Mental Wellness
Observations on successful therapy (so far)
Let me enumerate the ways my mental health has improved since I started therapy in October:
1. I have gone from five or six servings of alcohol a day to two or four servings of alcohol in a week. This is clearly huge. I was trying to drink my anxiety and panic attacks away. I was also trying to drink away my anger, sadness, and any other emotion I had.
Not surprisingly, that wasn’t working.
2. I am sleeping at night. Let me repeat that: I, the famously insomniac panic-attack-at-3-a.m. person, Am Sleeping at Night. No more painfully wakeful anxiety attacks. I don’t wake up every two hours all night long. When I do wake up (I always wake up to go to the bathroom at least once, my bladder is incapable of making it through eight hours), I am able to snuggle back down into my bed and fall back to sleep. Even if Dan is snoring (usually)! (KNOCK ON WOOD FOR ALL OF THIS, OF COURSE; I hope I’m not jinxing it.)
3. I am managing my anxiety without medication for the first time in two years. I’m glad Prozac was there for me when I dearly needed it. I don’t know how I would feel these days if other anxiety medications didn’t have horrid side effects for me. Medication is a boon when it works. While it stopped being effective for me, I’m also glad I had the resources to be able to seek out therapy.
4. I am present and engaged with my family in healthy ways. Now, that doesn’t mean that everything is hunky dory all the time. I get irritated and cranky; I sometimes snap at the children; I sometimes need to retreat from intense conversations with my husband. But even so: I am there. I am in it. I don’t withdraw and try to “deal with it,” and of course, I don’t turn to a drink to soothe my nerves.
My therapist is impressed that I have come so far in only about twelve sessions. And while I do give her credit for being the therapist I needed when I needed her, and for throwing open a door to my innermost fears and anxieties, I also give myself the bulk of the credit for walking through that door and finding the root of my anxiety, naming it, and then saying, “Hey, you know what, it’s okay. We are going to deal with this.”
I had a scared, panicky little girl living inside of me — inside of my brain and inside of my heart — a little girl who couldn’t get the love, acknowledgement, and attention she needed unless she raised a giant fuss. Hence my anxiety attacks. My adult self was sure that if I just took care of everyone else, if I just was on hand to comfort everyone and meet everyone’s needs, regardless of what I needed, then All Would Be Fine.
My façade of Extremely Competent and Confident Adult, while not wholly bullshit, was covering up my Inner Child. It wasn’t until I acknowledged her and figured out a) what she needed and b) how to get it that I started to heal.
And all she needed was the surety that she would be loved No Matter What, and some time and space to play and be a child, and just like that, she was okay. We were okay.
I originally made therapy goals out of the things I thought were causing my anxiety (i.e. grief, trauma, fear). I thought in therapy, if I processed those things, I would get better. But in a way, my grief and trauma and fear — while valid — were symptoms, and the root cause of anxiety was me not taking care of my emotional needs or comforting myself. I put my own emotional health at the bottom of my list.
I also worried overly about communicating my emotional needs because it felt risky. It also, at times, felt pointless — my emotional needs have never been taken care of by others, so why would that happen now? Now I realize I come from a good family; I have a good husband, children who want a healthy and happy mom, and good friends, and I don’t have to worry about them rejecting me or not listening to me. But, of course, they also can’t help me if I don’t talk to them.
Being an adult, and not just “adulting,” going through the motions of being a grown up who has her shit together, is hard work. Anyone doing it well deserves a ton of credit. Tending to one’s mental health, whether through medication, therapy, or a combination of the two in order to become a more well person also deserves encouragement and praise.
I have moved into maintenance therapy after only 14 sessions, and I will be talking to my therapist in about two weeks. Eventually, that will become monthly, and then taper off completely. As long as I keep prioritizing my emotions, dealing with them and not ignoring them, and communicating my needs to myself and others, I expect good health will be mine for some time.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
