Has anyone here done the “mourn & cry for old hurts”-kind of therapy? Did it help?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The past two years, I’ve talked to my therapist about my rotten childhood. I had a very clear goal; I want to get rid of this depression I’ve had for three and a half years now. I just want to feel better, to feel as cheerful and energetic as I did five years ago.
So I picked a therapist, and I saw this guy for an hour every two weeks. I talked to the guy, as in reasonably. That’s just how I seem to be wired, and it seemed the therapist also preferred me telling amusing stories about my crazy mom. The alternative would have been me talking in a choked up voice, or just bawling my eyes out. So I skipped the bawling, and just sat there making cerebral discoveries. His boxes of Kleenex remained intact.
“ Hmm, yes, now that I think about it, it IS funny that my mom can’t throw out her own twenty year old packets of hair dye to save her life, and yet she had the two shoeboxes of my stuff I had left there out on the curb within weeks of my having moved out to college. Probably because she needed my room for the boxes of hair-dye. Amusing, isn’t it? Ha ha!”

All the books I’ve read tell me that this kind of insight needs the additional emotional work. Crying. Feeling old hurts. All the books say it is necessary. That you feel better afterwards. That feeling those old hurts that have been suppressed frees up energy, and changes you for the better.
So I’ve tried another therapist. Well, she had me crying within thirty minutes of our first handshake. I could change therapists permanently and go to see her. But I don’t know. I just feel rotten when I sit there, all choked up. It hurts. I feel ridiculous. I feel a cry baby. I’m a big girl now, why should I cry about…well about all that petty long forgotten stuff? How do I know that I will feel better in the long run? And how long is that long run?

Have any Dopers done the mourning old hurts-thing? The crying old tears-thing? Any experiences would be greatly appreciated.

2

First, I’d always assumed you were a man.

Second, I’ve just started back to therapy. I have a temporary therapist through my school’s counseling center, but have an appointment next week with someone I hope to be my long-term therapist. He asked me before I come in to write down a list of my top ten insights from previous therapists (this would be 2).

So I went over it with my temporary therapist, and realized that my relationship with my mother is probably one of my biggest issues that I need to start addressing. She said it’s going to be like the grieving process, learning to accept my mother for what she is and letting go of what I’d hoped she would be. Lots of crying ensued.

But I felt better. You do need the rational part of you to make insights and have epiphanies, but the emotional side has to have its say too. I’d say especially for a problem like depression and a screwed-up childhood (looks like we’re in the same boat there).

I recently addressed (though on my own) a personal problem of mine that is very painful and shameful. I wrote a letter apologizing, explaining, begging for forgiveness. I cried a lot. But in the end, I felt so much better. All those emotions had been bottled up inside, and getting my thoughts and feelings down on paper (I have no intention of sending the letter) was a huge relief.

Either way, give it a shot, see if it works for you. You might not have to do weepy, emotional therapy forever, but it can’t hurt to try, and it might really help.

3

I haven’t done that type of official thing but I did have a baby daughter die in my arms. People encouraged me and sometimes forced my to deal with it in ways that made me cry and then wish for for death for myself. It was all crap whether it was coming from therapist or a family member. I felt like crap and then…I felt like hell for days later. The strong suggestions of emotional expressions hurt me deeply and I finally found the need to fight the off, often strongly. That type of thing is pop psychology and won’t lead anywhere if you don’t think it will. Just abandon the entire thing and find a different therapist if it isn’t working for you. There are a ton of crackpots out there and even the good ones don’t work for everyone.

4

Yes and yes.

I will willingly discuss this via email (in my profile) if you wish, but I am uncomfortable discussing it on the board.

5

Yes, it was part (but not all) of my therapy and lead me to a lot of insights about myself that helped me to change things about myself and my life that I was not happy about. It has also been part of what helped me reach a kind of peace with the awful shit that happened in my childhood. I am consequently a lot more contented than my sisters.

It has to lead to some kind of insight or resolution to be helpful, though. Just being upset for the sake of being upset is not particularly helpful.

6

I have, but not in traditional therapy, so I don’t know if this will help you but I’ll share anyway. When I was about 17 I’d been seriously depressed/suicidal/angry for several years. Having no health insurance, I tried to get help from one of the local agencies that a friend had gone through with no luck - I got shunted onto a looong waiting list and didn’t hear back from them until several months after my first attempts to get help.

I understood that a lot of what goes on in therapy is the “the mourning old hurts-thing, the crying old tears-thing” that you describe. I started keeping a journal where I wrote about those things, a lot of stuff from my childhood, stuff that was several years or even decades old that I’d ignored or buried and allowed to fester. It was incredibly painful. Writing about one experience would often make me remember another and another, bringing up things that I’d forgotten - not really forgotten, I guess, but sort of set aside in a little locked mental room marked “Can’t handle this now, to be dealt with later.” Reliving and uncovering those experiences was hard - I’m not much of a crier, but I acted out my emotions in lots of other ways. My friends and family had a really hard time understanding why I was so upset about stuff that had happened a long time ago, and my acting out strained or broke a lot of relationships.

Still, it was the most helpful thing that I could have done for myself at that point. Reliving those old hurts and dissecting them on paper helped me to understand my depression and to work past it. Writing about what had happened allowed me to look at some of these events from a different point of view, let me understand why my parents made the choices that they did that had led me to being such a depressed and screwed up kid. It also helped me to understand my own actions - why I was acting out, self-medicating, etc. I found that I wasn’t able to think about my problems rationally and maturely while I was still suppressing my feelings. It was the combination of the two - releasing those old emotions and then reflecting on the events that had caused them that let me move past them. It was a hellishly difficult time in my life and I wouldn’t want to have to go through that sort of painfully emotional destruction-reconstruction again for anything, but it helped more than anything else ever has. For me (bad analogy time!) it was as though I’d broken a bone and it had never been set properly. It had to be re-broken, reset and it took years of therapy and rehabilitation to get the limb back up to working normally. Yes, it was painful as hell and it took a long time to see results, but in the long term it was more than worth it.

It may help you, or it may not. It will probably take a while, several months if not a year or more, before you really begin seeing the benefit of it. Before that happens, it’ll be messy and painful and it’ll likely seem like you’re not making much progress, or that you’re backsliding, feeling even worse than you were before. If I were in your position, I would talk it over with my therapist - maybe both of them - and see if they think it will be helpful for you to do that kind of work. If you’re not getting anywhere with your first therapist, it might be time for a change regardless.

7

Reflecting anecdotally on my personal experience, and that of members of my family.

I went through two years of therapy, quite a while ago. Part of the process was to re-live old hurts, but it was not to specifically mourn and cry for them, but simply to feel as an adult the feelings that I was not “allowed” to feel at the time. In my opinion, this process works when your feelings are repressed, and I think there is a good chance (although IANAPsychologist) that depression, if not rooted medically, can be rooted in repression. I also think it works best if the actual events are not immediately fresh and traumatic (I’m sorry, Shagnasty, for your loss, and also for the misguided efforts of those people around you. Sometimes you just need to close down for a while just to survive).

In contrast to my experience, both my parents and my sister are (or have been, my mother is dead now) very unhappy people, and I believe this is because none of them ever wanted to confront the emotional baggage they carry around from their early years. They are, in varying degrees, consciously aware of the baggage, but they refuse to acknowledge its importance nor to feel the real feelings that they have been stuffing down all these years. I feel sorry for my father, it is pretty much too late for him, but my sister could benefit immensely, if she would make the effort.

Your experience, pprgl, with the second therapist is probably pretty typical. I sometimes hated what I was going through, but I was fortunate to have a therapist who started out the process talking about the kinds of things that might go on and what I might expect to feel like, especially when the going was rough. It helped me to keep at it, along with the fact that I could feel the difference after each episode.

And the dreams! It is such a cliche, but I still remember the dream I had one night while I was in therapy where I was in a familiar house, but I kept walking through a lot of doors and finding rooms that I never knew were there, until finally all the doors disappeared and I could see all the way through the house, and light was shining through every opening.

To sum up, I recommend the second type of therapist; the first type can keep you going to him for years without you making any progress at all. The second type, if she’s good, will help you make steady progress towards your goal. I wish you the very best of luck.

Roddy,

8

In my experience, there is a thin line between grieving and unhealthy rumination. The trick is to find the right balance between the two.

I had traditional talk therapy for 4 years. Didn’t cry much–I’m not really much of a crier over real things that hurt. The one time I almost did cry, I stopped the session to avoid it, because it’s embarrassing as hell. I eventually switched to CBT, but I just met a therapist who is kind of going somewhere in between, and I like her a lot. There’s got to be a balance somewhere, and also we’re doing EMDR, which best as I understand it is ‘‘dredge up old hurts one last time so that they quit coming back to haunt you.’’

This is what I’m going to say.

If you met a therapist who had you crying in the first session, you might consider sticking with her. That is pretty freaking amazing that she would affect you so profoundly right off the bat. Usually it takes months or even years to build a rapport like that where you are willing to be so emotionally affected. The more discomfort you feel during therapy, I think the more odds you have of making some real progress. (There is a difference between the healthy discomfort of having to face things you don’t want to and the unhealthy discomfort of feeling misunderstood or mistreated by your therapist, of course.)

However, I would watch yourself very carefully outside of therapy. If you find yourself thinking about your past more than usual, unable to concentrate, starting to feel depressed and anxious or like processing your emotions from the past is the ‘‘key’’ to your happiness in the present, those are good warning signs that you are doing less grieving and more ruminating.

I’m not sure how much your current issues are interfering with your life, but some of us are prone to living our lives as if we are still vulnerable children. The ultimate goal of therapy is to get out of that sense of powerlessness and make the most out of what we have in front of us. Sometimes that necessitates acknowledging how messed up the past was and liberating ourselves from the responsibility of bad things that happened… but other times it just makes you feel worse.

9

I think it’s hard to predict what you’ll find useful. But I did many years of therapy including some very intensive and emotional work, and I think it was very helpful. It also helped me that I grew older. My best understanding is that both were important.

I had a sexual relationship with one of my parents, who talked the other one through (not “out of”) committing suicide (and trying to take me along). I left home at 16 and have been completely estranged from every one of my relatives for decades.

I spent a total of 23 years in therapy. At its most intense I was in private sessions with two different therapists who were working together, as well as a weekly group, as well as an “intensive physical” group that met for 4 hours once a month. During this time, therapy was the primary focus of my life.

After all this, its been years since I’ve been “in crisis”, and I am fairly happy with the way I’m moving through life. There are certainly things I am unhappy about, but not desperately so - which is very different from my younger adulthood.

Somebody once told me that adults who were sexually abused as children typically need hundreds of hours of crying to work through it. This sounds plausible, I guess, but it also sounds tremendously difficult to really test accurately, even for a single case. And since therapy can take many years, it’s not so easy to separate one’s changes through therapy from whatever changes one would have had just by aging.

So, I think that heavily emotional therapy, crying or screaming your eyes out, is probably useful for many of us, and I also think you can try it for a while and figure out if it is helpful, or neutral, or hurtful, or so helpful you want to pretend it isn’t. I’d say, try it for a while, and give it enough time to make an accurate judgement that is truly for yourself.

10

I’ve done a lot with crying over a rotten childhood. Part was in counseling and part was in a group. There were times when the memories were overwhelming and all I could do was cry. I think it’s been very helpful in releasing a lot of the pain which I had carried around.

As Olives points out, there is a balance between reliving pain usefully and detrimentally. One of my aunts has relived her childhood traumas for almost 70 years now, with no end is sight. I also know people who don’t deal with their issues and continue to never change, so that isn’t a good idea either.

I had a therapist who wasn’t much use. One of my friends has coincidently gone to the same one before we knew each other, and our joke was that we could get the same result by talking to a wall, pouring a diet coke down the drain (the drink of choice for our counselor) and burn a $100. Telling amusing stories about mothers is great for drinks with friends, but if it’s not helping you get over depression, then changing was an excellent choice.

CBT has been really good for me. I had gotten out a lot of the painful memories before, so it was learning how to deal with the depression and anxiety.

The crying part of therapy was useful in that it was a safe place to feel the feelings again, but understand from an adult’s perspective that the situation was crazy, and that I couldn’t have done anything different as a child. Things get internalized as children, and sometimes it takes looking at them in order to release them.

I also held my baby son as he died, and there is a difference between issues from a childhood and a current traumatic event.

If you feel comfortable, try the therapist for a while and see if it starts to work.

11

I’ve had, um, a lot of therapy.

In my experience, the ‘dredging up the past emotions’ stuff is not so much to dissect or analyse the emotions as to re-experience them under controlled conditions, so that one can react to them again with support and adult knowledge.

Of course, for me there was a lot of other stuff, like learning to withstand the intensity of emotions, learning about body language and ‘words do not always mean what they say’, and even learning that argument did not necessarily mean that the other person was out to destroy you. Which ranks as one of the three most unexpected things I’ve ever learned.

But re-experiencing emotions and being supported during them and being coached to react differently was the key.

For example, during my whole life, I’ve been terrified of argument, to the point where I’d never had a one-to-one adult relationship with a woman. (That’s not the only reason, of course.) I had joined a group for therapy. One summer, I got into an intense argumentative relationship with one of the other group members. In the group, I had support and help (and so did she), and we were both able to get through it, to learn. It was one of the most excruciatingly-painful things I have ever gone through. But I survived. And even knowing I could survive something like that was important.

12

I’m of two minds, and I see that reflected in the responses to this thread.

First, there are major, singular traumatic events - the death of a child or other loved one that are overwhelming, yet do not necessarily include complications of betrayal, abuse, or other confounding factor. There are many people who are better off letting these events drift off and disappear into their psyches, not dredging them up and reprocessing them over and over again in order to “come to terms” with them. I remember reading an article about a study done where torture survivors in Africa were offered standard talk therapy to help them cope with their memories, and those who went through the talk therapy had a higher incidence of suicide and a higher incidence of unhappiness than those who did not go through talk therapy.

However, there are certain issues that seem to come up again and again and again and can’t be put to rest with our normal thought processes and rationalizations. In those circumstances, I think talk therapy, especially Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, can be of great help. A properly trained therapist can walk you through the process of putting those experiences into context, understanding the dynamics of why the event happened, and connect you to the emotions of the event in a way that allows you to work your way through them instead of being caught in them.

I’ve been in therapy. I’ve seen two different therapists who’ve been of enormous help to me, and the greatest amount of good came from going through those painful, haunting memories and finding a way to tie them off and let them go. I would say, discuss your thoughts with your therapist, and give yourself permission to be vulnerable, weak, griefstricken, or whatever else your psyche needs to move through these events and come out on the other side.

13

Another (somewhat delayed) response:

You should bring up this issue with your new counselor. Tell her that the experience was new and difficult for you, and how it is different from your previous counselor. And ask her the questions you asked us.

It’s OK to question your therapist about their techniques and to express uncertainty about them. They will (if they’re good) explain why they feel it’s a net positive for you, and knowing that you have problems with the way things went in the first session might try to ease back a little so you aren’t overwhelmed too much.

14

I want to thank everyone for their posts, and especially kaiwik for her e-mail. I have started with the new therapist. So far, I’ve had two sessions and used up half a box of her Kleenex. :slight_smile:

15

In my experience, this is about as effective as a shot of whiskey. You feel better for a short time, until the endorphins produced by emotional release wear off, then your demons return as if nothing happened. I did two and a half years of weekly talk therapy sessions that involved much sobbing, and finally realized I was wasting my money. It works for a small percentage of people, but long term, the efficacy sucks for most people.