Why I still go to therapy

If I'm not broken and I don't need fixing, why am I here?

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

I sat down on the couch for my weekly therapy session and felt awkward. What do I say? What do I talk about today? If there is nothing pressing, and if I'm not broken and I don't need fixing, then why am I here?

I can absolutely stop going if I want to and I would be absolutely "fine". Fine in the sense that I could cope well enough with life with the internal and external resources I have. So why am I here? Do I still feel like there is something wrong with me that needs to be dealt with? Not really. Do I have some major on-going problem in my life I need support with? Not so much that either. So what is it?

Am I really okay? Can I really be okay without therapy? And what does it even mean to be okay?

Rewind to a few days ago when I woke up feeling intense shame. I’m not sure why I was feeling bathed in shame but my experience of it was different than previous times. I was separate from it. I could witness the shame instead of become subsumed by it. It was an experience flowing through me and I was aware that it would pass. But as I leaned into the feeling of shame, it showed me its usual cruelty: “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so f***ed up? You’re such a piece of sh*t. You’ll never be good enough.” This cruelty - a vitriol so familiar to me from childhood - was attempting to convince me that my existence is fundamentally not okay.

Fifteen years ago, this would have sent me into a spiral. I would believe the shame and probably try to prove it wrong by “being better”. The shame I experienced led to my workaholic tendencies. Do more and I can hide how bad I am. I was projecting onto the world that I’m seen as a bad person and I need to prove to everyone else that I’m not bad. Countless hours in therapy, support groups, journaling, engaging in self-help reading and workbooks has healed a fair amount of this shame. I generally don’t feel or believe my existence is wrong, so why was this coming up now? Maybe I’ll talk about it in therapy.

But there I was in therapy, not feeling the need to talk about it. Within a day or two of the shame bath, I was back to my generally regulated self. I felt okay. So - why was I at therapy then?

There is something about walking around in the world and appearing on the outside as if nothing happened to me. If you met me on the street, you would easily assume I had whatever standard average experience people have had. But this is 100% not true. Some really awful things happened to me and most people cannot relate to my past experiences, nor how I experience my every day life.

Living in England with an American accent means I interact weekly with people who wonder why I would choose England’s 50 shades of grey over the Bay Area of California, not knowing that I lived with an anxiety of running into my perpetrators. I exist in our world as it is today, so I confront the murder, rape, and abuse of women on front page news. I am only two years into a marriage that I never thought was possible, and as a forty year old survivor who wants to be a mother, the insensitive and patriarchal culture we live in touches a particular nerve for me.

My experiences of trauma still make up a majority of my life experiences. It has shaped my view of the world, the way I have had to live life, and my embodied experience of the world. I also experience ongoing grief for the ambiguous loss of my childhood and parents. Most people don’t get this and I can feel quite lonely in my experiences. And while I engage in and co-create survivor communities, I don’t live my day to day life in these communities.

In about 18 months, I will reach my ‘tipping point’ (thanks, Kate for the term in this context) where the days I have lived in freedom from abuse will finally begin to outnumber the days I lived in captivity and abuse. This means I don’t yet take for granted feeling okay in myself and I marvel regularly at how ordinary my life can be (see last post).

So although I am “okay,” I go to therapy to be seen. To have someone who can understand, or make the effort to understand, just what a big deal it is for me to feel and believe I’m okay.