Apparently, I Beat Therapy
A perfectly normal and well-adjusted idea that is actually achievable and not at all ridiculous.
“It seems like you’re doing really well.”
That’s what my therapist told me last Tuesday at about minute thirty-eight of our forty-five minute session. I’ve been seeing him once per week for almost two years now. He is what one calls a “trauma informed” therapist. Which just means that he knows how to work with people who actively sabotage themselves because they are responding to—you know— uh, trauma.
I’m 33 years old (at least for the next 6 weeks or so.) I started seeing my first therapist when I was sixteen. Therapy was an on and off thing, mostly on. I’ve learned that it’s better to have a working relationship with a therapist established, even when I’m doing well. As I say to people who I talk about it with: I’d rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
I want to tell you the truth of it. I’ve always been a bit of a wreck. My dad wasn’t around, which gives me a pervasive urge to try and win people over who don’t like me, as if I can somehow prove to myself that yes, I can make people love me. (Wow, what a normal and reasonable thing for one to expect themselves to be able to do.)
I have sabotaged about a half-dozen friendships by being too worried about losing those friendships. In turn, creating a self fulfilling prophecy in which (you guessed it) I lose the friendships.
I have been the horrible girlfriend who creates emotional havoc while her partner is trying to make things happen with his band to the point where a “no boyfriends or girlfriends at band practice” rule had to be instated.*
I’ve been the ex that calls 30+ times.**
I’ve been the one who fawns and gives in instead of standing up for herself, allowing people to steamroll right over my boundaries in the process.
I have been so many things, but I have never been “doing really well.”
It feels really strange to go down to only seeing my therapist twice a month. It feels strange to look back at the me of two years ago and not really recognize her. My therapist works with measurable goals, though, and I’ve met all of mine. My chronic depression and anxiety seems to be in a state of remission, with no real signs of depressive episodes or severe anxiety except for things that are situational. (Meaning that they have to do with temporary and solvable problems.)
And the weird thing is, I’ve been trying to look for dysfunction and chaos within myself.
I think I have this fear that if I allow myself to accept that I have grown and I have healed and that I have very real and effective coping skills that I didn’t have two years ago, something will sneak up and bite me like a rattle snake in tall grass. And that venom will be too potent, and it will cauterize me from the inside out.
It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the other shoe is actually a catastrophically devastating atomic bomb. Or at least it should be, shouldn’t it? It always has been before.
It’s so very strange to become emotionally competent after thirty-ish years of feeling so very fragile. There was a time where the thought of a friend even potentially being mad at me was enough to send me into a spiral of catastrophic thinking that was so severe, I couldn’t get out of bed. And now? I don’t know. I can’t really fathom it.
Maybe it’s alright to acknowledge that I did this work. Maybe it’s alright to allow myself the chance to sit and breathe, maybe even bask in the results of the work I’ve done.
And maybe it’s okay if that rattle snake jumps out and bites me.
Cause I already stocked up on anti-venom.