How many steps, how many home offices, recently renovated spaces, sparsely decorated waiting rooms, small bathrooms, couches and chairs in varying levels of comfort, how many beautiful photographs, and ugly paintings, and psych books, and wearable art, and sympathetic faces, and clocks and magazines and white noise machines have I experienced getting enough therapy to understand myself? Too many to count, too much to describe, but I will tell you that all that work, all those steps, physical and mental, have helped me to be more of who I want to be. I am a fervent believer in therapy. “Let’s analyze it,” might very well have been my first words. I am not ashamed to say that I’ve been in therapy for much of my adult life. I am not shy about this. I had stuff to work on. A difficult dad, with his own set of problems, during a time when therapy was not for anyone but the completely crazy, the totally loco. So, I had some things I needed to understand. (And really, who doesn’t?) But you play your hand with the cards you’re dealt. And sometime you get totally crap cards and you have to talk to the dealer for a long time before you can play your best. And so you have a choice. You can stew, or blame someone else, or live in the beautiful land of denial, or you can immerse yourself in fantasy, or act a part like you’re in a play, or re-write your history like a jaunty fictional novel. But me, I’ve chosen to look at the whole darn thing and try to fix the parts that were broken, or undeveloped, or sort of shit. Why not get help when it’s available? Why not reach out, instead of get lost within? And, well, hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours and tears later, I am happy to report, I think I’m a better person. ACTUALLY, I KNOW I AM. Not a perfect person (you know how i feel about the concept of “perfect.”), but a better-than-i-used-to-be person. I’m not here to make any pronouncements that EVERYONE SHOULD GO TO THERAPY. (although I don’t think it’s a bad idea.). But I have to say that it’s made me smarter. I am more of my best self, more of the time, and that can only be good for everyone I know. It’s not easy, therapy. If you’re thinking it will be easy, go to the movies instead. Therapy is not like it was for Tony Soprano and Melfi. I’ve never had a therapist as cute as Paul Weston on InTreatment, not one as funny as Frasier, or as terrifying as Hannibal Lechter in Silence of the Lambs. Sometimes it’s so painful, I have wanted to quit (and I have). Sometimes, it’s more than I think I am capable of, and then I surprise myself. Sometimes it’s ten steps forward and twelve steps back. And sometimes, you get to celebrate a moment when something finally makes sense, and your head spins like Linda Blair in the Exorcist, because something you’ve been resisting or confused by, or totally in the dark about, becomes clear like a newly washed picture window, and you are free. Therapy. I am grateful. I am more than grateful. I am found.
*the gratitude-a-thon 