Literally right before the onslaught of COVID-19 I added therapy sessions into my self-care routine.
It was certainly a long-time coming, and I had reached a point where I was on the point of implosion. How do I know? Over less than 3 years I’d had at least 4 different friends & family tell me I needed to talk to a professional. I started to feel disinterested in things I’d loved for my whole life. Then I had to pull over on the side of a 5 lane highway because I was having a panic attack, and during an injury prevention clinic the PTs recommended I go see a cardiologist because my blood pressure was concerningly high.
I have struggled with anxiety for years. Normal 4th graders don’t go to see a therapist because they worry a bit too much. My anxiety manifested as biting my nails, feeling panicked in airports, instant stress when I had to make a phone call and unnecessary worry when I had to go somewhere I’d never been before.
My anxiety felt like it touched practically all aspects of my life. Sometimes it was loud like a siren going off in my head and my chest, making me feel too warm, shake too much and feel hyper-focused but also distracted. Other times my anxiety felt more like the muffled ring of a cell phone that’s lost in the couch cushions – you know it’s there but you can barely hear it, and trying to locate it is a nightmare.
Certainly these anxious feelings posed obstacles and frustrations, and exacerbated little daily problems someone else could probably take in stride. But feeling this sort of general anxiety, practically every day, became the norm and I usually found ways to work around it.
Therapy wasn’t something foreign to me, nor something I felt negatively about. I had plenty of friends who were open about their mental health, and how talking to their therapists made a world of difference. Plus, I’d always encourage other people to go when they mentioned seeing a professional.
Yet somehow, when it came to me I had a laundry list of reasons why I shouldn’t go to therapy – why I didn’t deserve it.
Plenty of my reasons were flat out dumb. Others were really just an indication that I had problems I *actually* needed to address.
Here are a few of my reasons, and the rebuttals I now have:
- I was managing just fine…
- Um, no you pulled over on the shoulder of the highway because you couldn’t feel your arms or legs anymore.
- I didn’t have time…
- You’re a seasoned veteran of the Scheduling Olympics – try again
- I didn’t deserve to go – nothing really bad had happened…
- You don’t have to experience a capital T – trauma to go to therapy. You can experience little traumas, or be in close proximity to a traumatic event or circumstance and need to go to therapy. Or, you could have no trauma and still go to therapy.
- I didn’t want to dig up everything I’d buried, pushing everything down was working just fine…
- Stop joking about suppressing traumatic events or experiences. It’s not cute, or helpful.
My road to finding my way into a counseling session was long, crooked and had a lot of pot holes and rough pavement (picture Georgia 400 around exit 2). Part of the reason was my denial, my backwards rationale, and the knowledge that therapy was not going to be easy. I was going to have to talk about things that I had purposefully avoided, or poked fun at so that I wouldn’t have to bear the actual weight of their significance. I had also tried therapy before after a particularly rough middle school experience. I hated it. I wasted my parents’ money by sitting in the office tight lipped and brooding. (But I’m cutting myself some slack on that one because that was also about the time Twilight came out so basically the angst was fashionable.)
This time though, I decided to go all in. Why do anything halfway?
After about 6 months of weekly therapy, I’ve already gone through a lot of material – thanks Covid. And I also know that I have plenty more to go through – situations to come that I will need to work through, and experiences from the past that I will need to unearth.
Because of the work I’ve done, I have many more tools to help me get through my anxieties and insecurities. I’m by no means “fixed” but that wasn’t really the point. Think of it like downloading a new software update onto your phone or computer. The update doesn’t always change the whole layout of the device. Sometimes it’s just to fix some bugs in the system that were missed the first time, or just weren’t applicable to current needs.
“Self-Care” has been the theme of…like the past 3 years. In advertisements and lots of social media posts it looks like bubble baths, pieces of cake, reading a book, posting a selfie…whatever. And I will openly admit that all of those things are a part of my “self-care kit”. But I’ve also added therapy. It’s a designated 50 minutes out of my week where I get to talk about what’s going on in my life. And not like in a superficial way. Like the kind of way where I can log on and say “I feel like sh!t and I’m really struggling”. Or “honestly this week has had these really great high points and I also feel really good about how I handled the low points”.
It’s 50 minutes that I have to take for myself – no distractions, no multi-tasking. A lovely, wonderful, selfish 50 minutes to talk about myself, what I’m living through, what I’m feeling, what I need help with and more.
I deserve it.
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