Practicing What I Preach
I’m a loud advocate for therapy.
If a friend tells me they’re having a hard time, it’s the first thing I suggest. If they want to talk about an appointment or look for encouragement or praise for starting therapy, I’m always there for them.
But for myself, it’s a different story.
Ever since I was a kid, I enjoyed going to therapy. My child therapist when I was very young let me draw while we talked and had Mr. Sketch markers that I loved to sniff. She had a toy basket by the door where I could “pick a prize” and an extremely cheerful outlook on life that helped me be positive in tough times. My childhood psychiatrist, while not perky, was a fountain of wisdom and even now, she knows my thought patterns just as well as I do.
Even though my experiences with therapy have been positive, I still have the lingering feeling that it’s bad for me to go. It’s been years since I had appointments every week or month, and now that I’ve moved to seeing my psychiatrist over the phone once every few months, it feels like I’ve somehow “won” against the need to seek therapy and should just be able to do everything myself.
I feel ashamed to admit that I want to talk to my psychiatrist or do what I’m doing this week - seeking a local therapist. Even though I would recommend therapy to a friend wholeheartedly, I have a hard time justifying it for myself. I feel like I’m “losing,” and as someone very competitive who was taught from a young age that OCD is an enemy in my head who I have to fight, I always want to win.
Sometimes, even when I feel like a therapy appointment could be helpful for me, I delay or even convince myself that I don’t need it. I claim factors like the difficulty of getting an appointment, the cost, and the fact that I often take these phone calls during work hours, which means I usually end up wandering the streets while talking because my office doesn’t have a door.
But all of those things are just excuses. I know myself well enough to know when I need therapy, and I love telling other people about how much it’s helped me. So why is it so hard for me to do something I believe in so much?
In my case, I’ve pinpointed a specific fear about therapy. The thought process goes like this: If I need therapy more often than I’ve needed it in the past, that means I’m bad off. If I’m bad off, it means I could be backsliding to the horrible place where I was after my surgeries. The thought fills me with such dread and is honestly my deepest fear, losing myself again and having to claw my way out of days-long panic attacks, negative thoughts, and worse.
I know, rationally, that such a thing is unlikely to happen again. It had a catalyst the first time (namely, the trauma from my surgeries), and if it did happen again, I would recognize what’s going on before it got too bad and seek out the medication that helped me fight my way through it. But even so, I’ve come to associate that time in my life with therapy in general.
But just like with the roller coaster, I’m going to try to dive in head-first to this fear. I’ve made an appointment with a local therapist, and I’m trying to reframe my thinking to align more with what I try to tell others. Therapy can’t hurt me, it can only help, and it might make me calmer at a time when things are tense in other areas of my life.
This week, I’ve found that the roles have flipped - I sought reassurance from my friends for going to see a therapist, and the people who I once encouraged are now encouraging me. It’s nice to see this coming full circle and the mental health community is made stronger for these types of bonds. As a child, I never had any friends to tell about therapy, and it’s great to see the world changing even just a little to make these sorts of conversations okay even with people I haven’t known for very long.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.