“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
― Fred Rogers

Five months ago, in October, I began regular therapy sessions in the hope of working out some traumatic thinking. Although I wasn’t regularly feeling the sadness of classic grief, I found my brain couldn’t focus well, all my thoughts seemed to have equal importance, it was as if my thinking was fractured. It was causing problems because I felt stuck in moving forward. It was as if everything had changed in the world and I was struggling to trust myself in it. But actually, I knew it was me that had changed, and my understanding of the world had changed. It was hard to see any big picture clearly with such splintered lenses.  I felt overwhelmed and dizzy in my spinning, kaleidoscopic view.

Of course it turned out that it wasn’t just trauma that had messed with my head. In some ways, all that trauma really did was shake up the roots in the garden for a prolonged period of time. When my therapist gently suggested some of my doom-y thinking might have been there for longer, my heart sunk.

“Ugh!” I remember putting my head in my hands. I could only see a too-familiar long, deep tunnel.

“What do you think of that?” she asked.

“I think this is going to end up being veeeerrrry expensive.” That’s all I could come up with.

“My job is to get myself out a job,” she replied. “Do you trust me in this process?”

What else could I do? I was already weeks in, more regularly feeling peaceful than I had in a long time. I could see it was worth it so far, and she was great, the best therapist I’d ever seen (she recommended poetry to me as homework, for goodness sake!) but it did seem like I could potentially be sitting on that couch for years to come—crying, free-associating, trusting forever. I’ve done a lot of counseling in the past, so I know this from experience. It’s about the journey more than the destination. And for complicated, sensitive types like myself, well…we are the ideal sustainable clients. A psychotherapist’s dream! 🙂

Anyway, in light of all this, with a little satisfied self-back-patting, I am proud to announce that last Wednesday, I told my therapist I was ready to stop our sessions for now. There has been a sense of change lately, a jolt of momentum, transformation perhaps, as if I’ve been in the shadows for a season—but it’s time to practice what I’ve learned, time to leave the brain-spa of my sessions. More a sense that it was time, really, than any real mental health I’ve been able to prove in the world. I don’t get a certificate or even a sticker. At least when you vote, you can go to the grocery store afterwards and proudly show off the sticker on your lapel (so totally worth it too!)

I suppose now I can rephrase why I went in the first place and also why I knew I was ready to stop: I felt I’d lost my intuition, which has served me so well in the past. And now I think I have it back, a little battered and taped together, but I’m ready to trust it again. And if I can’t trust it, I have lots of new tools to help me if I break down by the side of the road. Basically therapy is like auto-shop for the soul. You can keep a classic old car going for a long time if you know how to maintain it. Fixing the weakest points is inevitable, but as you go, sometimes engines simply fall out and tires explode on the freeway. I wish they’d told us this was all part of the human experience. But would we have listened if we hadn’t got there yet?

I was surprised and delighted at my confidence in saying I was ready to stop.  Maybe that’s all she needed to hear to agree with me: that voice. (It’s not like I can’t go back—and I probably will for tune-ups.) So in our final session, here are some things we discussed, and these are some of the ideas I’ve marinated over the past five months.

I was enlightened to the idea of personal constructs, which I came to think of as temporary housing (sometimes distinct vows to myself and sometimes concocted ideas) built on a beach, perhaps on bamboo stilts to stay dry above the waves, from the battered and eroding shore…these are constructions to which I’d return for shelter but I found that most of them no longer worked the way they had, I was being flooded out as they had splintered and shrunk during the storm. Returning to them was futile, suffocating…they were limiting more than sheltering. It’s a humbling process to find that the ideas you’ve claimed as an anchor from discomfort are often just meant to be temporary. If those are temporary, what else is? These aren’t easy questions to ask or answers to listen for. (For example: “I’ll never love again.”  Or “The other shoe will drop any second.” Or “It’s pointless to hope for lasting good things…I know better now.”)

My therapist was very much into the idea of untangling our narratives, which I hope to continue to put into practice. It takes a lot of imagination to look at the things we have looked at so long in a certain light that we just assume to be the TRUTH. But it takes even more valuable energy to hold on to our old constructs and the no-longer-helpful thinking that we’ve carried with us. Our minds are so brilliant, aren’t they? They get the better our peace all the time. We held a mirror up to the fact that I do tend to make my life harder than necessary because I lean toward thinking that is the right way, the best way.

As we summarized our time together into that last session, here is something she said that stuck with me: “You are going to get to where you are going no matter what. You don’t need to worry about controlling that. But what you can control is your emotional reactions along the way.  You can stress over it or you can relax into it. It’s all about getting a little distance and reworking your words and ideas around things. There are other ways to look at these things. They don’t need to be gloom and doom. Just because its your experience once doesn’t mean it has to be that way again. Can we switch the word “end” to “and”…think of your endings as ‘and-ings.’” As a trauma survivor, that totally flips the script. And I love it. 

(I told you she was great.)

Here is a poem she sent me as homework early on in our sessions. Poetry is a gift in my language, never to be taken lightly. She suggested I rest with it a bit.

Here are a couple of passages that I discovered  as I entered the new year. I think they match the season of internal work. The top and the last especially spoke to me, I still think on them often.

You can see some of that influence in this poem I wrote after a quick prompt in my monthly writing group.  Love in all its forms is powerful…maybe most, when it comes from within.