I’ve been in therapy for 4 and a half years. Today was my last session.
By: Lindsay Grace Dodgson
Tags: Depression, Anxiety, Therapy, Mental Health, Abusive Relationships

I’ve been in therapy for 4 and a half years. Today was my last session.

My alarm blared out at 6:30 a.m. one day in June 2016. A feeling I was not familiar with, not being (or someone who would ever be) a morning person.

I dragged myself out of bed, got up with the minimum day preparation I could get away with (brushed my teeth) and walked the five minute journey from my East London flat to a living room in a building on the road that sat just perpendicular to mine. I walked up the stairs, found number 213, and rang the doorbell. At least I’m assuming I did all this — I have no memory up until I was sitting in an armchair, looking across at a small bespectacled woman I would later see every Wednesday for the next four and a half years.

I sat there are I cried. I cried and I cried for 45 minutes, attempting to tell her everything that had built up inside me that I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain. A jumbled mess of words tumbled out, while I battled my internal fail-safe defences I’d been relying on for 25 years. Never to speak to anyone about your feelings. Never divulge. Never let them know you’re weak.

But a few days prior my heart and soul had pleaded with my self-reliant brain to reach out to someone, anyone, and they just scraped the win. So using the first website Google provided that offered access to a therapist, I sent an email. The exact words of the message I cannot remember, but the essence I do: Help me.

That June morning I tried to describe the breakdown of a relationship that had happened a couple of weeks previously and how it felt different to anything I’d been through before. I was heartbroken, sure. I’d been heartbroken before. But I was also broken everywhere else. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even stand the idea of talking to my closest friends about it. I didn’t understand why this relationship, that had lasted less than a year, had left me in pieces.

The next four years would explain how my mental wellbeing had been yanked at from every corner for almost my entire life. Micro-tears had been forming bit by bit, and the last 12 months had ripped right through. It’s an unattended pressure cooker left heating on the stove, the stranger with glasses told me. It’s finally boiled over.

I’d never really thought about abuse before. My idea of a toxic relationship was like what many people’s is: a dramatically cruel, brutish character who lives up to everything you expect a ferocious villain to be. Over the next few months in that armchair I’d realise life doesn’t actually imitate art when it comes to abuse. More often than not it occurs without much warning. It’s not always covert. It’s not always obvious. It’s not always violent. It can be sneaky, and it hooks you in when you’re at your most vulnerable. While your pressure cooker is intermittently spilling out bursts of misdirected aggression, sadness, and fear, you’re too distracted by a lifetime of trying to push it all back down to notice someone slowly turning up the heat.

He wasn’t the reason I needed therapy, but he was the reason I eventually sought it. I’d learn over the coming months and years patterns I’d developed in childhood left me with an unhealthy attachment style that clung onto whoever showed me attention. He was the latest in a string of unsatisfying relationships that had ended sadly, but inevitably. His yelling, his berating, and his calculated takedown of my character and intentions was something else entirely that left me a confused mess. He’d told me he loved me within six weeks of us meeting and he wanted to be with me forever. A couple of months later he was regularly telling me to go fuck myself and that I was a selfish cunt.

As I said, his words and eventual discarding of me when I was no longer useful wasn’t the cause of what was “wrong.” He wasn’t why I needed to learn how to trust and love myself. But I am thankful to him in a weird way because the chaos he created sent me, fragmented, on a path to pick up the pieces and become whole.

What started out as just wanting someone to open up to about a breakup turned into a lot more. We talked about things I never expected to talk to anyone about. I say we. I did the majority of the talking, which is a dynamic that occurs in exactly no other facet of my life. She often offered up a nod, and an “mmm,” and a tidbit of genius now and then. But the rest of it was me getting out of my own head.

The early days were focused on the immediate and obvious trauma, but in the sessions since we’ve covered everything from dating, to work qualms, to the government’s handling of COVID-19. We discussed my school days — how much I hated it because of the mean girls and meaner teachers. We discussed my parents. A lot. Their breakup and how they fell short of keeping me feeling safe as it felt like my world crumbled around me. How I’d been kept out of the loop as my parents made decisions, wondering what was going on and filling in the gaps to make sense of my reality. Having to do it all myself as an only child, with no siblings to talk to.

She was the first person I told when my grandma died. It was her I turned to when I lost my step brother to suicide two Christmases ago.

Over countless conversations, I realised I’d never felt secure in the world, which is why I’d been so obsessed with making my life small. I liked my whole world to be visible to me where I sat on my bed in a tiny box room, anxious to leave because of what might await me outside.

Boyfriends were something solid to hold onto. It was never fair of me to put such a responsibility on them. Most were kind and loved me enough to put up with my behaviour that was a result of the fact I would never truly love them back. I hadn’t worked out what love was supposed to be. It’s cliché for a reason that you have to love yourself before you can love anybody else. It took me connecting with someone who would never care for me to go through the looking glass. He ripped my sense of self open and fed upon the hurt and pain inside, propagating it, and growing it into a monster that would start devouring me from within.

When he was gone, the monster remained. It was still eating away at me, using everything that was left unsaid in my soul as fuel. It was only when I started talking in front of a stranger I realised words are power. Words help you free yourself from your own mind. Words, whether spoken or written, take things from spiralling in the ether and make them real. It’s scary when you stop deflecting and face things head on, but only because it feels different. Starting to vocalise where you are and what you feel is the weapon you need to rid yourself of the monsters for good.

A massive part of my healing has come from the knowledge my existence isn’t a nuisance — the role I slotted myself into as a daughter and school friend from an early age. I’m not bothering the people in my life when I share my experiences with them. It was having a space to unapologetically talk about myself for 50 minutes every week that’s made me finally realise this.

I play a different role now, and it’s whoever I choose to be.

We decided a few weeks ago we would work towards ending our sessions by the end of 2020. I get that it’s the weirdest time ever to stop seeing a therapist, with a pandemic still ripping its way through the country and everyone’s mental health taking a battering. More people than ever before might be reaching out to try and deal with the fallout of their lives, be it professional or something else. But for me it made sense to draw my time with her to a close.

Sure, I’ve suffered and felt low just as much as anyone over the last few months. Perhaps more than some. I’m still recovering from some of the damage inflicted by the first national lockdown, and I do still find myself spiralling. My anxious brain still likes to remind me of the past when things are getting tough. It’s like the memories linger there just when I need them the least.

The difference is I have the mental tools to counteract my spirals. I recognise when I’m hurting myself and being destructive. I can put a stop to it when I start beating myself up. When I hear his voice telling me I’m an awful person, I’m unsuccessful, everyone hates me, and I should just give up, I know that none of it is true.

When my world is shaken up like a snow globe, I know the flakes will settle. I know I have the power of words to put a name to the monsters that rear their ugly heads and stop them in their tracks. I know my boundaries and that sticking to them doesn’t make me a bad person, a bad friend, a bad partner, or a bad daughter. I know I’m safe and the floor isn’t about to give way underneath me.

I’ve spent so much of the last four and a half years expecting the other shoe to drop when things went my way. Sometimes it did, that’s just life. But more importantly, sometimes it didn’t. I’ve learned that it’s ok to not be ok, but actually, it’s also ok to be ok too. If I have a lot to be thankful for, and that’s fine. I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder. Happiness, it seems, is pretty quiet.

It’ll still take work. I’ll still have to remember to take some time to check in with myself — preferably at least once a week, imitating to some degree what I would do in my sessions. But I also know now that airing the mess in my head to the people around me is a perfectly good substitute, and a necessary one, to stop myself falling into old habits.

I’ll likely be working on my mental health forever, whether that’s giving myself a break for being burnt out, or making the space for a time out when I’m cognitively overloaded. There will be good days and bad days — but bad days do not have to signify disaster. My world isn’t going to be destroyed because I receive saddening news, or indeed if the media gives saddening news to everyone. If anything, the current circumstances are the ultimate test. Do I reach out when I’m scrambling, or do I once again internalise and hide inside myself?

I don’t know, is the answer. But I do trust myself a lot more than I used to, and I know that I know what to do now. I also know therapy is there as an option, if that’s what I decide is what I need to do. And my stranger-turned-sort-of-friend is there if I ever require her listening ear again.