It’s a big commitment.
Money, time and emotional work.
Why make patios hard if you’re not going to get anything out of it?
With the right therapist, you can feel safe to bring out your most vulnerable parts, to explore those parts of yourself that might be hidden or repressed. With integration as the goal, psychotherapy allows us to discover and reintegrate those lost parts and become more fully ourselves.
Committing to the process of psychotherapy can be financially and emotionally challenging, but without full commitment, you will never be able to do the hard work of changing your own life.
Having gone through the process myself, I can say that it was, and has been, life changing.
It has been a journey that has been sometimes challenging, often infuriating, sometimes terrifying, often enlightening, always engaging and sometimes surprising, and most importantly to me, deeply creative.
It has been the only space where I was able to fully and safely explore my inner worlds.
I returned to Melbourne with my tail between my legacy after finishing a rewarding and well-paying interstate role. Luckily I had savings behind me. For a while I was in the rut of applying for positions, being flown across Australia for interviews, only to find the position assigned to someone less qualified/more aligned/more successful in raising research funding or being given it. he had arranged to stay a long time. enough to convince the hierarchy that they should be rewarded with a continuing appointment. It was humiliating and exhausting. Every position I applied for had at least 80-100 applicants. I was tired and fed up. It was enough.
He had always had an interest in helping young people. I had enjoyed mentoring outstanding students as part of my role at the University and was slowly fanning the flames of my interest in therapy and counseling.
I started getting counseling myself and although my counselor was excellent we were getting nowhere. He agreed that it was time to move on and recommended that I see a therapist he had met during his ACT training. Sally (as we will call her) had just completed her registration and training in psychiatry, she was working psychodynamically (my preference) and had a practice nearby.
I had an image in my head of the perfect therapist for me: someone warm and confused like Judd Hirsch in Everyday People or perhaps a wise and witty German like the diminutive septagenarian Dr. Fried in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I envisioned someone weathered, perhaps a little overweight, with bushy eyebrows and gray hair, dispensing life advice and witticisms from a swivel office chair. She is definitely not a tall, young blonde with an incisive gaze and cold blue eyes.
I was probably taken aback by her attractiveness, but I stayed and told her my story as she listened intently, keeping her assessments to herself.
And so began my journey in psychotherapy.
Those first few sessions were tough.
I wasn’t receiving therapy, but I was describing my pain and in many of those early moments, reliving it.
After this initial period of evaluation, she indicated that there was something to work on (I always wondered if this carefully worded phrase was part of her commitment to understatement, a quality I’ve learned to value rather than dismiss) and that she and I we could work on it together.
Initially, I was raw about the events of the recent past, but it wasn’t long before we hit one of the many paths that lead back to my childhood.
Psychotherapy has been a mainstay of my emotional life. Somewhere where I have felt safe and nurtured. A place to explore and find myself. A place where all parts of me were welcomed and warmly received, but where I was also challenged and confronted. A relationship in which they listened to me and considered me carefully.
Sally has been in my life for the last 10 years. Every Friday, and for a while, Wednesdays too, I would go to their rooms, enter the code, and wait impatiently in the little chairs in the hallway waiting room, feeling as if my life were hanging out for all to see. trying to avoid the eyes of any other customers.
I’ll miss his rickety coat rack (a public liability suit waiting to happen), the comfy chair I’d sit in for 50 minutes (and sometimes, rarely, a pinch longer), and the psychiatry texts that line the on their shelves. Among those heavy tomes, my eyes were always drawn to a battered copy of Marie Cardinal’s incendiary and poetic memoir The Words to Say It, carved in its own special niche above the fireplace.
I will miss the smell and feel of the room, the lamps and paintings, the sheer texture of the curtains that keep my vulnerabilities and tears out of public view. I notice that I don’t say that I will miss her, maybe because she feels too sad. Although we go to psychotherapy to find ourselves, we do so through a relationship, and our therapist becomes special to us, becoming parents again and honoring our most vulnerable and fragile parts through the perilous journey of self-discovery.
It’s hard to leave.
Sally knows that art is important to me. Without her I don’t think she would have been able to come back to that. And of course, now I’m here testing my wings as a therapist.
When I started therapy it was everywhere. I now feel stable and centered, able to find meaning and give back.
So what has she done for me?
It’s not something for the metrics of randomized controlled trials. Not a simplistic and packaged testimonial.
It’s something for dreams perhaps or poetry, something to contemplate on those days when I’m grateful to be alive.
