Ask, Answer, Repeat
A reflection on my first year in therapy
If you forced me to think of my life in terms of milestones, it would be broken up into two parts. Everything before I began therapy and everything after. Starting therapy initially seemed like one of those areas I knew I needed to get around to doing but never had the time or was in the right headspace for. But quickly I realized that this was in fact more than merely crossing off an item on the checklist of life. I was embarking on a wild, uncertain journey through the depths of my subconscious with someone who at first was nothing but a mere stranger.
It is roughly one year after this journey began, and it’s tempting to ask the question of what it is that I actually learned, not just about myself but about how people work and how the world works and what truths there are about our relationship to our thoughts and feelings. The thing about therapy is that there is no assessment to figure this out or a fixed set of benchmarks that you must pass through in order to measure its impact on you. Rather, as I’ve come to experience for myself, therapy leaves its mark in the moments that you find yourself reverting to the same, kind of boring, and anticlimactic questions that your therapist asks you week after week.
For instance, I can’t have a single session without being asked some form of the question What is it that I’m feeling?. To be fair, answering this question has often seemed like trying to explain what blueberries taste like. The words that you have for the experience are incredibly inferior to the experience itself. But in a world in which it’s so easy to get lost in yourself and to let the daily surge of events and thoughts and worries overwhelm your brain capacity, I’ve found it to be a comforting question to circle back to even if you come up short with answers. If it’s a positive feeling, then this question offers a space to connect with why you might be feeling this way or how you may have experienced a similar feeling previously. On the other hand, whenever you realize that what you are feeling is negative or unpleasant, it makes you think of how you might need to rearrange yourself or your environment to give yourself the best chance of feeling your best.
Similarly, therapy has become a place in which questions are posed about not just what you are feeling but what it is that you want to feel, and what it is that you want more broadly. Again, answering this question is supposed to be hard, but it’s been meaningful to have a place where you have the freedom to take guesses, sometimes crazy, wild ones, about what it is that you are after. I mean, in the course of your life, how often is it that another human poses to you the question What do you want?. We’re always left to interpret what others want based on how they live their life and what choices they make, but it just hits differently when you are exposed to this question week after week.
Not only that, but therapy has helped me to figure out when my behaviors and choices are misaligned with what it is that I believe I want. Through this kind of focused awareness, I’ve had to observe when my actions are in opposition to my goals or my feelings, like when I say to myself that I’m full but keep reaching into the bag of Funyons. And in this process I’ve had to grapple with the times in which I may instinctually do things out of fear or insecurity, some of the most powerful regulators of human behavior in the whole universe.
Lastly, I feel like so many of the things I’ve discussed in therapy come back to the question of How can both or all of the above be true?. In my first year, I’ve been challenged to push beyond thinking in mutually exclusive terms and into a perspective in which you can have multiple things happening at the same time. I can be tired and energized at the same time, I can be patient and bitchy at the same time, and I can both enjoy and resist the therapeutic process. Locating the binariness of my thought patterns has helped me to understand when my impulse to sort things neatly into separate buckets detracts from the reality of what’s going on.
In some sense, starting therapy has felt like putting myself into an emotional job interview in which I am asked similar questions week after week, in which there are no right or wrong answers, in which a stranger is getting me to know myself only through a smorgasbord of spontaneous, often completely incoherent, but genuine answers. It gets easier to talk and think in these terms, but the strangeness of the relationship remains.
Of course, the goal of therapy as I’ve learned isn’t to engage in these sorts of conversations only within the four walls or Zoom screen of your therapeutic environment. It’s about bringing these interrogations out with you into the real world, like when you close your laptop after work on a Friday and start thinking about the weekend and have to start subconsciously piecing together what the overall plan is and have a couple loosely formed ideas of what success might look like for you this weekend but don’t really know which options are the best ones for you at this moment based on how your feeling and how the past week went. With therapy, you are paying for practice in developing a level of self awareness that isn’t really intuitive but that is necessary for you to leave this weekend feeling like you know where you are at and whether you made the right choices about how to spend your time and can more or less accept the current state that you are in, whether it is recharged and serene or antsy and anxious—or both at the same time.
Over time, I’ve grown to accept that my assessment for therapeutic success isn’t in feeling unbelievable all the time but this idea of knowing where I’m at and whether I’m keeping my choices and actions generally in line with that. If I had to put myself back in my shoes from one year ago, I probably didn’t feel things that were all that different from what I am experiencing these days. What is new, however, is this cultivated level of self awareness that serves me and only me, my quiet companion through life that is always there to help me figure out whether I am at least headed in the right direction, feeling or doing things that are as true as I could ask for; all because I kept showing up at my therapist’s office and continued to get prompted to think about the past week’s experiences in terms of these fundamental questions.
Ultimately, what if most people realized that therapy isn’t laying supine on a couch that smells of mold and talking to a crusty-eyed man with a shaggy beard who specializes in Jungian analysis and who begins sessions by asking you to describe your first experience wetting yourself in the bed, but just this: learning how to ask yourself and subsequently answer questions about what you feel, what you want or need, whether you are acting in line with what you want, and what dynamics may be true at the same time? Even if you continue to come up short for answers, the result is a deeper and more nuanced level of self awareness. Who could say no to that?