Four months back, I restarted therapy. For months before that, I kept telling myself I could handle it if I just became more disciplined.
Whenever a friend tells me they are considering therapy but “things are not that bad”, I am quick to push back: if your knee hurts every day, would you wait until you can’t walk to get it checked?
That’s the thing about advice: it’s easy to give, harder to follow.
Thankfully, I was able to find a therapist I trust and in our short time so far, it has left me with a lot to think about.
“How are you feeling?”, a question I have always struggled to answer. Every time my therapist asks me, I have to pause for a few minutes because I am blank. Staying inside my head perpetually has made me lose the connection to my body. In those moments, she asks me to observe if I can feel any sensations on my body or share any images that come up.
I would protest again: How do I know if any of these images that are coming to my mind at this instant have any meaning? Heck, I don’t even know if some of them are real in the first place.
Still, she would urge me to suspend my judgement and share whatever naturally comes up. This simple practice always opens up a thread for me to navigate with her as my guide, asking the right questions to help me think, remember and feel. The last one is the hardest to do, yet the most important.
For many weeks, this hour has been the only time I allowed myself to slow down and reflect on how the past week has made me feel. It is normal for me to walk into a session thinking I don’t have anything to discuss but once I start speaking, it pours. I realise I am carrying so much inside I didn’t know.
Feeling my feelings continues to be uncomfortable. Right until each session begins, I feel the urge to make up an excuse for postponing it. But what keeps me going is the cost of not doing it, not just to me but to the people I care about: being irritable, turning to work as my coping mechanism, distancing myself, turning to other modes of distraction, and my own feelings of not living up to my potential.
I have just taken a few baby steps in my healing journey but if you have made it this far and there is only one thing you can take away, let it be this:
Don’t let yourself be tricked. Don’t wait until you cannot walk. You deserve to give yourself a chance to heal. Just avoid saying the worst two words you can say in this situation: “not now”.