For many years I had a love hate relationship with therapy. Over time, I have recognized how valuable my therapists/counselors/psychologists have been and are. I started therapy when I was 18 years old, my first appointment was traumatic. As you might imagine, talking with a therapist was that last thing a person like myself would choose to do. I had purposely chosen to never confide in anyone about anything of real depth, including my feelings of depression and severe anxiety about daily functioning in life. My life was about survival, my survival was private. The therapist I saw was through LDS family services, a service provided by the church in which I was and am a member. I met with my therapist, a middle aged woman. I was uncomfortable throughout the appointment, but at the end, she gave me a hug. That did not work for me, some people are comforted by hugs, but I was not the hugging type and certainly not with a stranger who I didn’t want spend time with. I think I saw this woman every week for several months, but I can’t recall. What I do recall is, after each appointment, I would drive to a nearby park and sit in my car and cry. I was angry, depressed and scared of my future. In the 80’s there was so much stigma around mental illness. People didn’t talk about depression, there was no Google or blogs to try to help a person understand. I had significant trust issues, so even if there had been support through some association, like NAMI, I did not want anyone to know anything about what was going on inside of me- not my family, not some support group, not friends.
I stuck with therapy although it was painful; I have wondered why I kept doing something that was so painful. I now know that there was a faint flicker of hope that my life could improve. I don’t recall feeling hope, but it must of been there because I kept going to therapy. I started seeing another therapist when I went off to college, I don’t recall much, but I did feel more comfortable with him than the first one. A couple of years later, I transferred schools and moved back home. I started seeing another one and so on. I moved a lot so I have seen a variety of therapists over the years. There are three particular ones who stand out. After marrying and moving to a small college town, with my husband, I started seeing a counselor on campus. This was a very tough time for me, I was in school, which, as I noted was extremely difficult for me. I was also pregnant and was probably suffering the most severe depression I had suffered up to that point. I attribute much of that to hormone changes, but of course that didn’t make it any less painful. My counselor was very nice, but it was again terrifically difficult. The challenge with her was, in the 50 minutes that I spent in her office, she would only speak for about 5 minutes. That meant I had to fill 45 minutes, for a person who tried to not to talk much, it was awful. I once told her, I hate coming to see you, it brings all sorts of painful things to the surface, which takes about a week for me to recover from and then I come back here again and repeat the same thing. However, I kept going and made progress, very slowly, over the next 4 years. After a about a 5 year break, following a divorce and returning to work, I returned to this same college to complete my last two semesters. I was able to see my same counselor again. This was wonderful, until the day that I was called by the office and told that my appointment had been cancelled. They wouldn’t give me any other information. I went to the office later that week and found that my counselor had killed herself. I was her only client because she was the director and was no longer seeing clients. When I returned to school she said she would be happy to see me again. This was a tough situation, but luckily I had progressed in my ability to speak up, I scolded the office for not following up with me and started seeing a new counselor, who was very good and helpful in working through the situation. The second most significant therapist was a psychologist I had in Boston. I had taken a job out there following my graduation, I knew no one and unfortunately there were many triggers that helped land me on short-term disability and in a pretty bad psychological state. The main stressor with my job was that I was in a small department, 3 other co-workers and my boss. One of my co-workers, who sat next to me, refused to speak to me - ever- not even hello. She also refused to teach me any of the things that I needed to know to do some of my job. It was very upsetting to me, along with other factors in my life. After, a few weeks of spending every lunch hour crying in my car, I decided I had better find a therapist. I started seeing a social worker, but as my depression worsened, she referred me to a psychologist at Mclean hospital (at the time, one of the top mental health hospitals in the country). I met with the psychologist for a couple of weeks and she was great, but she kept trying to talk me into going into a program. I had promised myself that I would never do any kind of group therapy, it was awful enough to do it privately (still so much stigma). She couched the program into something she thought I would swallow- I do not hold it against her because it helped me finally get a proper diagnosis. I started a “partial hospitalized” program. I attended a program at the hospital a few hours everyday for three weeks. This was all out patient. It was basically a series of classes along with one on one cognitive behavioral therapy work with a psychologist. As I was sitting in a class one afternoon, I heard something that changed my life. The instructor said, antidepressants prescribed to someone with a bipolar tendency may cause a manic reaction. He then went on to describe some of the classic behaviors of mania. It was a profound moment, I finally understood what had happened that year I had been prescribed Paxil. I was seeing a psychiatrist at the hospital, I spoke with him about this new information. We discussed it for quite some time, the question was- why did I only have one manic episode, although it appeared to have lasted for months. Did I really have bipolar? We went back and forth, while trying to find a new antidepressant for me. Later, I will talk more about my medication situation, but suffice it to say, when we couldn’t find a good antidepressant, I said, OK, let’s just treat me with the medications that you would use to treat someone with bipolar. It took some time, but low and behold, we eventually struck gold. It was a quite a cocktail, but it was life changing. Not the kind of life changing that the mania gave me, but it was a giant step towards feeling better able to live a functional life. One of the most noticeable things was that I suddenly had “common sense”, all those times people said, “that is just common sense”, I finally saw it. Well, as usual, this is a long post, but as noted, I have one more psychologist who had and still has a significant impact in my life. I have been seeing him for about 3 years. I chose him because he was close to my work, but it was more than a random choice, as he has helped me through another psychological crash. He is a psychologist with a Ph.D and he keeps abreast not only his field, but attends pharmacology conferences and is up on the latest information for antipsychotic medications. Since the majority of his patients are on medications and there are side effects and challenges of changing medications, etc. he feels that he can provide the best care by being well versed in these medications. This turned out to be a tremendous blessing when my psychiatrist introduced a new medication that undid my bipolar medications. It was again, one of the more hopeless years I have had. For some people, especially those of us who have been on our medications for years, adding a medication that may destabilize mood can have serious repercussions. Essentially, your brain gets “scrambled”. It unplugs all the connections that you had working smoothly and the wires get tangled; it can take months to recover from and sometimes you have to start all over finding a new cocktail of medications. This is what I have been going through for the past year and a half and it has been awful! I completely give credit to my psychologist for providing the information that my psychiatrists should have known so I could start to advocating for myself. As you can see, my journey through, now almost 30 years of therapists, has been ultimately very helpful, but it was torture for many years. Now I tell myself, keep a therapist in your back pocket so that when things get rough, you already have help waiting. It has been a good plan for me. As always, I hope that something in my story is helpful, hopeful or educational. I would love to hear your comments or questions, please feel free to leave one.
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