Find Your Erin: 5 Things I’ve Learned From My Therapy Journey
As Mental Health Awareness Month comes to a close, I’m thinking a lot about what I’ve learned through my own journey with accessing mental health supports. So in honor of this month, and in the hopes that it might help someone else, I’m going to share a bit about what therapy has meant to me. And I should be clear: therapy is by no means the only type of mental health support out there. And on top of that, there are a lot of barriers for accessing quality therapy. The most obvious is the financial component, but beyond that are issues like the prevalence of therapists in rural communities, the lack of training in trauma-informed care, the potential for harm along lines of gender, race, or sexuality, and so much more. In other words, therapy is by no means the only support out there nor is it always the easiest or the best for a person.
But it’s the type of support that has had the biggest impact on my own mental health — and so in honor of the end of this month, I thought I’d share five things I have learned through this therapy journey I’ve been on for the last six years.
1. Your first therapist is not always the therapist you need — or deserve. At first, my seeking out of mental health support was driven by pure necessity: after moving to Phoenix in 2014, I began to experience panic attacks for the first time in my life. When my panic attacks started, I sought out therapy immediately and had the very common misfortunate of a mismatch early on. It’s not even that important to share the details of why this therapist wasn’t the right fit for me other than to simply say what I now realize in hindsight: she made the therapy about her, the therapist, rather than me, the patient.
I was lucky to have a forcing mechanism that pushed me to find a new therapist: I moved back to DC. And thankfully, I landed in Erin’s office. It’s hard to know what else to say about Erin other than the obvious: my work with her has profoundly changed my life.
All of the research on therapy shows one thing: that the relationship between the therapist and the patient matters more to outcomes than even the type of therapy being utilized. So if you are looking for a therapist, please reach out to several. Talk to a few before making a decision. And if you start working with someone who doesn’t feel quite right, bring up your concerns to see if it’s fixable — but if it’s not, find someone else who is more aligned with what you need.
2. Your relationship with your therapist is a lens through which you can work on how you relate to everyone else in your life. Therapists often talk about this as discussing what’s happening in “the here and now.” In other words, sometimes in therapy you talk directly with your therapist about your relationship. Yes, the one between the two of you. Don’t get me wrong: it can be wildly uncomfortable. But the times I have made the most progress in my own therapy work have been through discussions of how I am relating to her. And that’s not because our relationship is the most important thing. It’s because the very same issues I struggle with in my life outside of therapy show up within the context of our relationship as well — and let me tell you, it is a truly powerful thing when you can work through those challenges with someone trained to help you see the patterns.
One example of this in my own work has been around my attachment fears. Let me start with what I ultimately learned: that one of my root fears, gained from my upbringing and past life experiences, is that if I bring up my own needs or feelings in a relationship (with a friend, partner, etc.), the other person will leave me. My work with Erin helped me identify this core fear through how it played out in the therapeutic relationship (e.g. what I was or was not saying), but even more importantly, our work has helped and is continuing to help me challenge that fear by providing a set of corrective experiences that change my worldview. In other words, she is showing me through our relationship that if I express a need or a feeling, that not only will she not leave, she will actually welcome it. Again…it can be very uncomfortable to process these types of things with the person sitting in front of you. But it’s one of the unique parts of therapy — and in my experience, one of the most valuable.
3. You will often times feel worse before you feel better. I really didn’t internalize this when I first signed what therapists call “informed consent” forms. If you read them, they actually warn you: they say that as a result of therapy, you could end up experiencing pain. That being said, I’m not sure it’s fully possible to internalize this before you live it. The reality is that we are all shaped by our life experiences, and the challenges we’ve gone through have built maladaptive coping mechanisms in many of us: for example, a tendency to build walls, a quickness to anger, or an inclination toward co-dependency. Whatever those coping mechanisms are, they always come from somewhere — and usually, they were originally very adaptive, helping us to get through situations that were painful or difficult. But those once-adaptive mechanisms sometimes become problematic, hindering our relationships or causing us more challenges in our day-to-day lives.
We cannot change what we don’t understand. To change our way of operating, we have to turn inward and reflect on our journeys to this point: being curious about what might have led us to operate in the way we currently do, having empathy for why we once needed to operate in that manner, and building understanding for the type of impact it’s now having on our lives. But that curiosity is hard to hold onto, because the reality is that all of this exploration usually involves pain. The discomfort it can cause to unearth some of the painful truths of our existence is enough for many people to stay far away, whether consciously or not. It takes active intention and ongoing strength to tell yourself that it’s worth it: that the pain you might feel through uncovering these realities is worth feeling. That you aren’t going to completely break down from it — that in truth, you’ll actually break fully open.
4. Therapy will become your safe place…and you can never predict when you’ll need it most. My best friends know pretty much everything about me…but there’s something different about sitting in a room (in-person or virtual) with someone whose sole job is to help you. One of the things I’ve realized about life is that it’s really, really difficult to predict when the hard moments are going to hit. Sure, there are times when you sink into them little by little — but so many of our toughest moments catch us off guard, they come when we’re least expecting it. With hindsight, we’re often able to piece things together but that’s because we know what to look for. In the moment, the breaking points feel like they’re going to split us through, partly because of the pain and partly because we haven’t planned for it. And in those moments, the whirlwind that surrounds you seems like it’s going to splinter your very existence.
When my world felt like it was crumbling down around me in the fall of 2018, Tuesdays at 9am were one of the only grounding and consistent experiences I could anchor myself against. When I was at my most afraid and most isolated that fall, an email to Erin sometimes felt like the only lifeline I could really send out. The therapy room — your therapist — becomes your safe place when you need it most. And the knowledge that someone out there believes you are worthy of love and support, that someone out there believes you will one day be okay, can often times make all the difference.
5. One of the goals of therapy is to internalize your therapist in yourself. I’m the first to say that you should of course go back and forth to therapy throughout your life as needed. As we encounter new challenges, it can be incredibly helpful to process them with a person who is trained to help us through. But what I’ve come to realize is that the goal of therapy, the goal of each of those time periods where we are doing the work, is to embed our therapist within ourselves. I never thought it was possible, but you do reach a point in time where you have integrated the work so deeply that you can regulate yourself through moments that once would have sidelined you. You reach a moment where you recognize that the decisions you’re making are coming from the hours and hours and hours of work you’ve done side-by-side with this human who is building in you a capacity to thrive. You reach a turning point where you finally understand that you have the capability and the skills to manage through whatever challenges were once facing you — as well as the ones that are to come. It doesn’t come all at once — but one day you do look around and realize you have really changed. And that maybe, just maybe, you’re able to take the next step forward on your own.
Let me be really clear: I’m not fully there yet with Erin. The idea of saying goodbye to her, even if it’s just for now, makes my heart hurt a bit. But I’ve at least hit the point where I recognize her voice in me, where if I listen in moments of difficulty I can channel what she would say, how she would guide me through processing it. So yes, while therapy should always be there for you during moments of challenge — and while I can absolutely see myself coming back to therapy one day in the future during a period of change — I also can recognize and appreciate the goal that by investing in therapy, what you’re really doing is building that capacity in yourself.
If I wasn’t clear enough — if this wasn’t clear enough — let me say that therapy has changed my life. And if you’re someone like me, who deep down knows that you could benefit from exploring the ways your past experiences have impacted your current way of operating…or if you just simply have a gut feeling that something in your life could be better, I say: find your Erin. I promise, it will be worth it.
Happy Mental Health Awareness Month — and beyond anything else, just know that you are worthy of love and support!
