Just a sort of open ended question. I want to share my experience and am curious to hear of others as well. Sorry, this is long winded!

So my provider asked if I would be willing to try a therapy program that meets multiple times per week. I then got a phone call from the company about the specific details of the program. Holy moly! It was a program with 9-10 hours of therapy per WEEK (almost ALL of which is group therapy, not individual) and it lasts multiple months…guess that’s how these work.

At the time (and maybe it still is), it seemed like a bit of an overreaction from her. And goddamn, the time commitment on top of working is just insane. To top it all off, the reviews of the company were absolutely fucking horrendous…couldn’t find a single positive one and was beginning to think it was a scam.

But I agreed to try (after giving the admissions people a hard time lol sorry!). My first day I was absolutely pissed the fuck off of how absolutely fucking useless it seemed…until I got to the last hour…they gave us a bite-sized thing to chew on and try to apply in our lives.

Well guess what? They NEXT FUCKING DAY, I coincidentally by absolute chance had a major fucking mental health issue. I used the skill they gave along with another skill I learned on my own before the program and IT FUCKING WORKED.

So I figured there may be was something to this and kept attending. Each day I would get slowly less pissed off. I slowly was able to start reading between the lines and understand and appreciate the format of the program. I’m only a couple of weeks in now, but I don’t regret wading further in. Am I “cured”? No. But it is helping me day by day to work on little things and little habits at a time to grow.

With commitment and the right mindset, this so far has felt more helpful than therapists I have tried to see once every two weeks for almost a year now. My provider told me that her goal for me was to finally get into a better place and theoretically need a regular therapist way less if even at all. And to reduce or stop having issues juggling various meds to see what might work…as the therapy would theoretically involve most or all of the heavy lifting.

Monetarily in the US, this sort of thing is not going to be accessible to everyone, so I’m grateful that I have been in the position to do so. These programs take insurance…but if your insurance doesn’t cover enough, it can still be a great cost.

tl;dr - While this sort of thing isn’t for everyone by far, I would honestly encourage people to have an open mind if you are ever referred to one of these things. Give it a bit and really try your hardest to be open minded, even though it can be very difficult.

  • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    This is amazing to hear, and I’m glad it’s gone so well for you! You unlocked to key to IOP, which is to show the fuck up. And that doesn’t just mean being there, but being mentally present and being open to what’s bring offered

    • dingusOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thank you! I felt like I was mentally present with my therapist as well, but I guess it wasn’t quite enough lol. One of my group mates was “graduating” and he told us he made a DBT wall. I honestly thought it was a fantastic idea and am “stealing” it to hopefully remind myself of the techniques and ideas for after I’m done.

  • truite@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    I’m glad it’s helping you :)

    In my country we have what we call “day hospital”, you come the morning and go back in the evening. I don’t know if it’s similar or not. It’s group activities, like drawing, theater, dance, watching film, philosophy, sport… and it’s magically therapeutic because it’s with psych nurses. There is probably activities like meditation and yoga now. We have this on half-day “therapies” too but you generally come once or twice a week so it’s less intense. For day hospital, you can be there one, two, five days a week.

    • dingusOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I think we have something similar. It’s called “partial hospitalization”. It’s basically a step above what I describe but below being entirely trapped in the hospital unable to leave.

    • dingusOPEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      I am not surprised the group stuff actually clicked though. Individual therapy once every two weeks is honestly a joke for real issues. You spend forty minutes just giving a status update on your life and then the session is over. It does nothing for actual skill-building. Those IOPs are a grueling time-sink, but they force you to actually sit with the garbage in your head instead of just ignoring it until your next fifty-minute slot.

      You really hit the nail on the head at why standard timeframe individual therapy seems to have just sucked for me. Therapy appointments never coincided with issues…and then it’s basically just tell me about the past two weeks. “Ok bye.” While therapists in my experience have always been eager to try to give input to me…I just haven’t been able to have as much direct guidance as I needed. I’ll cry about a bad day to them, but the suggestions given afterwards never seemed to help me enough.

      Then I went the other way and bought a comprehensive DBT workbook. Good lord! It has helped me too, but over time I realized that it was way too dense and actually gave way TOO many techniques for it to be effective in my life. These bite sized, but 3x/week DBT chunks make it a lot easier to try to add in skills to daily life.

      Just be careful with that “needing a therapist less” talk from your provider. It sounds great in theory, but in my experience, that is usually just insurance-speak for trying to kick people out of the system once they are stable enough to not be an immediate problem.

      Well it’s a bit different like that for me. I often complain to her about the cost of things and why all of my therapy and psychiatry appointments are not great for me monetarily. I have a crazy high deductible plan, so it is very expensive for me to see providers so often. The IOP program is a temporary hit to my financials (which I’m in a great position for) to potentially actually get some better help and ways to cope long term…as opposed to my current ineffective methods that still cost a lot of money overall.

      I actually DON’T want to be in therapy long term. I want to be able to cope with life better myself. I would still obviously be open to seeing one in times of struggle, but I want to actually be able to have enough positive change in my life where it isn’t really needed as much anymore, if at all.