Supplementing Therapy

/ Sirius Bizinus

Image courtesy of Stockvault.

Although I’ve been seeing a therapist for the past four years, it’s not covered all of the things I need to cover. This past weekend highlighted that I really need to focus on getting actual help for coping with my loss of faith. My personal goals have always been to get to a point where I don’t feel anything negative or get anxiety attacks regarding my former religion. I found out from my local freethought group that Recovering From Religion has started a new group near where I live.

My hope is to join and connect with others who have similar goals.
My freethought group isn’t really the place for therapy, nor should it be. I’ve needed something stronger than informal help regarding how I left my faith for quite some time now. Since my current therapist is more traditional in her approaches, she’s not trained to go into issues regarding recovery from the deeper end of the Christian spectrum. It’s like leaving a cult and not knowing what to do anymore.

That said, the only thing I can do is sign up as an interested person in meetings. This group has been trying to get off the ground for a while now, but it just hasn’t gotten fully started yet. I really hope that I can attend the next scheduled meeting and get in on something that will last for a while.

I don’t know if that’s going to happen, though. In the meantime, I think I’m going to keep looking for ways to supplement my therapy. Recovering from what I’ve been through has taken a long time. I’m going to need all the help I can get.

3 thoughts on “Supplementing Therapy”

  1. Sometimes SB, I just think we’re all too nice. There is a disease called “feeling obligated” when it comes to family and faith, and I have this weird kind of duty to appease everyone but myself. I’ve gotten better and don’t need to be accepted any more by the ones that tormented me. Good luck brother. The road is long, but at least it’s bumpy 🙂

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  2. I suspect that unburdening yourself in front of a sympathetic audience as you have been doing here is helping (at least I would like it to). When I went through difficult times, I found two things that were very helpful. Having sympathetic listeners to my “issues,” was one. The other was sympathetic listeners who stopped when after I had looped a number of times, that is listeners that would not allow me to abuse their service. Since a key to “moving on” is to move off of the problem and onto solutions, this was very helpful.

    I observed an intervention into the life of someone who was deeply wronged and which that wrong had distorted her entire life and the question put to her that broke the log jam and allowed her to move on was the question “What if it weren’t wrong?” when I heard the question I was shocked, outraged. Of course, it was wrong. Well it was, but it didn’t have to continue to be. I saw that person a week later and I tell you know that I have never seen such a personal transformation. A lump of a sad sack human being was transformed into a vibrant alive human being. She positively glowed. I almost didn’t recognize her. She decided that the cost of maintaining the wrongness was the sacrifice of a decent life and that the cost was too high so she let go of her hurt, realizing that she had become the source of it.

    I am not suggesting anything specific to you, but I offer this example as to what can happen when a sympathetic listener comes back with challenges and just doesn’t listen.

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