I went to therapy - now what?
We’ve all seen the narrative online; “seek therapy'“, “women aren’t your therapist”, “they need a lot of psychological evaluation”. We’re beginning to normalise seeking professional help, and that’s fantastic and I’m so thankful to live amongst peers who believe in the benefits of seeing a trained professional, but what happens when we take that big step and actually begin therapy?
No one tells you it might take you three years to find the right therapist. That the first psych you see at just 14 years old won’t understand why it’s so difficult to cut ties with friends, that the volunteer at headspace spent 90% of the time putting you on the spot and spent more time listening than helping, and that when you finally find the right psych whom you’ve been seeing for seven years, you’ll still question whether they’re truly the person most fit to handle and process your most inner workings.
No one tells you that you will have to face uncomfortable truths about yourself. That maybe YOU’RE the problem. That you have to unlearn years of unhealthy coping mechanisms, question year long friendships, reevaluate your whole psyche. That your therapist isn’t there just to praise you and make you feel good about yourself, but to critically analyse yourself and the environment you surround yourself in. In her book “Women Don’t Owe You Pretty”, Florence Given says that we are reluctant to believe narratives that challenge your whole identity. This is something I’ve been forced with facing during my time in therapy. That the world I’ve been living in isn’t all that I thought it was, and that there are other perspectives and rhetorics to grow and learn from.
No one tells you that therapy will be an ongoing experience and may last years. That it won’t be one session and you’re cured. That it might take upwards of five years to get to a point where you are content with yourself, and even then there’s still heaps of work to be done. That seven years down the track you’ll be discovering different triggers and have old traumas come to the surface, only adding to the therapy work load and prolong the amount of time you initially thought you would be in therapy.
No one tells you that some days it will require all your physical and emotional strength to get up out of bed and attend your appointment. That your mum will almost always have to forcibly remove you from bed so you’ll go. That you’re willing to cop the late cancellation notice if it meant getting to stay in bed. That sometimes you feel unprepared because you haven’t mentally written out a script of how you’re going to present your trauma. That you begin to second guess yourself; “do I really need therapy?” (The answer is almost always yes).
No one tells you that you may leave each session feeling almost worse than before you came in. That you’ll return to your mum’s car crying and refusing to talk, or even worse, having to tram home with the uncomfortable weight of the session on your shoulders. That your mental illness will be cured after one session, that maybe in some sessions you would have regressed in your trauma rather than progressed. That you feel like you failed some sort of test in mental wellbeing.
Therapy is hard. It takes courage to attend and to keep up the momentum to keep attending. It will be an uncomfortable process, but the only way we grow is through discomfort.