Therapy Day

Today, I Took A Big Mental Health Step.

In my mid-thirties, my world was burning down.

Divorce. Depression. Anxiety.

I was losing it in a big way.

In August of that year, I started at my dream school, William & Mary, to study my dream subject, History. It did not matter. By mid-semester, I was crashing the hardest I ever have. My wife announced she was unhappy and could not be dragged into my misery anymore. I couldn’t blame her. It was getting bad in there.

I rallied through it all, helped by family, friends, and sympathetic professors and made it through. I had winter break to play video games, have a low-key Christmas with my roommate, and feel a newly cleared head as the Depression fog lifted, helped by Prozac and Topamax. I felt saved. I felt newly baptized.

I returned to school, and I committed to fixing the damage caused by my disease in all my relationships. The most important was my daughter. I carried guilt from years of not being the best father I could be for her. I was not physically or emotionally abusive. But I was not present for her as I should have been. How could I be? All my psychic energy was needed to take care of the Depression and its needs. I vowed never again.

Things got better. Through medicine and reflection, I started to see life for the beautiful journey it is. I was never quite an advocate for mental health, but I never hid from it after I medicated. I refused shame. Co-Parenting was haphazard in the early days; there is not a guide to the methods of success for the suddenly divorced and poorly organized.

Brighter things came.

I met my now wife, Kate, in this year. It was love at three to four months after first sight. We leaped and moved in together. She became a stepmother and partner overnight. It was a challenge for all of us, but none more so than her. She will probably never give herself enough credit for those early weeks and months. She could have walked away. I’m not sure why she didn’t. But to my eternal good fortune, she stayed, and we are living our life.

My first psychiatrist quit her practice not long after I began seeing her. She was an odd duck. She would not tolerate my deflecting, which was smart of her, but she always weighed me when I came to her office. A psychiatrist or a fitness coach? A constant thought when I visited her. But she tuned the mental fiddle the first time out, and I was up and running in the post-Depression fog. I could see and think clearly. It was a different world.

It was a world I needed to learn again. Still, I am.

That psych doctor moved on, and my primary physician maintained my drug treatment for a few years while I excused away the need to find a new psychiatrist. One too many grumpy days earlier in 2020, Kate and I decided I needed to find one. We bought a home in Williamsburg, Virginia together, and I added: “find a mental health expert” to my move-in list. I found one. Kelly Chun. She is wonderful. She didn’t put up with my nonsense any more than all the other strong women in my life. Dr. Chun added Wellbutrin to my regiment. Something about affecting different neuroreceptors.

But something was amiss. I wasn’t feeling super raised. I wasn’t singing Hallelujah in the rafters. I supposed the drug was not working, and it was cramping my weekend cocktail time.

I expressed my concerns to Dr. Chun. Why have I felt such a brutal sense of apathy lately? Why was I feeling this or that? She parried like the expert she is. Wellbutrin does not cause apathy. She took out her notes. But you know what does? Not doing anything. Not filling your time with things you enjoy.

Not responding to the negative stimulus of your past, gravely, she said. It is you, not the medicine. She urged me to therapy. Kate had, as well. I had some severe unresolved stuff. Dr. Chun was right. She gave me a list of names, and away I went.

The calls to the therapists sat dormant for a week, but soon with more gentle prodding from my spouse, and I made the call. One was available in late September. COVID-19.

Dr. Chun’s number one recommendation could see me the week after my call for an intake session. Great, let’s do it.

I didn’t give it much thought until the day came. I was anxious. I had a lot to discuss. Fathers. Mother. Abuse. A strange and twisted road of life. What did it all mean? Why can’t I just take a philosophy class?

I made jokes about going to my likely doom. But I went.

The office of Thrive Therapy was a little hippy for my tastes, but almost anything with candles is. The soon to graduate intern who did my intake greeted me. She was exceedingly kind, and as we entered the “cubicle of why do I have to listen to a grown man whine,” as I could only assume she called it, she made me at ease.

Why are you here? Mommy and Daddy issues, isn’t everyone? Deflection.

What mental health struggles do you face? Oh, well, I have diagnosed major clinical Depression and generalized anxiety.

Scribble, scribble went the pen.

But an odd thing happened. I was at ease. I was ok with this. She asked broad questions. About specific things. Every question unleashed a tidal wave of recollection and exposition in me.

Dad was this and that. He was a drunk and abusive. He was a bad man, but his mother was worse, so could he ever have been anything else? Does that matter? I didn’t create him; he created me. He was a big topic.

So was my stepfather. He is a good man whose demons and drinking rendered him inept to the act of kindness. He wanted so much to be a good father. He never made it. He was an emotional storm that constantly rained down on me. Ours is a complicated history of good memories and bad. So, it goes.

The elephant in the room was Mom. The progenitor of life. The protector. The shield against the world. Can a mother do any wrong? She was my rock and cared for me through it all. I was a tough kid to raise. I was this or that. She fled across the country with my siblings and me to escape the insanity of my father. How does that not make you a saint?

Was she these things, or did you need her to be those things? Kate always drills right down to it. Until you confront your feelings about her, good and bad, this will never go away.

It was always about the men for me because it couldn’t be about the parent who stayed, who was there.

I talked about mom at length. More than I thought I would. More than I still think I should. But that’s the point of therapy, to talk about the stuff you don’t think you should.

We covered much: biography, education, significant life events. Some harsh ones. Suicide. Self-harm. All the fun stuff. But I was comfortable. Pensive, but comfortable.

The journey of mental health never ends. There isn’t a cure. It isn’t a broken arm. It’s a broken brain. Each step on that journey toward help, management, and healing of the body and the spirit is positive. A step back is the motivation to step forward again.

I don’t know what this therapy journey holds for me. I’m glad I turned down this road, though. I’m scared to see where it goes, but fear is just a part of life, and the only way past is through. Having taken my first step, I don’t see how I can ever turn back. And that feels good.