Been There, Shrunk That

At M’s recommendation I read an article in the NYT Sunday magazine called “My Life in Therapy” by Daphne Merkin, about one woman’s 40-year epic with psychotherapy—all her hopes for how it would fill the terrible holes in her psyche and finally give her the love and attention she never got enough of from parents and lovers. She describes a sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing sampling of a wide range of therapies from age 10, including classic Freudian psychoanalysis which I frankly have no earthly use for since I’ve always believed it was demeaning and disrespectful to women (and probably men as well) and seemed more likely to keep people stuck in the past focusing on the inevitable imperfections of their childhoods.

My own experiences with therapy have been numerous. I too was taken to see a woman who was probably a psychiatrist when I was around 10 years old and had suddenly decided I hated school when previously I had loved it. The root cause for this was that I was having difficulties with arithmetic, and this was the first time in my brief school career that I had found anything in the classroom remotely difficult. However, I didn’t talk about this during my session. Instead, I told the attentive white-haired lady about the recurring dream I was having in which I was arguing with a talking skull, and how I had eventually learned in the dream to wake myself up by pushing the skull away with my hand and uttering a “bad word.”

“What was this bad word?” asked the psychiatrist.

“I can’t say it out loud.”

“You can say anything in here.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she responded with surprise, since up to this point I had been a very good little girl in the session.

“Shut up was the bad word—we’re not allowed to say ‘shut up’ at our house.” And indeed we weren’t—it was literally considered an unacceptable word in our household.

Later in my 20s and 30s I struggled with shifting moods and depression, and a few severe cases of a broken heart along with a profound fear of failing at school and later at work. I drifted from one therapist to another with little or no progress in my estimation. It was only the year after my mother died, in 1999, that I was forced by a vicious darkness of the soul to do real work in therapy in order to survive that grief and the several more that followed. My therapist then told me that there was no way out but through…and introduced me to the cognitive behavioral therapy. And from that point, I did find a few good therapists who helped me make some progress; I also began reading a large number of books on my own, centered around letting go of rumination about past and worry about future and focusing on living more in the present. And also paying more attention to that blathering negative voice in my head and how to step outside its influence and talk back to it (even telling it to “shut up” on occasion).

Can therapy be an addiction? This is suggested in Merkin’s article and it likely can be, but for me it was more like a journey that simply took a long time and that in the end was productive. It just takes time and experience to finally wake up and see through the fog to notice what’s really going on and how much power you hold in the search for serenity.

Daphne concludes the article with: “Therapy gave me a place to say things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world—and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.” I agree—in other words, it helped me find my voice.

She also says therapy “provided a space for interior examination, an education in disillusioned realism that existed nowhere else in this cacophonous, frantic planet.” Agreed again—in other words, it helped me wake up.

What about your experiences with therapy good or bad?