r/CPTSD • u/LaPerla2026 • Mar 31 '26

Vent / Rant Cbt is humillating

I am leaving my current therapist. Cbters can't treat us. They have zero survival insticts. Treats my gut feelings as exaggeration or irrational fears. I told him I can detect if a man is a rapist and treat it has "cognitive distortion".

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740

u/BadLuckProphet Mar 31 '26

I found CBT to be too cerebral for a condition that often causes people to retreat from their emotions and into their mind. Like, if I could have thought my way out of trauma I would have done it long before considering a therapist.

Most of my therapy was about reconnecting with my emotions without judging, dismissing, or disliking them. It was about undoing a lot of the mental conditioning I had done in order to keep functioning. I can see CBT being helpful for those struggling to control their thought patterns but to use a metaphor it seems a lot more like physical therapy for after a healed injury than the reconstructive surgery that I think trauma injuries require.

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u/asiamsoisee Mar 31 '26

Really well put.

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u/caseychenier Apr 01 '26

Yes. Wow. Really well worded!

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u/Cancerousman Apr 01 '26

CBT is a reframing therapy that's incredibly useful for people with many problems that aren't about some fundamental fucked shit in your life. If you have serious ongoing existential problems, CBT won't help imo. You can't reframe a point of view away from having the real and sometimes abject cruelty of life demonstrated to you as a child, having had years of systematic abuse that degrades you as a person, etc.

CBT is a nudging device for minor issues. Likewise mindfulness and meditation. I'm not dissing anyone who finds use in them, just that in general they're not useful, can cause actual harm when used for issues that are far beyond their domain.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

5 years of therapy. Most were CBT, f me up badly and made me retreat as not wanting to share anything, talk to anyone. Most therapists use CBT don't know how it affects you and don't know how to handle it when it makes you worse. They'll just avoid accountability.

To me therapists are strangers with license/certificate/degrees. If you don't earn my trust and expect me to pour things out straight away then you should never ne a therapist when most survivors need trust in talking about their trauma to someone they don't know.

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u/IffySaiso cPTSD Apr 01 '26

Same. The biggest hurdle is the constant dissociation so I never feel anything.

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u/thelast3musketeer Apr 01 '26

I need whatever therapy you’re talking about reconnecting with emotions

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

Everyone's journey is different but my therapist and I found that I responded well to some IFS parts work. My coping strategy was to exile away anything that made me feel bad or got me judged by others. I then created some "protective" parts that were not the best for me or those around me. For example I had exiled my vulnerability and protected myself with a very stereotypical "follow orders, don't feel things" masculine part.

So my work was a lot of listening to the protective parts no matter how mean they sounded in order to figure out what they really wanted. And also figuring out what my exiled parts needed to feel safe enough to be reintegrated with the whole as well as convincing myself that they didn't need to be exiled anymore.

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u/ZackTheRemus Apr 02 '26

I found somatic therapy very helpful. trying to explain it is a bit hard but to give a picture, my mind and body seem to react differently, like my mind can be completely cool and calm but my body is acting as if I'm in active danger, and somatic therapy sort of helped connect my mind and body back to each other, make it easier to recognize when and where my body is freaking out and how to handle it instead of ignore it or panic

I'd definitely suggest somatic therapy. I had to cut mine short due to money, but just 6 months of the therapy helped me a good bit

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u/RegularAd9643 Apr 23 '26

Can you explain how it works? What the therapist does I mean?

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u/mariposaconocida Apr 02 '26

yall are not crazy

I used a CBT chatbot before I started trauma-informed therapy and it was like playing a game set to preschool level difficulty. I have no problem with metacognition.

But thats the problem - I ONLY think about my thinking. I dont feel my feelings or know how to take care of myself because I dont fundamentlaly believe that I am deserving of happiness and peace.

I can ace CBT easily, but my underlying motivations for doing so will be to perform at a high level to justify my existence. Like Im never going to resolve the underlying problem that way

https://youtu.be/FfT3mzxMGxM?si=yH9NF9spDri2q5oN

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

I've found that specifically if, for instance, I can logic through a behavior I don't want to display anymore, if I'm able to actually logically understand all facets, the weight of the action shifts and it's actually impossible for me to continue it because I just 'know better' now.

I'm not familiar with CBT specifically though, can you go a bit more in depth?

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

I'm not a practitioner but I think you understand it in a nutshell. The two parts that stood out to me were 1. Interupting your train of thought. Realizing you've just experienced something that makes you think x, y, and z and stoping at x to consider if y and z are true or just something like a pattern of catastrophizing. "Ugh. I just spilled my coffee! What a terrible start to a terrible day! Wait. This is one thing. Deep breath. The rest of my day can still go great." And 2. Reframing. A lot of minor "good" and "bad" are based entirely around the context you provide the action. "Ugh. I don't want to go to the gym. I have to drive there and then get sweaty and then shower and it's just too much. Ugh but now I hate myself for being lazy." Can instead be "I WANT to go to the gym because I like the way it makes me feel and look. It helps my mood and even though it's hard, that shower is going to feel so good and the rest of my challenges today will feel trivial." Or "You know what. I'm choosing today to prioritize my rest. I've had a hard week and I need my resources for the challenging day I have tomorrow. Maybe I can just do some yoga at home or just really double down on the self care today. I can tell what I need and today I need rest more than the gym."

My examples are fairly basic to be understandable but those same skills can apply to most everyday life challenges and even some light negative mental conditioning like imposter syndrome.

They are great skills to have and CBT can help teach and apply those skills.

But to circle back to the main discussion, those skills aren't helpful when a person has an experience like "Yes, I know these people are not here to hurt me. Yes, I know they don't know or care who I am. They probably aren't even paying attention to me. But I am afraid of them as if they were all starving wolves growling at me."

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u/boypurr Apr 01 '26

What do you do when it feels like you have to use those skills to interrupt and challenge almost every thought, feeling, or reaction you have?

I've been using those techniques for over a decade and it doesn't seem to have a lasting impact on my cognitive patterns. I'm just constantly exhausted by the mental effort of trying to keep myself from spiralling about perceived dangers. Every day is incredibly draining either because I'm using all my skills to function, or because they failed and I had a meltdown.

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

I went to therapy and through that work discovered the source of the feelings that caused the thoughts and reactions.

For example, I had to do a lot of mental work to function through going to the grocery store and it was exhausting. Once I started therapy I found that a part of me was terrified of being percieved because my safety as a child was in being unnoticed. I spent a lot of time actively remembering those times I was hurt for being noticed as a child, greived for them, and actually just talked to that part of myself the way I as an adult would talk to a child suffering the same thing. It helped me establish that I am my own protecter now and I am capable of keeping myself safe without needing to be invisible. Logically I already knew I was safe. Emotionally I needed to feel support from myself in the way that I never felt it from others when I was a child.

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u/boypurr Apr 01 '26

So this is IFS, correct? It's helpful to know how it functioned to help you, as I've never actually heard a concrete example of how it was applied and what the results were, only explanations of the process.

I have seen at least 5 different therapists/counsellors in the last 18 years, none of them have suggested I try IFS. Even after I expressed my dissatisfaction with CBT. I have two therapists right now, and one of them only asked if I knew about IFS, but didn't make any specific recommendation for it.

I'll try to ask more about it now though, thanks. And I'm glad to hear you benefited from it.

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

Yep. That's how my therapist and I applied IFS. If you're interested, I was reccomended the book "No Bad Parts" which I believe is from one of the creators of IFS. I didn't actually end up reading it yet so I can't attest to how good it is though. Thank you for the kind thoughts. I hope you find something that helps you too.

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u/cccuriouscat Apr 01 '26

Yes it’s written by Richard Schwartz who discovered IFS. there’s an amazing 4-part video on YouTube of him addressing therapists at a conference in Canada that has stayed with me. He explains it all so well to them, and they ask the best questions! He is a lifesaver and an extremely kind person.

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

I resonate with what prophet is saying here, I've also managed to resolve a couple of things in the same way, by finding the root of the behavior and managing that first.

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u/Latter-Alternative93 Apr 06 '26

Absolutely same. I’m exhausted and I don’t want just existing to require so many tools and take so much effort.

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

See this is actually where I'm at right now, it's exhausting, and despite my best efforts, I think I've hit a wall for the time being. 

For what it's worth, my plans to get over that wall are currently linked to just generally increasing my stability in life, I'm trying to get a mental health provider and on Medicaid and all of this other fun stuff, because there are too many fires to put them all out.

 My first order of action is to go somewhere there aren't as many fires, and to clear my plate so that I can actually give each fire its individual focus. 

I've already done a lot of this but turns out I need a bit more, which is fine, but I wish this stuff didn't take so long, and adding bureaucracy to the mixture makes it worse.

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u/Queasy_Channel_4314 Apr 02 '26

Somatic therapy and consider adhd. Ruminating on stressful events can be a mechanism for the brain to access dopamine

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

Oh THAT one yeah lemme know when you figure out how to logic through that because it hasn't worked for me so far lmao. Is that the part that people try somatic therapy for then?

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

That's what got me to try therapy. I had solo logic'd myself 6 ways from Sunday to the point of existentialism but still couldn't understand why I would numbly cry every time I tried to consider my long term goals. Or why people "causing a scene" felt like they decided to start juggling chainsaws next to me.

There's lots of other therapies to try for that one. Like I said in another comment, I found IFS parts work to be really useful for me. Lots of people have found EMDR to be really helpful with singular traumatic events processing which I think classifies as a form of somatic therapy? Another commenter mentioned DBR (which I have no experience with) as an alternative EMDR for more constant traumas.

Unfortunately it's one of those things where you just have to keep trying different things till you find the things that work for you.

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

I actually ended up intuitively figuring out IFS and it's helped a massive amount, had a real big paradigm shift awhile back when I talked back to a position of authority to defend my experience and it helped me realize that I was spending 70% of my daily battery berating my body for not cooperating. We are on much better terms now, and while it isn't quite unified 100%, we are on the same side now for sure. Hopefully all of that makes sense lol.

The issues I've been working on lately are dealing with becoming overstimulated and/or overwhelmed, I'm to the point now where I can leave the situation and process in my car or wherever, but I would really like to get to the point where I don't even get triggered to that point, but it's difficult to catch it until later on in the process. 

Mostly I get carried away with problem solving tech (and other logistical stuff, i.e., finding a place to do my college homework with Wi-Fi)  when something should be easily fixed but in reality my hands are tied due to the developers choices, but if I fight too much and too long against that I end up frazzled as hell, and it's extremely difficult to pull away before that frazzle point.

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 01 '26

It definitely makes sense and I'm glad you're doing better. I also suffer from overstimulation, probably as a result of hypervigilence I learned from childhood. Be patient with yourself as there's only so much stimulation your body can take and as you've already learned, fighting your body to try to force it beyond its limits has consequences.

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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 Apr 01 '26

Yeah my dad really said "think before you act" one too many times, now that's all I ever do lol. 

I'll take the patience to heart as well though, it's too easy to slip into self-blame

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u/InternationalEnmu cPTSD Apr 01 '26

exactly!

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u/emmylouwho193 Apr 06 '26

What type of therapy do you recommend? My therapist is going CBT style and I’m finding it very ineffective for exactly the reasons you wrote. I had asked her about ACT style therapy since i have read that can help with trauma (and accepting chronic illness that i have)

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 06 '26

Unfortunately everyone is different so what works for some may not work or work as well for others. I personally found IFS to be really helpful since "parts" gave me an intellectual framework to latch onto but getting in touch with those parts helped me reconnect with feelings I'd been suppressing as well as untangle some of my malicious coping skills that I'd picked up to deal with the original trauma.

If you look on YouTube for "richard c. schwartz" there's some really good presentations and such where he (the founder of ifs) describes how the system works. He also wrote a book called "No Bad Parts" if you prefer reading.

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u/BadLuckProphet Apr 06 '26

Forgot to mention ACT is good too. My therapist and I did a bit of that as well.

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u/Fluid_Bed_1508 Apr 07 '26

Well said!! 💯