Maybe not

So I called the Lesbian Therapist Referral Network, to see if there were any therapists who both work with dissociative disorders *and* take my insurance. Nope. They have a grand total of two therapists who take my insurance--I'm seeing one of them, W. is seeing the other.

Then I asked about therapists who take my alternate insurance (the one I pay lots of money for because I'm required to carry it through my university, but which I never use because the deductibles and copays are too high). They have zero therapists that take that.

So I have a couple of options. One is to just sit down and call every therapist in my health plan's list, and find out if any of them deal with dissociative disorders. And the other is to try to make do with a therapist who isn't being very helpful.

Every week for months now, my main topic in therapy sessions has been how I need something different, I need to figure out how to feel less unsafe internally, I need to reduce the chaos, I need to get more balanced. And every week, she's been saying, pretty much, "Oh, this is fine, it's all right to not be getting things done. Somewhere inside, you knew that you could let go, so it's safe to do this now."

She just isn't hearing me when I say that I really need things to change. I get the feeling that she thinks I'm just trying to rush healing... I don't think that's what I'm doing. I just desperately need something to improve. And, really, I don't think that prolonged inability to do things like eat or bathe or clean the house or work at a job is something that will work out.

I've started to suspect that the problem is my therapist doesn't have a ton of experience with dissociation, and so she isn't using the right approach. But I'm not entirely clear on what the right approach is. I've read books about DID, and people definitely got help from their therapists; but as for specific steps to building safety... they mostly seem to rely on having a therapist who can guide you effectively through negotiating those. It's hard not to have that, since I get such a strong sense that I'm going to stay stuck where I am until I can get some help figuring out how to be somewhere different.

I also wonder about whether the problem is that I'm "high functioning," in the sense that I'm mostly not actively suicidal, and I'm not wandering the streets looking crazy. On the surface, people don't look at me and say, "Oh, she's definitely mentally ill." And because I'm not going out and hurting people or drinking or doing drugs or stealing things... then they kind of assume I can take care of myself. And it goes back to that thing of having to be bad in order to get attention. It's like the child abuse trainings for teachers, where what you're trained to look for is the kids who obviously have problems, who are acting out; and they kind of assume that the kids who behave don't have the same kind of problems going on. I never got noticed as a kid, and it sometimes feels like I'm never going to get noticed as an adult, either.