Sunday, October 02, 2022
In Treatment
I've been doing therapy for like a year and a half now. Before that, I spent approximately a decade telling people, "I know I should probably do therapy, but..." And the last two years or so of that I was actively looking up therapists that were covered by my insurance online, but finding problems with them, like that they were too far from my office, not taking new patients, or didn't look cool in their photographs. Then, my insurance added telemedicine during the pandemic, and we were off to the races. Over video, I felt like it was less of an investment and if I didn't like the person I could just quit. Of course that's not true; after all, I was not able to break up with either of my personal trainers and had to wait for one to quit the profession and the other to have the gym close on him. But fortunately it hasn't been an issue yet.
Therapy is weird. I always feel strange talking about myself so much. But, like, what are we going to do, talk about her? It turns out that just taking some time to talk through the many and different feelings that I'm having (hunger, itchiness, rage) is actually kind of helpful. There have been numerous times where I've been narrating some thrilling argument with my mother or my boss (two different people, at least nominally) for my therapist and have found myself looking at it a different way (though I'm still very, very right, of course). I know I still kind of use humor to deflect away from the tougher stuff that I don't actually want very much to talk about, but isn't it progress just to recognize that I'm doing that? Also, what the hell is progress, anyway?
I assume this will all be answered in a later episode of therapy. For now, I'm just going to go judge people on Instagram for spending their weekends watching Hocus Pocus 2.
