Member-only story
On Therapy: A Primer for New Beginnings
From the patient’s perspective
A very good friend for most of my life moved away several years ago. We try to get together to go backpacking once a year, and on this year’s trip, he noticed how much I have changed. In those years since he left, I’ve made a bit of a transformation, if you will, into an adult. Especially over the last year or two, I feel like a butterfly cracking open its cocoon. Butterflies don’t live that long so we’d better get started.
Some of the things I’ve learned are simply from life experience and age and all that. But much of it didn’t come naturally, and certainly not without resistance from myself. It takes therapy and guidance. It takes work. And persistence. And patience. And openness. And love.
The therapy itself was the critical element. I can see that now, but 20/20 hindsight, right? I needed someone to guide me, but back then I didn’t know that person would be a therapist — I thought it would be my wife. One night I was very upset about something, and in a moment of pure distressed vulnerability, I lashed out at my wife, complaining about something she didn’t do for me, tears streaming down my face. She said, “You need to talk to a therapist. I can’t be your therapist and your wife.” I almost got offended because I was naïve about what therapy really is.
