The part nobody tells you about therapy

For a little over a month now I’ve been seeing a counselor at my university.  I decided to go because so much was going in my life that I was literally having panic attacks every time I tried to sit down in front of my thesis.  I would look at the page and only be able to think about my failures and how I’ve disappointed myself and everyone around me, and then become more frustrated with myself that I couldn’t just snap out of it and get to work. 

After about an hour of yelling at myself for being pathetic I would cry and shut my computer off and write the day off as another wasted, and wallow for another several days while watching Sherlock or Downton Abbey, or something similar where I could escape to London.

This is depression at its best.

I signed up for therapy sessions and thought “This is good! I will feel so much better! I should be back on track in no time!” 

I had to think that.  It’s a romantic view of therapy, to believe that everything is rosy after every session. The idea that you come out of therapy with a smile on your face every week is so far from the truth it’s almost laughable. Here’s the part that nobody tells you about therapy: it fucking sucks. 

Think about the stuff that you don’t tell anyone. Your fears, your desires, your feelings, your doubts, your shame.  All of that gets revealed in therapy.  No, all of that you reveal in therapy.  Sometimes you reveal it all at once, and you have to talk about it. 

Sometimes you get to a point when you think you’ve made progress, and then you start talking about something you are afraid of or ashamed of that you forgot about or didn’t realize before, and then you have to have “therapy recovery days.” 

I had to have some therapy recovery days this week.  I had a good hearty wallow, as Donna Noble described it.  I think after the 4^th day both Rose Tyler and Donna Noble started glancing at their watches wondering when I would get off the couch with my rocky road ice cream and stop watching Downton Abbey (which is a great show, by the way). 

In graduate school, we do this activity where you find your personality by color.  You can be gold, orange, green, or blue.  The biggest war generally happened between the greens and the blues.  Greens are the highly logical sort- typically not very emotional, organized, argumentative.  Blues are relationship oriented, emotional, care about people a lot.  I’m what we call “Grue” – half green half blue.  There is a war in my soul. 

In our office, based on this activity, the greens would always have to say to the blues “stop having feelings and get to work,” and it became a motto for graduate school, in a way.  We don’t have time for feelings in grad school. 

Well, a lot happened in my life this past year and a half, starting with the death of my grandmother, with whom I was particularly close.  She died the week before final exams, and over the summer I had an incredibly intense teaching job, and no break before the next semester.  I took on the motto whole heartedly- I did my best to push the feelings away, for a year and a half.

During this past week’s therapy session, the thesis was decidedly a metaphor for everything graduate school, masking every feeling I pushed aside.  I got in my car, and all at once, felt everything from the past year and a half.  I felt the death of my grandmother, being fired from my job, not graduating on time, breaking up from my 5 year relationship, and a list of other things too. 

I don’t really remember driving home.

All I remember is walking in the door, and when Rose Tyler asked “how was therapy?” I said, “Hard.  Productive.”  I then slept for the next 4 hours.  I don’t think I left the house for the next 3 days, except once to get Wendy’s (which I considered an achievement for the day.) 

I really think if anyone had seen me, they would assume something else had happened in my life- another tragedy added on to the list of shit to deal with.  The truth is, struggling with therapy is like dealing with constant tragedies because it forces you into the shit you don’t deal with. 

Eventually it’s better for you.  I tell myself it’s like exercise- the hurt that’s good for you.  Honestly, I don’t know, it could be crap.  But I do like to think that dealing with your demons makes you wiser.