T is for Therapy

Tapestry by textile artist Apanaki Temitayo M. Born in Toronto, raised in Trinidad and Tobago. https://workmanarts.com/artists/apanaki-temitayo/ 

For those who are new here - This year I am writing to topics, in alphabetical order, that were suggested to me by readers. Sometimes this is hard! 

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8/17/2023

Possibly I need more therapy. I’ve been working for weeks on “T is for Therapy” and here I still am. I’ve given up on introducing the topic via a short survey of Indigenous-White relations at Hudson’s Bay fur trading posts in the 1600’s - the point being that humans have evolved through generations of exploitation, loss, violence, and racism. Being neurotic is not illogical.

In the Christianized heritage in which most of us were marinated, the solution to life’s challenges was to obey someone further up the food chain. Other religions have this same dynamic but I think it’s fair for me to stick to the one I know.

Did you watch ‘Shiny Happy People’? One of their practices to “train a child to respect authority” is this. As soon a baby is strong enough to sit up (around six months), the infant is set in the middle of a blanket on the floor. The mom tells it to stay on the blanket. If the baby crawls off the blanket trying to get to the mom or anything else, the baby is reprimanded and “lightly” spanked and put back on the blanket. In this way, they say, the kid learns to obey authority. The abuse of this is breathtaking.

This “obedience fetish” is a philosophy that underlies much of militarized, Christianized culture. There’s always someone to obey and if we don’t, we can be punished. Obey parents even when they have massive issues of their own. Obey teachers, even if they are stupid or abusive. Obey cops. Oh yeah. Obey the boss. Obey racist, anti-woman, anti-immigrant laws that say some people are less worthwhile than others..

How do we get free from this?

In the big picture, laws and social structures have to change.

In the small and personal picture – we have two ways out. Education and therapy. We’re here to talk about therapy.

I remember back in college feeling a bit envious of kids who were going to “counselors.” I sometimes wished that my lack of confidence was as worthy as their important and crazy experiences. Then I moved into the city and encountered genuine crises - being held up at gunpoint when I was a bank teller was traumatizing, truly bewildering relationship issues, being paralyzed by trying to figure out what career I was going to pursue. I knew of a Christian counseling center so I went to a guy and yes, it was scary making that connection for myself. One of the things he made me talk about a lot was why I thought my being unhappy wasn’t “important enough” to deal with.

Therapy begins when we, against our inclinations, take ourselves seriously and begin to regard the question, “In what life were we going to look for happiness?”

Not all therapists are worth the paper they are printed on. Usually, it’s helpful to go to a person you don’t know, who is more or less your age, who matches your gender identification, and in whose presence you feel respected.

Therapists don’t tell you much! You spend all that time, effort, and money and what you get is a person who listens about as well as your dog. Yeah, sometimes they might ask you to try something weird like setting up little toy figures and animals in a small sandbox or keeping a dream journal. But mostly they will ask you to talk about what’s been going on since the last time you met. And what sticks out in your mind about your recent encounters. And what do you think about that? And why did that person bug you so much? Who do they remind you of? I bet a lot of the best therapists are also good at untangling knots. Just keep gently but persistently pulling.

Therapists don’t ask you to obey. They might ask you why you think you obey some people and not others. They might ask you why you are afraid to not obey. They might make you go back and remember a person who didn’t respect you when you were a kid and how that lines up with how you relate to certain people in your life now.

Good therapists are good at finding out how you felt a lot of the time when you were young. What was a prevailing emotion of your childhood? Do you see the links to how you have spent this much of your adulthood putting yourself back into the particular uneasiness of your youth? Not because it was happy, but because it is familiar.

Some people have experienced great trauma. War and accidents. Strong family trauma. They’ve witnessed death and mayhem and loss (I’m thinking of families on Maui now). Many try to handle thier wounds by trivializing them or by being really busy so they can concentrate on something else. Addictive substances work great at obliterating the memory of pain. For a while. Block haunting memories during daylight hours until the awful experiences come back in dreams.

Therapists accompany victims, young and old, back to and through what happened- in order to give them language for the life they are in now. You may have already experienced some of this in your life. Our culture has given us words for traumas we had no language for when we were young. Verbal assault Sexual assault. Date rape. PTSD. Dysfunctional family. High functioning alcoholism. Do you know that moment when you realize, “that awful event didn’t happen to me because I was a disobedient kid, it was ….”

We get a sense of what happened. We acknowledge what we have passed on to others. Being human is often a really hard slog. We do better with words than monsters.

Therapists don’t ask you why your partner acts the way they act. They ask how you relate to that behavior and why you put up with it and why are you so comfortable being this frustrated? They bring it back to you, every damn time. It’s really tedious to end up always being responsible for your own choices and behaviors.

I’m laughing. Ruefully.

Yes, therapy is damnably expensive and inconvenient. So is addiction and sorrow and unhappiness.

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This video is the opening credits to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. “I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me” is sung by a male performer in drag. Awesome movie but I’m telling you what this song is before you click in. It surprises if you weren’t expecting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suzwaW_SqtU