therapize me

a picture my mom took of me shortly before we went on a hike that these shoes were absolutely not suited for. <3

The first time I went to therapy was five years ago. I had recently left an abusive relationship I’d only recently started to describe as abusive. At the request of friends and loved ones who were helping to sift through my feelings, I made an appointment with a therapist whose office I could walk to. Here is what I remember about her:

She was very kind. She told me I was cured after a month of seeing her and gave me a hug. Whenever I relapsed, a.k.a. saw my ex, I would tell her—something I rarely told anyone at the time. She would always say something akin to, “Well, now you know what that’s like.” I had never expected to be dismissed from therapy so quickly. I thought that relationship and its accompanying effects on my psyche would take years to sort through. In the end, I was right, but I had yet to learn the key to getting more therapy: asking for it.

After that initial run, I didn’t see another therapist for almost two years. The first I met with was a blonde woman who had a beautiful office filled with crystals and trinkets. She asked me about my family while drawing a diagram and then asked me to describe, in so many words, my most haunting trauma. There was no foreplay or bond-formed, and despite that sparkling, spiritual office, I simply wanted to leave and never come back, which I did.

When I met my current therapist, the key quality that led to my return was her gentleness. She didn’t pry or push, in fact, she typically asked if it was okay to talk about something upsetting before we talked about it. At the time, I was realizing that all the ways I’d learned to survive an abusive relationship and all the subsequent anxiety I’d acquired were damaging to both me and the healthy relationship I now found myself in. Eventually we worked through attachment theory, PTSD, IFS, EMDR, shadow work, and plenty more, but in the beginning, her most remarkable strategy was not scaring me away.

The thing I initially struggled with in therapy was looking like a bad student. It doesn’t compute in the way school or work or essay-writing do. You can’t win or be the best. You can’t be graded and you can’t charm your way out of who you are. When I first started, I always wanted to say the right thing so that my therapist would say, “Good job, I am proud of you.” I wanted treats and stars and validation. When I did ugly, unsavory things, I didn’t bring them up to my therapist for fear of her saying, “You are a bad person. You did a bad job.” When you’re good at lying, it can be very tempting to just keep lying about anything and everything forever and ever. The problem arises when you meet people who can tell when you are lying and refuse to tolerate it. The first time I told my therapist about something particularly upsetting that I had done, she did look a little surprised and distraught, but she didn’t yell at me. The second time, she suggested where I might have gotten triggered and explained how it might be helpful to explain those triggers to my partner. By the third time, I felt like I could admit more clearly to her the places where I had been wrong in a situation and as a result, I could admit them more clearly to myself.

After the first year of working with her, a lot of the extremely difficult aspects of my trauma had subsided or become more manageable. I felt more comfortable advocating for what I wanted and needed in my relationship and in my life. I felt more capable of initiating difficult conversations and as a result, more capable of defining and enforcing boundaries. I was less afraid of my partner turning on me, less fearful of the other shoe dropping. My blood pressure went back to normal (I had upsettingly high blood pressure for a while). And beyond that, I felt like an independent, fully-realized person. Therapy had given me a language and a context through which to describe the parts of myself that I was most ashamed of—my rage, my extreme fear of abandonment, my hyper-vigilant pattern observation (often of patterns that weren’t there)—and when I described them to my partner, I found that he was surprised and curious, rather than disgusted and terrified. I often joke with him that my therapist thinks he is the best person in the world, but through bouncing his image off of her brain, I was able to more clearly see what was before me: a kind, compassionate person who was fully capable and perhaps ideally suited to love me unconditionally. Therapy helped me love him better because it allowed me to see him more vividly. It helps me to do the same for myself.

I have now been in therapy for almost three years straight. We’ve sifted through friendships, family issues, and debilitating fears of intimacy. We’ve also talked extensively about the difficulty of getting a puppy. I am not cured. I still get triggered periodically. I still struggle to regulate my emotions and utilize healthy coping mechanisms. I have always loved to work out and have long practiced meditation, but because I continue to be very anxious, I need a lot of strategies in my toolkit for when the obvious ones don’t work. Recently I heard actress, writer, and comedian, Kulap Vilaysack describe learning her limits and inner boundaries on a podcast through “lots of trial and error.” So much of my twenties have felt like “trial and error.” I’ve tried to run away from my feelings and failed. I’ve tried to numb my feelings and failed. I’ve tried to pretend my feelings don’t exist and failed. So now, I have to consciously work to feel my feelings. That sounds wild because they are literally called feelings but I am skilled at oscillating between repression and overwhelm so I must work to find balance.

I wrote this a few months ago about my puppy, Sunny, and it reminds me of the parts of me I’m still figuring out how to love:

Sunny is one year old today. We’ve had him for two and a half months. On Saturday, we took him to my parents’ house for the first time and he ran away horizontally across rows and rows of newly green Ohio grass. He isn’t bad per se, but he is rogue. He has a certain unquenchable energy to him that manifests in all sorts of difficult to maintain ways: raising the red strip of hair on his back and growl-barking at other dogs; tossing his toy squirrel in the air and catching it, only to shake it violently until it squeaks for mercy; chasing Stella across the floors of our house; provoking the other gentler dogs we love into battle; and so on.

When I wrote this, I was exhausted by Sunny’s Sunny-ness. I recognize that feeling because I am sometimes exhausted by my own me-ness or Chloe-ness. Recently in therapy, I wondered aloud if I am sometimes just too much and my therapist reminded me that my feelings are just information from my body. My body is always giving me so much information; I am striving to understand that all my unwieldy feelings might be gifts from other parts of my consciousness—baby me, teenage me, stubborn me, sad me, future me. It may not always feel like a gift, but I know in my heart that being me is a gift. Feeling so much from the world makes me who I am, it is my Chloe-ness, and thus, my responsibility to love.