Therapy

Since May is mental health awareness month, I thought I would talk a little bit this week about my experience with therapy:

I started therapy in June of 2019. I had a very specific goal in mind, which was to talk with someone so they could help me figure out the best way to communicate to my husband that I was gay. I figured that I could also use that person to help me work through the logistics of what I knew would come in my life after that; unwinding something that we had taken 18 years to build. I had very little interest in exploring anything outside of the logistics of ending my marriage.

There was a big part of me that was very hesitant to start therapy. I knew there were a lot of things I should address, but I didn’t want to because I knew it would be painful and hard. I started going with a task in mind and had no intention of really digging into my emotions or motives for things. Therapy is all about trust and vulnerability and I don’t like to be vulnerable. I have always viewed the word vulnerable as a synonym for weak. I know now that vulnerability is strength but that feeling of weakness still lingers.

I liked my therapist from the start. I felt a connection with her, but it took me a long time to feel comfortable opening up. She is kind, encouraging and supportive. I tell her all the time that I think she is too nice to me and she tells me it is because I am not nice to myself so someone has to be. I keep trying to get her to feed the negative voice in my head, but she never does. I tried (and still try) to keep any discussions focused firmly on the present, talking about people, places and things in the now. She challenges me to go back, and on this I resist HARD. I get physically uncomfortable when she asks me to go back to my childhood, which lets me know that is exactly the place I need to go. She is patient and we both know I will go there eventually.

The biggest thing therapy has helped me with is to retrain my brain on how I look at things. I am more mindful (not always) in how I look at things and have a much better understanding now of why I do some of the things that I do. I still struggle to have hard emotional conversations, to dive deep into how I am feeling, but I push through now when before I would totally shut down and walk away with no intent of revisiting. When I walk away now, it’s never for long, and I always come back.

I am at a point now where I firmly believe that everyone could benefit from therapy. Having someone to talk to that can be objective and really knows how to listen vs. just waiting their turn to talk is a wonderful thing. Therapy is hard work. It can be painful and is frustrating at times, especially for me. I am a very impatient person and therapy takes time to yield results. I have been at this for almost 2 years and I am just now starting to fully appreciate how much therapy has changed me for the better. I have done a lot of good hard work and have a lot left to do so I don’t plan on ending my therapy journey any time soon.