Emotional Support Sisters

I had to go to therapy¹ while in junior high. It was not exactly something I was particularly thrilled about. And not just because of the anhedonia². *ba dum tss*³ At this point in my life I had been on medication for a few years and my parents had already taught me “How to Live With Depression: 101”. As is pretty common during adolescence, life circumstances arose that threw me for a loop. At the risk of being overly vague (because those circumstances are not the point of this post), I’ll just say that these life circumstances were trivial to an adult but changed how I thought my future would unfold. And I couldn’t cope.

Interestingly, my path to therapy was not as straightforward as one might think. It wasn’t like I went to the ER with a broken arm that needed to be set and put in a cast. I wasn’t having a mental health crisis. I wasn’t incapacitated. It was more like going to the ER because of explosive diarrhea. Diarrhea is pretty miserable, but it is also something that often⁴ works itself out–no doctor visit is necessary. However, if the diarrhea is so bad that you become dangerously dehydrated, then you need medical intervention. I had metaphorically become dehydrated. The diarrhea itself was a struggle–I mean, no one enjoys feeling miserable–but the bigger problem was that it robbed me of the resources necessary to thrive.

Lori Gottlieb quotes John Weakland saying, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”⁵ I was stuck in the “same damn thing over and over” phase and couldn’t manage to move to the “one damn thing after another part of life”. I needed therapy.

But I didn’t want therapy. I wasn’t strongly opposed to it (that would’ve required strong emotions, which I just wasn’t experiencing), I just had some pretty typical bias against therapy. My worldview at the time was such that therapy was for annoyingly maladaptive people. This stemmed from the various media I had consumed in my life and from my observation of a classmate who more than once talked about how they were in therapy. I found this particular individual irritating in ways I still can’t quite articulate. Oddly enough, the whole “going to therapy means I’m broken and that’s bad” stance that seems to be quite common did not play much of a role in my disinterest in therapy. I already knew something in my brain was broken, accepting that fact had been both remarkably easy for me and had helped me understand how I could move forward with my life⁶. 

Eventually, my dad told me something that I have since told others. He quoted his dad, my paternal grandpa (a man I recognized even at that young age as having the kind of mind that seemed to hold vast stores of knowledge–an impression I have yet to be disabused of), who said, “The most intelligent people I know have gone to therapy.” There are a few different ways to interpret that. It could mean that intelligent people know enough to know when they need help. It could mean that therapy leads to being intelligent. It could mean that being highly intelligent tends to lead to needing therapy, playing into the whole “tortured genius” trope. It could mean that intelligent people tend to lead stressful lives. It could mean that being around my grandpa made intelligent people need therapy. Before I could erroneously jump to some of those interpretations, my dad explained that it isn’t uncommon for intelligent people to need therapy, and truly intelligent people know when they need help AND they are willing to actually seek out that help. 

With that understanding, I was willing to try therapy. And it was successful therapy⁷. I don’t recall how long I continued therapy at that time, nor could I say what exactly transpired in individual sessions. The overall outcome was that I didn’t just get help processing that particular set of life circumstances, I was given more tools and skills to use throughout my life. I was also willing to go to therapy again the next time I got stuck doing the same damn thing over and over.

Footnotes

1. Most people understand “therapy” to mean the kind of therapy where you sit down and talk to a psychologist, social worker, or other type of counselor. This is how I use the term therapy. But the pedantic part of my brain keeps telling me that medication is also a type of therapy so I really should be more clear about what I mean. As a compromise between the inner pedant and inner vernacular-ist I am going to create a footnote to clarify my meaning while still using “therapy” in the main body of text.
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2. Anhedonia  is the inability (or reduced ability) to feel pleasure, even when doing/experiencing things that used to be enjoyable. It’s a symptom of depression. ↩︎
3. Did you get my joke? Please laugh. Please think I’m funny. I think I’m funny. But you have probably already figured that out. ↩︎
4. I just want to point out that there are still parts of the world where diarrhea caused by things like cholera is a serious issue. It is a serious issue because of the lack of access to clean drinking water and lack of access to medical care should they become seriously dehydrated. 
   Which actually makes this analogy even more apropos because…I’ll get into that in a different post.
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5. I couldn’t find a source for Weakland actually saying this quote, but I did find a source of Gottlieb saying this quote.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/books/lori-gottlieb-maybe-you-should-talk-to-someone.html ↩︎
6. Please don’t think this is learned helplessness on my part. It isn’t. Knowing what is wrong empowers me to do something about it. Sometimes there is a lot I can do to help myself, sometimes there isn’t much that I can do besides ride it out. In either case, just knowing what is and what isn’t under my control has been an important part of my journey. ↩︎
7. See Gottlieb quote about what “successful therapy” means ↩︎