My First Day of Therapy

A little mundane housekeeping can lead to a lot of big insights.

Big insights don’t always show up like you think they will. That’s something that came into sharp focus as I finished my first session of therapy. I guess I had an image of a big insight being the sudden realization of new information, or suddenly seeing something in a totally new light. You know, something that kind of turns your world upside down. But it turns out that a big insight can also just be fully recognizing something you already knew or felt to be true. It can be a single sentence that simply validates your personal truth.

I am a self-growth junkie.

Therapy isn’t by any means my first attempt at understanding myself in a deeper fashion. I’m a daily (or almost-daily) journaler. I cultivate mindfulness with meditation, EFT tapping, and movement. I am a chronic overthinker and I practically live in a state of introspection. I’ve long since learned that my thoughts do not dictate my truth and that I have the power to manifest the life experience of my deepest desires. In fact, that’s what led me to finally seek therapy.

I’ve had a long history with depression. Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen, I’ve experienced deep and long-lasting episodes of feeling some combination of heavy, sad, and hopeless. My self-growth journey has helped me make a lot of progress in this. The depressive episodes I experience have become less frequent, and less impacting when they do show up. But still, they show up. And recently, they’ve been showing up in a big way. So I finally decided to get an outside opinion, and I figured a professional therapist was a good place to start. Turns out, I was right. But not just for the reasons I expected.

Talking helps, but…

It’s a refrain we hear over and over again. Talking helps. And that’s true, but there’s a big caveat: talking helps if done in a space of acceptance and non-judgment. And whether or not that space can be achieved is dependent, in large part, on the listener.

I’ve been, for some months now, in a situation that can easily lead to feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. When it first started, I knew I needed to talk about it. I needed to explore what led me to this situation and how to navigate it. It’s not that the situation itself is necessarily bad, but there is a lot of negative social stigma attached to it, and I knew that talking about it would help me discern my own truth and separate it from my social conditioning.

I went to a friend. My best friend, in fact. I thought, if anyone could listen to me without judgment, it would be her. And she thought the same. What neither of us realized, however, was that my situation happened to be a perfect trigger for her unresolved traumas. As soon as I started telling her about it, she became defensive and angry — not at me, necessarily, but at the situation. She started projecting her wounds onto me and my experience. Recognizing what was happening, I closed down the conversation.

Now, I’m self-aware enough to know that my friend’s reaction was not about me and what I was doing but about her own traumas. I was able to leave that interaction without feeling angry or too hurt, but I wasn’t able to leave it without feeling incredibly lonely. After all, if I can’t talk to my best friend about what’s happening, who can I talk to? Who would be able to listen to me without judgment? Who would be able to help me process what I’m going through objectively?

Well, as you may have guessed, that’s where the therapist came in. After months of struggling with this alone, going through severe ups and downs, I finally realized that I had to talk to somebody. And if I couldn’t talk to a friend or a loved one, I figured a therapist would be the way to go. I mean, it’s literally their job to listen without judgment, right? So while my wallet wasn’t thrilled, I figured it would be worth the investment and I pulled the metaphorical trigger.

The expected and the unexpected.

The first session was mostly just housekeeping. We went through some legal paperwork and a risk assessment, and my goals for the therapy, and the rest of the time was pretty much spent with me giving my therapist a thorough background of my experience with depression. She didn’t ask me a lot of questions, mostly because I volunteered a lot of information. (As I said, I’m pretty proactive about these things and I figured the more she knew the more she’d be able to help me.) When we were close to the end of the session, she asked me if I had any questions. I didn’t because, again, I did most of the talking. Then, she said two things that kicked me in the stomach.

The first was very simple, and not even terribly surprising. She had just told me she wanted me to see if, before our next session. I could think of some simple ways I can diffuse my emotions when they feel overwhelming. She said, “I want to ask you more about your family and your relationships, and that might trigger some strong emotions. It seems like you’ve been feeling alone for a long time, and that must be hard.”

So what part of that was what socked me in the jaw?

It seems like you’ve been feeling alone for a long time, and that must be hard.

Yeah, that pretty much nails it. But I wasn’t expecting that truth — something that has sat in me for so long — to be so casually recognized and, what’s more, so casually validated. And partly, that’s because it took me years to recognize it myself, and I’m not sure I ever really validated it. I mean, sure, I’ve felt lonely for a lot of my life. I’ve felt invisible for a lot of my life. I’ve felt ignored, unseen, unvalued. But I’ve also always had amazing people in my life, and I never wanted to be unappreciative of what I had. It only occurs to me now, as I take a hard look at these truths, to realize that the two are not mutually exclusive.

I could feel ignored, unseen, and unvalued, for any number of reasons, and it doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault, including my own. I could have been misunderstood by people around me, even injured by people around me, and it doesn’t necessarily make them bad or wrong. Isn’t that part of the human experience? We all carry with us our baggage, our hurts, our sensitivities, our traumas. Hopefully, we learn to understand these aspects of each other (and ourselves), but that takes time and growth and effort. So there you have lesson number one: the (not so) obvious truth.

The second thing she said that felt like a kick to the face had to do with our treatment goals. I had started the session by telling her that I wanted to find the root of my depression and heal it. It seemed to me like that would be the best way to resolve the issue once and for all. But my therapist had another idea.

“Of course, I’m open to methods that my clients want to try if they think it will help,” she said, “but my preferred style of treatment is to understand your triggers and find coping mechanisms that will help you deal with them. Sometimes the original trauma can be too painful to heal directly, and finding constructive coping mechanisms is more achievable.”

This rocked my world. I mean, sure, we have to address triggers. But the original trauma being to painful to heal? What the hell does that mean? Anything can be healed. Anything can be fixed!

And there it was. My inner perfectionist staring me in the face. Telling me that if I don’t “fix” my underlying trauma, there will always be something wrong with me. And I’ve been processing this ever since. (I know that sounds dramatic — it’s actually been less than a week, but still!)

Is it really okay to simply accept my underlying trauma? Can I really fully heal, fully be whole, if I allow my old wounds to continue to exist? Will dealing with my triggers be enough? Is a part of my never-ending pursuit of self-growth rooted in an underlying need to be perfect?

Then, a few days after my therapy session, a manifestation and life coach I follow said something eerily similar. This time, it was:

“We don’t have to heal the underlying trauma, we just have to rewire the beliefs that are associated with it.”

Hmm… Maybe they’re on to something. Maybe allowing our traumas to heal doesn’t always mean going in and doing surgery, maybe sometimes we just need to leave them alone long enough to scab over and scar so they don’t hurt so bad. After all, what are scars but just another part of our story?

…

I’m not sure what epiphanies may be in store for my next session, but I wonder if they won’t be even more significant. The only real warning I got from my therapist was that it would probably involve a lot of crying…

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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