Therapy: A Look Back

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My first experience with “therapy” was when I was 14. I was battling with a lot of internal issues that weighed heavily upon my emotions, and I was barely surviving within a narcissistic family. Need I say more?

I was a teenager dealing with what I perceived to be astronomical issues on a grand scale, and I saw no hope for relief in sight. Neither did I find any solace. I only had my internal world of thoughts for which I was unable to find any expression.

I could not journal for fear that my thoughts would be read aloud as was the custom within my narcissistic home. Nothing was secret. Nothing was sacred. I simply existed. I lived on a silent prayer and fell into a cesspool of musical lyrics to take me away from the dreary world of this thing called life.

I knew instinctively when I was young that I had a need for therapy. I first knew when I sought the help of a relative to confide in when I felt my first rush of suicidal thoughts invade my soul with a sadness so crippling I did not comprehend it, but I surely felt it.

My First Amateur Therapy Session

It would be my dad who would see that the normal heaviness that seemed to pervade my spirit constantly throughout my teens was even heavier during my freshman year of high school. My withdrawal from family life was more than obvious. Instead of being a part of the family, I further sank into my own self-created cocoon. I did not speak. I did not engage. I did not emote. I just existed.

My dad tried everything to force my sadness away. Yet, what on earth could take my sadness away when I was still living in the environment that helped to create it? At the time, however, I was not completely aware of my true problems. There was so much occurring in my life at that time that there was not just one circumstance that I could pinpoint as being the culprit of my sadness. Deep sadness, internal pain, and grief had accumulated over time. It was not until I began withdrawing from life that my dad literally took notice.

On a ride with my dad to a family friend’s home, he alerted me that the friend would be someone who I might find easy to talk to because the friend had raised several daughters. I recall feeling apprehension at the thought of talking to anyone after suffering the heartbreak of being shunned by a previous relative that I had attempted to talk to before when I was nine. Even still, though, I felt a little hopeful that my pain was being recognized as something that needed addressing as if it were an emergency. For the first time, I felt that a parent had noticed my suffering.

I had felt mute during my young life for quite some time. My dad said that I was not the same person and that concerned him. It also concerned him that he felt within his heart that he was losing his child … that his child was literally fading away and that there was nothing he could do to change things for me. Since I would not talk to him nor my mother about my feelings, he thought that maybe talking to someone who was not closely connected with us might help me. It was apparent to me during the car ride over to the family friend’s that my dad had been thinking about how to help me for a while.

Needless to say, when I arrived to the family friend’s home, I could see she was an older woman with adult children and grandchildren. She was a very nurturing type. I did experience her as very easygoing, but because she was a family friend, I knew that I was automatically limited by the things that I wanted and needed to say to her. So I did not talk. I just listened to her. She had a calming presence, and although none of my problems were solved by her, it was good to know that someone “cared” about what I might have been going through.

Although this was not a real therapy session with a licensed professional, it was therapeutic nonetheless. Surprisingly, my dad took me to see this nice woman a few more times and would actually leave me with her. After some time, I did eventually start talking to her, but I did not trust her enough to talk about my deepest problems. Instead I asked her hypothetical questions about life. Just the fact that she listened to my opinions without critiquing and ridiculing my thoughts was helpful enough. It was release enough for me to begin feeling better just because someone else heard me. Being heard in a narcissistic family just does not happen unless what I have said provoked a narcissistic injury.

High School Therapy

Not long after I stopped meeting with the friend of the family, I sought refuge in the nurturing nature of the school librarian. The school library was my favorite place, but the librarian’s office was my safe haven. Her office was a place I loved to hang out to study away from everyone else. I loved to listen to her talk about the books she read and the life she lived in various places. She always seemed to bring a fresh perspective to what it meant to actually live and enjoy life, and I dreamed of having a chance to feel alive and enjoy life. I came to realize after experiencing an emotional breakdown in her office once that she was a safe person. I found that I could actually confide in her about my depressive thoughts and feelings.

Although she was not a licensed therapist, she was a listening ear. Even though I did not share a lot with her, I was able to share enough, and I was able to release some of the burden that I carried when it came to dealing with the internal pain of depression. She was the first person to ever let me cry on her shoulder, and she held me until I was all cried out. That was a moment in my life that meant so much to me because it was a gesture of kindness that I had never experienced before. I had never even cried tears with my parents holding me apart from when I was an infant.

The librarian soon referred me to books that I could read that she thought might bring me further emotional release. I read so many books from various authors, and I learned so much about myself in terms of resilience and overcoming struggles. The librarian also introduced me to books on personality types. High school was when I first learned that I was an introvert with high sensitivity. As if growing up within a narcissistic family was not heard enough, I had also struggled relating to my peers because I was told by peers that I was so very different. I am thankful that the librarian pointed me in the right direction in showing me that I was simply a highly sensitive introvert with varied interests of depth. If anything, the librarian was one of the people who impacted me the most during my high school years in the most positive way. I wonder how I would have survived high school without her.

College Therapy

College was a different story. It took me a while to find my footing with a good therapist. I had a lot of mishaps. My battle with depression reached a peak during the winter of my freshman year when I attempted suicide. I was immediately seen by a nurse in the school’s infirmary, and instead of offering me a shoulder to cry on and an ear that would hear me, the nurse insulted me. It was like hearing the voice of parental disapproval for making them look bad in the public eye.

According to the nurse, I was making the school look bad with my desperation for attention. This nurse had no idea. I was stunned into silence. Hearing the words of the nurse had made me regret surviving the suicide attempt. I never sought help from the school infirmary again even when I was sick during my remaining years at the college. I fell further into myself and realized that I could talk to no one, but with the threat of my parents being notified by this nurse, I took up the demand to see a therapist.

I saw three different therapists before I settled on the college’s chaplain for therapeutic services. Instead of dealing with the depression I suffered, each of the three therapists wanted me to work on college skills – study habits, getting to know people, and other things that had nothing to do with the help that I truly needed from them. What did I need study habits for when I earned nothing less than top grades? I was an “A” student. I always felt that I thrived in college because my mind was active, and my depression could often be triggered by the inactivity of my mind.

It was not until I met with the college chaplain that I realized this about the inactive use of my mind and the correlation with my depression. The college chaplain told me that besides the stressful problems I was dealing with at the time, she believed that I was bored with college because I was not experiencing a challenge. My time in high school was far better than my freshman year, and I was 10 times more challenged than I ever was in my freshman year too.

It was after my freshman year that I increased the amount of class credits I took and worked several part time jobs to keep me busy. I even ran my own businesses – babysitting services and typing services – to earn extra cash. The college chaplain had assisted me with keeping depression at bay during my remaining years in college. I checked in with her often because of the ability to speak freely about my problems without judgment. Although I never talked about my personal problems with family, I was appreciative of the help she provided when I dealt with relational issues on campus. Days before my college graduation, she gave me a parting gift in the form of a poem which I still read from time to time when I feel sadness upon me.

The Adult Phase of Therapy

After graduating college and transitioning into the young adult life, I had sporadic instances with therapy, but none of those instances proved successful. Instead, I dealt with depression by stuffing my emotions further down into an abyss that I hoped not to one day fall into even though I often found myself barely hanging onto the edge of it. I attempted suicide a second time in my early twenties right after graduation and found myself having a breakdown in my mid-twenties. It would be a long discussion with a gynecologist that would have me receiving help from a group on codependency.

Not that I did not already know that I had some major problems, I just did not like the group setting when it came to dealing with them. I felt that the codependency group picked me apart and ridiculed me just for who I was as a person. I felt that I had joined a cult where a code of silence was best kept by the newbies such as myself who were more often unseen, unheard, and had to climb the ranks to be a part of the “clique”. I was treated in like manner as I had been by the nurse from the college infirmary. I was treated with such disdain that I became keenly aware of the depth of sadness that I was consistently battling.

After three sessions, I decided that group therapy was not for me especially when there was no trained or licensed therapist that led the group. These were all regular people just like me who really had no business being guides to other suffering souls. They were too judgmental for me. I had suffered enough narcissistic abuse from my own family without joining myself to a group of people that displayed similar narcissistic characteristics. I was an adult now, and I had been in healthy enough settings to know that I could remove myself from situations that were not conducive to my growth or healing.

My Turning Point

It was not until I had experienced the spiritually abusive nature of church pastors and congregants through church “therapy” and deliverance sessions that I decided enough was enough. In a haste to not end my life one Saturday afternoon, I rushed to the neighborhood bookstore to save myself. Although I did not tell anyone about my suicidal intent, I did find a book to read. The book was a story about a woman whose son died by suicide after struggling with lifelong bipolar depression. It was in the book where the author confirmed the importance of finding good therapeutic help. This was my turning point.

In my desperation to preserve my life, I researched therapists in my area and finally settled on a therapist with expertise in helping clients with depression and family dysfunction. It was the best decision that I had made in terms of beginning the process to heal from the pervasive deep sadness, pain, and grief that I had suffered since I was a young child. Through therapy, I was introduced to a psychiatrist and began the process of finding the right psychotropic medications to help alleviate my symptoms of depression. It was then that I found behavioral cognitive “talk” therapy to be even more helpful than it had been in the past. I soon felt that change was on the horizon in a major way.

Healing, Growth, and Change

When I first entered therapy, I was a broken mess. I felt inconsolably damaged beyond measure. I could not even deal with the source of my pain and depression before first dealing with the “surface” issues that led me to seek therapy in the first place. Yet, overtime, my life began to change. After some time, I developed a new mindset. I established goals, and I reached those goals. I grew. I healed. I changed. I became a different person. I was not always “happy”, but I was definitely content. My life was better. Depression was not only at bay; depression was out to sea.

Through therapy, I had developed better ways to cope with my problems, and although I began the process of journal writing prior to my start with therapy, I found that time in therapy had increased my levels of self-expression. My writing flowed because my mind felt more open. My mind felt free. I no longer felt hindered by my emotions. I no longer felt a heaviness of dark clouds raining down upon me that kept me from even thinking freely. There now seemed to be an open flow of ideas and thoughts. My mind was no longer hindered from free thoughts, and this was good for me.

I healed. I grew. I changed. What’s more, I did not respond to stressful situations in the same way. I broke away from toxic relationships, and I learned just how dysfunctional my family system had affected me and everything in my life. It was then that I began learning about different personality disorders and personality types. Through therapy, I learned so much about myself. I also learned so much about dysfunctional relationships and relational forms of abuse. Therapy proved to be very eye-opening for me. It was ultimately lifechanging and so much so that other people took notice of the change in me – especially those who were a part of my dysfunction.

Therapy has provided for me the outlet that I needed to verbally express myself in a way that I had never been able to do so with others in the past. Therapy provided me with an avenue to heal, to grow, and to change. Yet, even therapy has disadvantages. Plus, there are times when a great shift must take place. Find out in the next post what changed my life to bring my time in therapy to an end.