7 Months in Therapy

I spent 7 months in therapy and took a break with the unforeseen pandemic. But truthfully, it feels as if I’ve been in therapy for 8 months now. For how hard I’ve been working internally, to finally walk towards being the person I want to be--perhaps the person I always was underneath all the hurt.

If you’re considering therapy...I just wanted to share my journey. Because often times, we think we only need therapy if we have diagnosed mental illnesses, or if we’ve had huge life-changing traumatic experiences. We don’t realize, that we carry all sorts of trauma throughout our lives, living without never having dealt with them—but suffering regardless.

I’ve lived my life dependent on achievements—pieces of paper and metal objects—as young as age 7. In my room until post-college, you would find a wall of little trophies and awards. People would normally feel proud. But truthfully, those were my reminders of my worth, they were reminders that I wasn’t good enough unless I do more. They made waking up a chore--not a blessing. 

Mom and Dad were always proud, and that made me work harder. Because proud to me, meant love.

That “I’m only loved, if I have something to show for.”

I don’t have memories of being a happy, carefree child. I didn’t play outside just because. I’d go outside because I let myself after finishing a to-do list I forced myself to do; in order to be the best at trivial things like cursive, math, drawing, and even having better handwriting. 

I remember telling my friend at age 10, “do you ever feel so sad, you don’t know why? And you just keep feeling sad?” She looked at me with a look of distaste and walked away.

As my therapist said, somehow I was able to use my anxiety to my advantage from a young age. I coped by overworking myself to go “above-and-beyond.”

Mom and Dad became more worried than proud--but also confused. “Our kid is great on paper, but something is always off.” From elementary, I’d stay up into the late AM, perfecting all my assignments. They knew I wasn’t sleeping when I said I was. I hated sleeping--I thought too much. I was always stressed, always angry, always agitated. In elementary to adulthood. Only happy at the very end of my accomplishments. I got pulled aside by a handful of teachers in my life, not for doing minimal, but for doing too much. I could hear them, I couldn’t comprehend. I was obsessed. 

Post-college was the peak of my anxiety--and I couldn’t figure out why. All these years, I thought homework and school was making me miserable. But now I had nothing but time—no rubrics, no set milestones to meet, and I felt more miserable than I ever have. I was suffering from withdrawal.  

As I grew, this bled into my relationships with people. Because after getting all the good grades and stars, you become empty--it’s not enough. So I started overachieving in my relationships, to be loved.

When you carry unattended pain for so long, you will start to overflow and bleed. No matter how many times you patch yourself up, you will leak and you will hurt others, and you will be the one left hurting the most.

I genuinely believed (and still fight not to today), that I am the ugliest person in the world (inside), that I don’t deserve to feel hurt, I am unbearable, I deserve to be punished, I don’t deserve to be loved, that I will be alone, that I am always the problem, I am a monster, I am a waste of space; and the most terrifying thought: that all these things might be true. I only realized I felt these ways about myself when I found myself breaking down in front of my siblings this year like I’ve never done before. Sometimes the person who needed to know you were hurting the most—was yourself.

This way of living; being a calm ocean on good days—a drowning tsunami on hard days, hurt everyone I loved for far too long. No matter what I did, I was not changing—no matter how much I was aware of. I outgrew my coping mechanisms. So I decided for myself that I was going to start therapy. I couldn’t cope with myself anymore. I was hurting, I was deteriorating, and I was self-sabotaging my life. 

Therapy will look different for everyone. But it is in therapy, that I have found peace for the first time in my life. I have found calmness. I found compassion and forgiveness for myself. I found compassion and forgiveness for others who have hurt me. I’ve found acceptance for myself, but accountability to grow. I’ve found courage to see my flaws, understand their core hurt, and why they do the things they do--so I can help them.

One of the most hurtful things I’ve heard when I started was, “so just because you’re in therapy, you think you’re perfect now?”

No, because I’m in therapy, I now know how deeply we are all hurting, and how easy it is to live our lives miserably running away from the very things we need to face in order to live happier. I know how lonely it is, and how much we need love and support at this time. I know when I’m wrong, I know when I need to change—but that doesn’t mean I am not allowed to feel hurt.

I opened up to my mom about what I had learned in therapy, and explained to her my life for the first time, for all the times I didn’t know how to tell her as a child, that I was suffering, I needed help; that I wasn’t mad, I was just sad. I was scared, tired and overwhelmed. That I was lonely and afraid no one would love me.

Don’t get me wrong—I was raised well, I grew up with as perfect of a life as can be. But that’s how powerful the monsters in your head are. So as a child, how did I expect myself to understand those monsters?

My mother cried a cry I’ve never seen her cry before. She dropped to her knees to apologize for not knowing I was in pain. For being parents that caused me pain, for having bled their traumas onto me. I hugged my mom and told her, I never needed her or my dad to be sorry. Because if they had to apologize for my trauma, for the things I don’t write in this blog—my grandparents would have to apologize for their trauma and so on. Because life doesn’t give anyone a manual of how to be to be perfect parents; perfect partners, let alone, how to even be a perfect person.

They’ve done their best in raising me, and now it’s my time to take responsibility to reparent myself.

Life is just about living, loving and healing.

So as Dad is better healed than Grandpa, it is my job to be better healed than Dad. So my kids, can be better healed than me. 

So I can give the world and loved ones, the best version of me. And so I can give myself, the love I deserve and know to not accept less.

Snippet from the letter I sent my therapist the day I “crossed my bridge…”

“Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face, and wow, it's been months since I've ever cried like that. I just couldn't stop...I imagined I would have a very happy cry for some reason, like a cry of relief.

But this was a very sad, heartbreaking, and grieving cry.

I guess I'm very sad and heartbroken to have lived this way all my life. I guess I cried because I felt saved. Like I saved myself for once.”