Therapy
My knees bounced uncontrollably and my muscles were cramping from how hard I was flexing them to keep my body still. Anxiety makes me shake.
Across the room, on the couch (I sat in a small chair in the corner of the room, a very interesting metaphor for our relationship at the time), sat my father. He was probably also anxious, but if he was, it didn't show as visibly as I felt. After all, we were seeing his therapist.
It had been his idea. Our relational conflict peaked in November, after I had spent months reading all my pamphlets on emotional abuse that my piano teacher had smuggled to me in our lessons and stashed them like contraband in the corner of my closet bookshelf. I was 17. I was furious. And when I finally stood up for myself, I did not mince words.
That January, he asked me if I'd be willing to see his therapist with him every other week. I said yes.
His therapist at the time—we’ll call her Janet—readjusted her old-lady spectacles that perched recklessly on the very tip of her nose as she looked down at the notes on her unlined paper. (Who would ever want to take notes on unlined paper, I wondered.) Her voice was firm and a little intense, but not unkind.
She was very good at handling my dad. She had a low-tolerance level for bullshit, but I think he grudgingly respected that. She knew how to ground him or shut him down as was appropriate, depending on the moment. She was a little younger than my grandmother, with coppery-orange hair and silver roots.
I spent the rest of that year in her office once a week. Every other week was with my dad, but the off weeks were just me, talking about my relationship with my parents in depth with an adult for the very first time. There's only one thing she told me that I still vividly remember: that feelings are not facts, but simply signals for us to understand that there is more going on with us than what we see at the surface. I still come back to this sometimes, when I feel foggy and overwhelmed, feeling my way through the fog to firm ground.
I left for college. I didn't go to therapy for a little while. I tried once, but in my intake session the therapist declared that she didn't think there was "anything wrong" with me and refused to follow up. The counseling center at my undergrad university had a waiting list about a semester long, and I wasn’t interested in forcing my way in.
I don’t remember what realization made me try again 2 years later. If I’m honest, I think it was mostly because I was lonely. I had very few significant sources of emotional support in my life, and I needed someone who I trusted to talk about my feelings with—especially since I felt so much guilt about my own exhaustion and resentment.
Someone—I don’t remember who—recommended my next therapist, Pat. Pat was the opposite of Janet in a lot of ways—his face exuded kindness and sadness all at once (he would later be the one to teach me that these things often go together, and when they are together we usually call them “compassion”). He never spoke authoritatively, except to be gently firm with me when I was harsh to myself or others. A lot of our time together was him waiting patiently and quietly, looking at me with those earnest, compassionate eyes. He was the first person I’d ever seen cry for me when I couldn’t. It was in his office that I first learned about The Drama of the Gifted Child, that I first peeled back the anger and fear I’d been feeling long before that very first therapy visit with Janet, and it was in his office that I first found the ocean of my own grief.
Logan and I also went to see Pat together during that time, and those months with Pat have utterly transformed the way we talk with one another ever since. I feel a great deal of gratitude to Pat for the time we spent in his office, laying ourselves bare together.
When I left Pat’s office the week before my graduation, I didn’t walk back into a therapy office until the fall semester of year 2 of grad school. It was September. I was anxious and exhausted, burned out from the gender discrimination I was experiencing weekly in my workplace. In my input session with the social worker in our university’s counseling session, she suggested “group therapy”. This was unappealing to me (mostly for all the reasons one should go to group therapy, although I was unaware of that at the time), but a dear friend of mine had been in group therapy and enjoyed it, so I decided to give it a try.
There were 2 therapists and only 3 students who attended the group. A few weeks into the group it became clear that one of the therapists—Randall—and I were kindred spirits. The other students who were in the group eventually stopped coming, but in the group’s place I met with Randall, and we talked about sexism, racism, mental health, marriage, family relationships (my mom is a therapist, and Randall thought a lot about how his occupation affected his daughter), mentorship, and community building. He helped me find my footing with my academic advisor. He was soft like Pat, but with a piercing clarity that I admired. He made several pointed observations about me that I still think about from time to time, over a year later.
Late November of 2018, Randall sat in his chair facing me. I scanned his office, which was part of my routine—art everywhere. The man loves beauty. He studied me for a moment before speaking.
“You can always come back if you’d like, but I don’t think you need to.”
It didn’t come as a surprise. It had been on my mind too.
“Are you sure?” I asked with a laugh.
He smiled gently. Then Randall spoke the words I’m still thinking about a year later:
“You have all the tools you need to be present to your life at this moment.”
My eyes and heart swelled with gratitude. I never, ever thought I would hear those words, because to me they held a secondary meaning: you are ready.
I happy-cried so hard the whole way home that I couldn’t tell what was rain on my windshield and what were tears on my glasses. I was ready. For my life, unfolding before me. A day I never thought I would see.
I know I will go to therapy again. Growth and healing are not linear. But I treasure the gifts my therapists have given me, and to know that they believed I was prepared for the life in front of me is a truth I cling to. I hope I can honor their legacies in my own way.