A Story Full of Hope, Endurance, and Healing

Don’t give up until you feel the blessing of a real therapeutic experience

How to find the right therapist | Image by the author

Written by Anesa Vilić

I hope you’ll forgive me for being personal and emotional, but that’s what the following story deserves.

There is a regular discussion about psychotherapy and therapists — experts whose help we need to overcome mental health problems. Unfortunately, that help often isn’t adequate. Sometimes this is because of the person’s lack of expertise, sometimes because we are coming up with a topic the expert can’t cover, and sometimes we simply don’t click. But it is important not to stop searching for an expert with whom we will feel safe.

I was on that road of searching and that’s why I’m writing this, as a sign of hope for everyone who is in their search, to never stop looking until they meet their Vesna.

But let’s begin the story about my journey.

My story about going to therapy started as early as 2010. Quite naive and without research, I got into a therapeutic relationship that was anything but a true therapeutic relationship (unfortunately, I would realize that years later, after I had got out of that relationship). My private and business relationships intertwined and at the time I didn’t realize it was unethical and wrong, so I gave all my trust to the therapist.

I trusted her absolutely when she said that not talking was my resistance and remained silent from one session to another, in a fight with myself. After many years and too many sessions, I got out of that relationship realizing that in that process, the therapist was trying to heal her frustrations without trying to work on herself.

After her, I met one deeply affected by what the first had done and so she criticized the former. In shock, she kept talking about how terrible that was and how it shouldn’t have happened, that I was safe with her now, and that she’d never leave me. Sadly, she gained my trust.

Educated in four different schools of psychotherapy and highly esteemed in expert circles, she left me just like that in the worst possible moment of processing my deep trauma. Without further talk, no explanation, no recommendation to whom to…