Therapy

I've been in and out of therapy since I was a kid. The corpulent man who would let me draw on his table with paper and crayon and pick out ink blots to see how I interpreted them. I liked him because he would let me play Connect Four with him at the end of our sessions. Though I didn't know why I was there, he gave me medication that my mom would slice in half and crush into powder before putting it in a container of chocolate pudding. I wasn't ever good at swallowing pills. She did this every night and to this day, chocolate pudding reminds me of the powder medicine.

As I grew up into my later teen years, he saw me again. Still corpulent. Not as his patient but as a daughter, waiting for my step-dad's session to finish. I don't believe in quick-fix therapies you dump your problems in an hour towards, and then forget about for the rest of the week. That's lazy, but that's how my step-dad was. Yelling until his face got red and his veins popped out of his neck.

During college, I took advantage of free counseling. I came to clear my mind. To find respite in a hectic college schedule. I remember going during my last semester, and my counselor secretly coming to see my portfolio show before I left town the next day, pretending as if she didn't know me in confidential professionalism. I never walked for graduation. I find these silly rituals to be superfluous and meaningless to me. Or maybe I just wanted the hell out. Impervious to permanence.

Either way, it was years later before I found another therapist and she was horrible. A good therapist is hard to find. They can be just as damaging to your psyche as anyone. With a profession full of dysfunctional people who just want to figure themselves out, objectively, it's no wonder that psychiatry gems are hard to find.

This particular therapist would criticize my boyfriend at the time, when I was struggling to make sense of a rocky relationship. I didn't appreciate her depreciating tone, and I didn't appreciate it when she would constantly interrupt to talk about herself and how her husband wouldn't do such and such and how her husband does this instead, giving off the impression that my boyfriend was a total shit (which, arguably, he could have been). Still, I was trying to fix something, not acknowledge how much my relationship sucked. I wanted to get past that... And I couldn't with her barrage of opinions and a deaf ear.

Trying to figure out what was wrong with me, she had me do a quiz which I later found available online for free. How credible is a free online test administered by your own therapist? Well, not very. She told me I could have Asperger's Syndrome, which is part of the Autism spectrum. Simply because my answers to her quiz leaned towards the anti-social, introverted, and slightly depressed person that I was. Sure, I may be awkward, and I may be introverted, but that doesn't mean I'm autistic! After getting a 2nd opinion from another therapist, who laughed at her "diagnosis", I knew that it was all bullshit. Just like having "childhood schizophrenia" was all bullshit.

Almost 10 years later and I finally found out the "medicine" that I took during my childhood therapy was Haldol, a drug commonly used to treat schizophrenia. My misdiagnosis came about after a highly convincing, imaginative and elaborate attention-seeking stint I did after playing with a homemade Ouija board; pretending to be "posessed" such that I started to believe that I really was. Reality and fantasy became blurred, as my overactive imagination took over. Maybe I really was crazy, or maybe I was just a child.

The 2nd opinion came from a therapist who had my whole life problems pinned before my first hour session was over! She had me crying and reduced to tears as I thought, damn, she's good! Her apparent talent at getting to the Truth, and cutting to the chase threatened me. Because as much as I complained about my shitty therapist who diagnosed me with Asperger's, I stayed with her because she was safe. Because I knew she wasn't really helping, and because really helping meant really changing. I wasn't ready for that yet.

Being in and out of therapy isn't something that I'm ashamed of. Rather, it's something that I feel can be good for anyone, regardless if you need medication. It's great to talk about your feelings, to have an outlet. To purge through writing is just as effective. I came back to the therapist with a 2nd opinion a year later, right after my boyfriend at the time and I finally split. I remained with her for almost a year, but as summer started to dwindle to a close and my Asia plans were finally starting to come to fruition, I noticed that I didn't feel like I needed therapy much longer. Simply put, the new goal of Asia put my life back on a track where I was previously lost. Sure, I may still feel "in limbo" sometimes as I wait for my trip to come, but I am happier. I have momentum. And I am ready for change.