I'm really sorry, CK. That's a load of shit you're dealing with by yourself. I'm impressed you keep yourself going, you have an amazing amount of fortitude. I know you've been struggling with this fog, and things like it, for a long time. I'm glad you have moments where it lifts, even if they themselves are stressful and emotional. It's been nearly a week since you posted and I hope the fog has stayed out of the way in that time.
I am not trying to prescribe or compare or hijack with my own experience. I just recognized some of the places I've been in the past and thought I'd offer a piece of my map, so to speak. Tiny text for personal story time.
Speaking as someone who has personal experience with therapy, therapists, medication, and struggling to accept that anything could be solved by those things, I can definitely say that your experience is individual. General you. I have seen literally dozens of therapists and found 2 that really worked out, both of whom happened to be students with a finite end-point on our therapy relationship. My prescribing doctor is definitely not someone I trust, but he's the one with the prescription pad and it's helped to have the years and years of fighting with and for myself to tell him what I need rather than hope he can figure it out (he can't). That said, I am in group therapy and some of the people there have had success with their first touch in the system. Some are still in asynchronous treatment where both medication and therapy are called for but they're only getting one of them.
I struggled a lot with getting over my entrenched belief that this is just how I am, this is how I deserve to be, this is what it is, there's nothing I can do, even if I did it wouldn't matter. It took me some severe breakdowns to get to a place where I could at least put all those feelings aside and talk to someone. (It didn't work, so I had to do it three more times before it did, but so it goes sometimes.) The group therapy I'm in is rooted in DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, and it's been interesting. I resisted the hell out of it the first couple weeks I went, did it to appease the second therapist I've ever liked because she suggested if I didn't it was a sign to step back from therapy for a while because I wasn't ready to take treatment seriously, but despite the dumb worksheets and infantilizing acronyms it's really a great framework for someone like me, someone who craves a logical approach to the illogical.
I like that it is a meditative approach. The worksheets and the acronyms and the skills with their dumb names are built around principles meant to quiet the mind and allow for an analytical but accepting look at the crisis/stress/emotion/urgency that helps defuse their power and help you redirect your energy. The tools and skills DBT teaches help process those feelings and challenge them for a truth rooted in the universe. It's not the same as a universal truth because DBT holds that there isn't one, that everyone's experience is their own, but that sometimes the truths we tell ourselves are on flimsy foundations that become self-evident and collapse if we ask it directly, "Are you serving me? Is this helping me in the short term or the long term?" There's not so much a bad and good as there is helpful now (even if it's something like self-harm or withdrawal, because punishing ourselves still leads to a kind of helpful reinforcement while also holding on to all the destructive, short-term elements) vs helpful long-term. (n.b., I'm still new to this thing, but this is what I've taken from it so far)
If any part of that sounds like it could be helpful, I'm happy to help find more specific resources. That said, just about every aspect of DBT is available somewhere on the web for free, including variations that address specific diagnoses. DBT was ostensibly created for borderline personality disorder, but it's been really useful across a spectrum of concerns, including depression.
I'm glad you posted something, I'm glad you can at least talk about it with the DL, and I hope you know you always can.
