The Evolution of My Therapy Journey

I saw my first psychiatrist when I was 13 years old. It was, at the time, beyond my control and came as part of the recovery package. My initial sessions were awkward partly because I was so far gone down the rabbit hole that logic was an afterthought. My brain was being eaten up by the disease (quite literally), and my organs were weeks away from shutting down.

Around the same time, I was set up with a family therapist, which wasn’t productive at all. I mean, can you imagine three Asian people sitting in a room with a caucasian, 60-year-old woman trying to get us to talk about our problems? Not a chance. Regardless of how melodic and soothing her questions were.

By my third or fourth therapist (again mandatory), I was around 15 years old. I didn’t like her a single bit and barely have any recollections of our sessions.

Finally, after my second relapse and second time doing outpatient, I struck gold! I got a woman in her thirties with a thick Montreal accent. She was a graceful and calm lady with a twinkle of kindness in her eyes. Over a year, she gently guided me through some blocks I was facing as a perfectionist and a master procrastinator; unraveling root issues behind my mental illness in practical, everyday ways. Thanks to her, you will not catch me staying up until 3 am to finish an assignment due the next day. Since my discharge from that program, I’ve seen a couple more therapists, and those times were on my own accord.

As I mentioned in the past, I’m very pro-therapy. This post will not be so much about my breakthroughs in therapy, which you can read about in this article, but will be about the interesting evolution of my therapy journey. This post merely reflects my own journey and is not to be interpreted as medical or psychiatric advice.

This is how I went from running away from therapy to embracing it.

Phase I: Deny and Discover

When I first started going to therapy, therapy wasn’t cool yet and your feed wasn’t flooded with BetterHelp ads. Yes, it was the barbarian times, I know. Seeing a ‘shrink’ pretty much implied that there was something wrong with you, so I didn’t openly share that I was seeing anyone.

Therapy in the early days was, in my eyes, absolutely useless. There was no way I was going to tell a stranger my deepest secrets and thoughts. I treated my therapist like an authority figure, someone I had to appease. When met with questions that tried to probe at why I had this problem, I answered nonchalantly, with a “I’m not sure.” or “I don’t know.”

And truthfully, at the time, I was too young and too irrational to process what was going on and what I was letting happen to me. And kids can be quite stubborn when they want something. And while most kids at my age wanted more video games and freedom to hang out at the mall with their friends; all I wanted to be was the thinnest person ever.

I didn’t really believe in a god, but I would pray to him to make me thinner.

And so for the majority of the beginning of my therapy journey, I lied to the therapist and I lied to myself. In my mind, in all perfect sense, I didn’t have a problem. I blamed the doctors, the nurses, the “stupid” psychiatrists, the staff, and the institution because I believed I didn’t have a problem. I believed my freedoms were being stripped away as I was taken away from my family and locked up in this hospital, living in retrospect, in what looked like nicer dorm rooms. 

I didn’t like the fact that I was stopped from being able to self-destruct (ie. not eat) and get even thinner, chipping away at my vital organs, bit by bit. I cheated whenever I could (I don’t know a single person around me who didn’t).

I got to a healthy weight, but my mind continued to be dominated by the disease. It didn’t take long for me to stop eating lunch again and fall into a relapse. I mean, I was scared of mayonnaise, for god sake.

Phase II: Work in Progress

To give you some context, when I talk about inpatient and outpatient, this is what I refer to.

Inpatient: You’re physically living at an institution, in a group home, basically.

Outpatient: You live at your own home, but you come to the clinic once a week, biweekly or monthly for checkups. You have three appointments; a physical exam with the pediatrician, diet planning with the dietician, and a therapy session with the psychiatrist.

My second time in outpatient, I was paired with the Montrean lady, and things went well because we never really discussed my illness. We worked on other things like my perfectionism with a therapy technique called CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy). This type of therapy was coupled with homework which I enjoyed.

In this part of my therapy journey, the work was less stereotypical, aka me sitting on a couch talking about my feelings, and more practical. I felt like I was building a muscle that was frail before.

By the end of my treatment, I was almost sad to stop seeing my therapist. She really did have a great impact in those early years of my development.

Phase III: Therapy for Emotional Support

I took a long, long break from therapy because, for many years, I felt like I was fine.

But have you ever randomly felt the urge to go to Church? Well, that was therapy for me, my salvation.

The first time I found my own therapist was maybe in my third year of college, And I got very lucky because she was an absolute angel. At the time, I had relationship problems which I masked with “personal growth goals.” It soon became apparent in these sessions that I was really struggling in relationships, but I didn’t want to come out and say it, because I felt it was somehow a less worthy problem to have. It was mostly nice to just have someone to vent to; someone who wasn’t allowed to judge me for some of my questionable decisions during this period of my life.

You always go into therapy thinking there will be some strategy behind it. But truthfully, therapy is a lot of emotional work. It’s a lot of going back in time, pinpointing how you felt, what you thought, why you thought that, and how it impacts or gets in the way of whatever you’re trying to do now.

Therapy gives me the space to be completely selfish for an hour. To express my thoughts, my emotions and to have someone help me process them and, importantly, validate them.

When I got out of college, reality sank in like sand dunes at my feet. I felt like I was drowning. I sought help from a clinic that did sliding scale, which essentially means pay whatever you can. During this phase of therapy, the work was intense and slow. Slow because I was fighting to feel better, and it just felt like it wasn’t happening. I would go through strong ebbs and flows of feeling okay and then disassociating. I felt rage and crippling sadness. One theme that became apparent throughout those sessions was that I had the tendency to take the blame from situations or people and internalize it myself. I shouldered weight that was never meant to be carried and I often let myself sometimes crumble under pressure of my scaling expectations. I struggled a lot to know when to call it.

Halfway through this phase of therapy, I did work where the therapist got me to sit down in front of a sandbox and piece together the different parts of my identity with figurines in the sandbox. I know it sounds woo woo and all, even I didn’t quite get the point of these exercises. I think , just like how we like to play out characters and stories with stuffed animals and lego pieces as children; these exercises were a way to tell stories of how I was feeling, what parts of me were struggling, being blocked, and needed more care.

My life took dramatic turns even in those short six months. I went from unemployed and depressed, to getting on anti-anxiety medication, getting a job, and then being promoted to a manager 30 days in. Things were on a positive horizon and then came the theme of happiness.

Happiness to me was always a byproduct of something else. In my mind if I had achieved this, made this much money, or had a certain type of job..I truly believed I would be happy. Whenever I get depressed, I believe that it’s just because I haven’t achieved all my greatest goals and ambitions. The problem with this mentality is that you’re never truly happy. With a good job, a nice home, and a close to ideal relationship— I still struggled with lows, probably more than the average person. Even though I was aware of the quiet luxuries I had, my soul— it doesn’t feel full. Because I had gotten over this tremendous emotional hurdle and had escaped the depth of my depression—I thought it would be time to move on to a new therapist.

I needed new insights for this next chapter in my life: Building my career.

Phase IV: Career Counselling

God, who hated those mandatory and stupid courses they made you take in high school? I am pretty sure after taking that one career quiz, my top choice for careers was a zookeeper. Not kidding at all.

Career planning was a vomit inducing activity in high school because how in the world do you expect a 15 year old to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives, nevertheless, what English class to take in college, (creative writing or advanced?)

Anyway, I am going on 25 now..and I still, surprise surprise, fully do not have my sh**t together. I wanted to get a therapist to help guide me through this rough terrain of the early 20s, and open the gateways to new career options. I needed to get past my own mental blocks, and having someone to keep me accountable was essential.

Although I had progressed quite smoothly in this “phase I” of one career stream— deep down I just knew this wasn’t it. This wasn’t all I was meant to do.

Luckily, your girl is the queen of reinvention, but the next step is just figuring out which character I want to play next in my own movie.

I see my new therapist once a month in a brightly lit, super-zen therapy centre in the heart of Gastown. You know, the type of space that has contemporary paintings, live plants, and coffee table books that look like they’ve never even been skimmed by a hand. My therapist is a very uplifting and spirited lady, and she’s trying to help me rewire certain parts of my thinking that obstructs me from achieving my goal of being a happier human being.

One being—my black and white mentality. Leftover residue from the eating disorder days where food was perceived as either “good” or “evil”; I now see life as either you have it all and made it, or you’re kind of a failure and suck. You’re either disciplined and working minimum 10 hours a day or going off your ass partying in Mykonos on a three month bender (in my dreams!) My black and white mentality produces a lot of guilt tripping and shame. It does not make me a more productive or a higher achieving person.

We’re also navigating my beliefs around money (which directly tie into career), and how to work on living closer and more aligned with my core values and “ideal” type of life. We’re still in the identification phase.

My struggles with misalignment, especially in my career which I’m greatly attached to, contributes greatly to my low moods. This is the piece that really has all my attention right now, even though it feels extremely overwhelming and I’m taking literal baby steps to trudge on and make it happen.

Though there’s no major breakthroughs yet, I’m already working on gradually tweaking my mindset, and letting go of things that don’t serve my highest priorities or interests. It’s the year to be extremely selfish and dedicated to realizing my greater potential on this planet.

And I’m not saying it’s easy at all. In fact, feeling the uncertainty and the self-doubt is more challenging than any academia I’d endured in the past.

Ending Thoughts

Sometimes we enter an unfamiliar situation with no map, and we think we’ll just find our way out without any help. This is a very time consuming and inefficient way to solve problems. This is why getting a therapist is the difference between having a map and none. Therapists are like a guide, they don’t answer your questions for you, but they ask questions in a way that points you toward solving them yourself. We all have a lot of blocks and biases we’re not even aware of, until someone unveils them for us. Working purely off your own intuition introduces you to a life full of self-bias and perhaps, wrong moves. If you only see things, “your way”, it’s difficult to find a resolution to an unfamiliar problem, regardless of how much time you spend on it. Your therapist can give you just one extra clue, and sometimes, that can mean the difference between being stuck and getting unstuck.

Therapy can be quite heavy on the emotions, because you’re unloading and breaking old beliefs. You’re perhaps going back and visiting painful times and memories. But this is the necessary part of healing: Acknowledging. I promise by the end of it, you will feel lighter, and on your way to becoming more healed. It’s not an easy path to take, but it is usually the most necessary one.

If you’ve ever been curious about therapy, feel free to shoot me a message on Instagram @saveurdela_vie