If you're relatively new around here, you might want to read my thoughts on starting therapy.
I’ve just had my therap-versary. Is that a thing? I’m trying to say I’ve just passed the one year mark of starting therapy. I should have started years ago. I knew that then and I know that now. But better late than never, and I’m a better person than I was last spring.
By the time I finally called in a professional, I was pretty far down the road of “broken.” I thought I needed some help with some really specific things. Not that I didn’t understand that there were layers to be discovered, but mostly I thought I had a grasp on naming my issues.
Last spring I was having panic attacks in my sleep, waking with my heart racing and my throat closed, and I was unable to calm down from them for hours. Then I’d go through a hangover of sorts, a mix of vulnerability depletion and and sleep deprivation. The fact that the attacks were seizing me in my slumber is testament to how good I’d gotten at squashing all feelings while I was awake.
My parents and siblings, the family I grew up with, we are physically affectionate and verbally loving. We are all very genuine at showing the good emotions: love, happiness, admiration. We are not so good at showing the hard ones: sadness, fear, and loss. It comes from a good place, I think, that our unspoken motto is “chin up!” The immense gratitude we feel for the good parts of life far outweighs the difficult things, so why bring those up? But after a lifetime of squashing any emotions that weren’t positive combined with a genetic predisposition for extreme anxiety, I finally tumbled over the edge.
So I started therapy armed with my own self-awareness. Years of journaling and reflection. That all fell like a house of cards about two sessions in. Cliche childhood issues, I didn’t have ‘em...I thought. Relationships come and go, I didn’t carry those scars...I thought. My first year of therapy has been full of self-revelation and not the shining bright kind.
What I’m working on right now is just feeling what I’m actually feeling. Stopping - a lot, I have to consciously stop and do this a lot - and asking myself what is happening in my heart right now. Letting myself feel the crash of devastation in Haiti instead of building a wall. Allowing myself to admit that I actually don’t like a person instead of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Acknowledging issues instead of eyes straight ahead, moving on.
Is everyone else walking around feeling all the time? How are you doing this?! It’s exhausting. I cry easily before I shut it off. I can only make it through about an hour of all the feeling until I have to get back to what’s familiar to me: I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine.
Even the therapy itself can make me feel very self-indulgent, very aware of my first-world-ness. I think of the women that went before me, plowing the fields with their latest baby strapped to their backs. I think of my female sisters in many parts of the world worried where their next meal is coming from. Nevermind my inner peace. Nevermind my weekly insecurity evaluation.
But there’s no denying that my therapist and the work I’ve done with her has tilted my perspective for the better, no doubt that it’s made me a better wife and mother, every session inching towards being more true to myself. So I stick with it and hope that making myself more whole will have a ripple effect, and is therefore worth it.
The work has been harder than I anticipated. It’s been surprising, the whole year. And only now, just now, do I feel like we’ve scratched through the three feet of surface crap to the core. Seeing that core, like a round ball of concrete, the ugly and the beautiful, is freeing. At nearly 35, I’m finally approaching more of who I want to be and letting go of all the rest.
*photo by Ryan via flickr
