Therapy was like finding a key for a door that had been locked my whole life. Here are the nine things it’s taught me
It hasn’t taken a crisis for me to seek help. I’m doing so because I feel stuck: at work, in life, and certainly in love. I feel there is a braver, happier, more fulfilled person inside me trying to get out, but I don’t know how to reach her. I am existing with a low-level frustration, without being able to pinpoint what I am frustrated with, let alone find the tools to address it.
I want to change. In fact, I want to be a different person altogether. I am like an old house whose electrics keep shorting in the same place, and I want someone to rewire me. I have a very strong sense that unless I do something, I’ll be stuck here for ever. So here I am, sweating on a doorstep, asking for help. I am about to learn a huge amount.As I sit down for my first session, I notice a box of tissues on a table within arm’s reach. I get through a lot of them that afternoon.
But therapeutic tears feel different from normal-life tears. They often appear out of the blue. They are real, but they are confined to the session, leaving me feeling a little shellshocked afterwards: “Where didcome from?” I think. When I sob about something, my therapist is sympathetic, but instead of comforting me, she is detached enough to be curious about my tears, what they reveal. They are like a truth-seeking missile, a direct line to what really matters.
Meanwhile, in the real world, life starts to get a little easier. One day, I ask for something at work that, almost overnight, makes my job more interesting and rewarding. This real-world application of my therapy makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. An example: I wonder regularly why I have often been unsure how I feel about things. It’s frustrating: feelings should be instinctual, clearcut – yet I have always struggled to articulate and trust mine. We realise they weren’t discussed, taken seriously or explored, growing up. It’s hard work challenging this deeply held belief.was right, they fuck you up. So every frustration at my behaviour, every flaw in my character, every life skill I feel I lack, I lay the blame at my parents’ door.
But my therapist rarely asks that question, mostly because it is implicit in everything we talk about. Instead, she regularly asks a more powerful one: “What’s that good for?”
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