years, and they keep coming up day after day, making us re-live the pain over and over. We need to address them head-on, deal with the pain intentionally and with purpose, to be rid of it so that we can move on with our lives.
Feeling stupid, ashamed, even judged is quite a normal experience, especially if you're new to being in therapy. But this is usually not the case in reality—it is often the case that the judgment comes from ourselves, from the part of us that is afraid of facing things head-on, and tries to come up with reasons to avoid doing so. Therapists are not there to judge, to pity, to mock. It's far from a lucrative line of work, especially if the therapist takes insurance, so it's likely that the person across you is there because they actually have a desire to help. (There are exceptions, of course, and some therapists are grotesquely incompetent, but I'd argue those exceptions should be handled if and when they're relevant—i.e. if your therapist is shit, it's better to move on, but general suspicion is, in my opinion, counterproductive).
If any part of you wants to give recovery a try, I believe pushing through the difficult and painful feelings could be worth it. You're not alone, therapy can be hard, almost unbearable at times, but that's a reflection of the true, unbearably heavy burden you've been carrying.
Whatever you choose to do, I wish you strength and peace.
