Put in the work right…easily said

Has anyone else had therapy with someone who just isn’t working for you?

How do I know if I should seek therapy? How do I know if I am actually mentally ill or if my brain is just playing tricks on me? How do I know if I’m only experiencing normal day to day anxiety or if I actually have a disorder? Do I see a therapist or a psychiatrist? Aren’t the two different somehow? How do I know what kind of help to look for? I know how I feel but I do not know how to say it with words. What could a therapist/psychiatrist possibly do for me if I can’t even tell them what I am feeling? I want to try but I am so afraid of failure.

Hi, this is my first time posting here, though I have been looking at the app for support for a while already. I have pretty bad social anxiety which unfortunately extends to even being in forums online as well, so I have been putting off sharing on here. I am in my early 40s and have struggled with OCD in various forms since I was a child. In my mid-teens it exploded into very tormenting Pure O. It is complicated by some comorbidity with other diagnoses — social and generalized anxiety, depression, and CPTSD. The sad thing is that I’ve actually experienced so much harm over the years at the hands of uneducated mental health professionals who didn’t have a clue about OCD or how to work with it, and i feel like I carry this extra burden of shame and trauma from those bad experiences on top of the grueling daily struggle I have with my mental health diagnoses. I am set up to have an initial consultation appointment soon with a therapist who is a psychologist in private practice. They seem kind and very knowledgeable, and so I am very hopeful that we will be a good fit for working together. But I am still haunted by those past bad experiences, and so the whole process of starting with someone new is nerve wracking. Has anyone else had bad experiences with therapists who didn’t understand OCD or who had only a superficial understanding of it? Thanks for reading!