My Therapy Journey
The main reason I decided to share this stuff was to encourage others. I know how important it is to talk about experiences. I’ve been blown away by the number of people who have got in touch. So many have asked about starting their own therapy journey. Like I said, that was my number one aim. So I am beyond happy that it has given people the nudge to begin their own conversations.
Anyway, that got me thinking about how I’ve explained it to those who have reached out. I’m sure there are others out there who haven’t got in touch, and that’s cool. I thought I would put it down in writing. This is what helps me organise my thoughts and say what I want to say.
There are two main points that I have stressed to everyone I’ve talked to. So I’ll put them down first here too.
Therapy is hard work. I’ve started and stopped many times over the years. I will talk about that more in detail further on. It’s one of those things that you’ll get more out of, the more you put in. That means asking yourself hard questions. Also, being brutally honest with yourself, and then your therapist.
You probably won’t find your ideal therapist first time around. If you do, that’s great. You want to talk to someone you can trust, and you think gets you. That might not be the first person you talk to. Don’t get turned off the whole thing if you don’t ‘click’ with your first therapist.
Right, so here’s my journey. I’m sharing in the hopes that it reinforces those two points and helps someone else to stick with it when it gets hard.
I first saw a psychologist when I was 16. I was anxious and having trouble sleeping. My mum organised for me to talk to a psychologist. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I remember sitting in her professional looking office. A feeling of being uncomfortable in every way you can. I was a kid in an adult environment. She was asking me questions that I didn’t have an answer for. So I sat there for two sessions and said as little as I could. She gave me a couple of exercises to help me relax and go to sleep. But I never talked about anything that was keeping me awake, or about myself. I wasn’t ready.
A few years passed and I got to my mid twenties. I found myself struggling and lost. I had stopped playing Water Polo at a high level and had no routine of exercising to replace it. There was no balance to my life. I went for one session. I treated it like a refresher course on some ‘life hacks’. I was remembering some tactics I could use to help me deal with moments of anxiety. But not to address my anxiety and where it came from. I cut back on drinking a bit, got a gym membership and planned to travel overseas. I was doing enough to keep myself going, but not enough to work on myself.
Then we had our first daughter. I’ve written about how that hit me and brought out my anxiety and depression in other posts. I didn’t have the mental tools and approach to parenting to handle what it was throwing at me. Don’t get me wrong, I was being (and am) a good dad. But the toll it was taking on me to be ‘a good dad’ was huge. So I had a few sessions with a therapist. I opened up a bit more. But I was still very guarded. I knew I had to do more to work on myself than I had in the past, but couldn’t commit to going all the way. I evaded questions that made me uncomfortable. I even flat out lied about things that I thought might lead to uncomfortable follow up questions. Basically, I did enough to get me through and no more.
You might think by this point I would have learnt that I needed to do something more. That I should be committing to trying to retrain the way I was reacting to situations. But I still have one more unsuccessful attempt to go!
We’d moved back to New Zealand by this point and I had had a few stressful experiences pile up on each other. I got to the point where I wasn’t coping. I remember having a panic attack while driving to work and then plowing on with my day. I was on a collision course with things getting out of my control. So, I went to a new therapist I had never seen before. We did ‘click’. But I still wasn’t ready to commit to the journey. I did feel myself getting comfortable talking to her though, and being honest. I don’t actually remember why I stopped going. But I managed to bring myself out of the nosedive I was in and decided that I’d done enough.
As you can imagine, all this did was ensure that the cycle would repeat. But the one piece of progress I had made was that I now had someone that I would go back to when I needed it. So fast-forward to 2021. After a year of pandemic, lock downs and general life stresses I was back in a dark place. My life was out of balance again. Poor exercise routines. Drinking too much. Generally not dealing with things in a way that was positive.
So, I went back. This time I said from the first session that I’m committed and want to open up in a way I had never done before. The difference was noticeable straight away. I was preparing for the sessions. Writing, trying to organise my thoughts in a way that I could talk about them. I was going in to say what I meant. It also helped me to be honest. In a way, writing it down made me feel more like I’d be lying to myself if I then went and didn’t say that in therapy. Does that make sense? I was holding myself accountable. I’ve changed more about my life and the way I think and react in the last year than any other time in my life. All done with intention and for positive reasons. I’m still going, almost a year on.
The reason I want to highlight this journey is to show that it’s not a case of showing up and you’re fixed. That’s not how it works. I want to show anyone who hasn’t begun, or is just starting, that it’s OK to not nail it first go. In fact, if you think you have, you may not be being honest with yourself. But I want to show you that when you are ready to commit, it can be powerful. The way we wire ourselves as we come of age doesn’t have to be set in stone. We can challenge our default settings and, with hard work, adjust them.
I want to be honest about my experience for anyone new to the journey. To me this is something I’ve worked hard to be able to talk about and now share. So the fact that I’m writing this and putting it out there is testament to the process of therapy working. That process is ongoing. That doesn’t mean I won’t have periods of my life where I stop for a while. But when I do, it will be a decision made with control and self-awareness.