Therapist roulette
What will you get nobody knows...
Hello mixers!
BOY, has it been a while! March flew by in a haze of family visitors and a prolonged cough/cold/flu for me. Somehow we now find ourselves at the end of April, although I’ve been thinking about writing this essay below basically all month. I even wrote it last Friday, but felt it was too depressing a topic to send on any day Friday through Monday. Then this week piled up and here I am about to drop this right before Friday. I hope you’ll forgive me, but also that you’ll still give it a read (even if next week) and a share.
See y’all again soon, for real this time!
Content warning: suicidal ideation, depression
I’ve been meaning to email my therapist for over a month now.
Not for any urgent reason; in fact, I need to email her because there’s nothing pressing. I’ve learned that therapy can be used effectively as a proactive treatment just as much as a reactive one. I don’t need to be having a breakdown or moral dilemma to set up a session. I can, and am encouraged to, call up my therapist, Amelia (not her real name), any old time. That way, I don’t end up on her (virtual) couch months later crying and releasing everything that has built up since the last time I saw her. Instead, I see her before I can even get to that point. And that has made all the difference.
I didn’t always see therapy this way, nor have I always had Amelia, who taught me this approach, as my therapist.
My first therapist was the grad student assigned to see me on the day I went into the University Health Services building to cash in on my one (1) free mental health appointment. It was the spring of my senior year and I had been crying a lot that semester. I cried at the thought of my friends and I moving to different cities, the imminent breakup with my boyfriend, my lack of job prospects. I cried at parties, in my room, at the library. Sometimes I cried for no apparent reason at all.
It wasn’t just the crying, though. The copious tears were often followed or accompanied by bouts of utter apathy, hopelessness and/or dread. Looking back, this was so obviously depression that it makes me laugh how clueless I was, but I really had no idea what depression looked or felt like. I just knew that lying in bed for hours at a time, sometimes crying, sometimes just staring blankly at the ceiling while my mind raced to the darkest places, probably wasn’t the healthiest way to be spending my time.
So I landed in that dimly lit UHS office, filling out mental health questionnaires and answering those same questions out loud to this grad student. I told her everything I just told you above, although probably with more detail. She said, “I don’t think you’re depressed. You must just be stressed by upcoming graduation,” and sent me on my way.
I was stressed, sure, but that didn’t explain the incessant crying or my desire to simply cease to exist. Still, she was the “professional,” and so I listened to her.
You might be surprised to learn that I did not get better after graduation. Living back at my parents house, desperately searching for a writing job, I barely ate or slept. I learned that I had student loans I had to pay back and fell even deeper. I didn’t want to simply cease to exist anymore, I actually wanted to die. The loan amount looked so absolutely insurmountable to me, a 21-year old unemployed graduate, that I thought only death would get me out of a life of financial misery. (Don’t let anyone tell you student loan debt is not a crisis.)
I went to my primary care doctor and told her I was depressed.
“Any thoughts of harming yourself or others?” she asked.
“Nope!” I lied.
“Promise?”
“Yep!” I lied again, thinking of the bottles of hydrocodone I still had from when I got my wisdom teeth and my gallbladder removed the previous summer (in two different, unrelated operations, obviously).
She prescribed me fluoxetine, or Prozac, and handed me a long list of affiliated therapists. I filled my prescription and chose a therapist located close to my house. Not yet comfortable sharing any of this with my family, I kept this all a secret, harboring my pain and opening up only for strangers to see.
I should have known that this therapist was not for me when I walked into the office suite and there was country music playing. The decor screamed “Live, Laugh, Love,” even if there wasn’t a sign that explicitly said it.
I didn’t yet know that not every therapist is going to be a fit for everyone; it would still take me a few years to learn that. It didn’t even occur to me that a therapist could actually be bad for me. I thought all therapists were supposed to help.
Anyways, I ended up crying to this older, tall, blonde therapist who wore cowboy boots and long, floral skirts about how I missed my recent ex-boyfriend and how I worried I’d never amount to anything in life. I sobbed about how ugly I felt.
“You’re not ugly, you’re just pretty in an exotic way! Like Kim Kardashian!”
I never went back there again.
By the time I was living in New York about five months later, I was doing okay on Prozac, but still was not quite mentally well. I knew I needed another therapist, but the pool of non-white therapists who accepted payment on a sliding scale was shallow. I messaged dozens of therapists on PsychologyToday (a great resource) and landed with a middle-aged Chinese woman, who we can call Helene.
Helene was my therapist for just under two years, but she wasn’t a very good therapist (for me). While the Prozac kept me from wanting to die, I was still struggling with a lot: keeping up with work, whether I’d get a full-time writing gig after my internship, whether I’d ever amount to anything, the pests in my apartment, the stupid president of the United States, the state of the entirety of the United States, whether my crushes liked me back. (I contain multitudes.) All of that, and more, roiling through my brain at any given moment, and Helene barely ever said a word to me. Her approach was to just let me word vomit until our 45 minutes were up. She might make an empathetic-sounding “hmmm” or grunt from time to time, but rarely asked me to elaborate. If I ever ran out of something to say, she’d knit her eyebrows together and stare at me. Sometimes, I looked around awkwardly and tried to think of something else to say. Other times, absolutely spent, I could only stare back.
Venting your emotions and thoughts can be helpful, but to a point. Sure I got all that negative self-talk out of my head for the evening, but then what? Helene never gave me the tools or even a hint at how to work through those thoughts or figure out where they stemmed from or how to stop them from taking over my mind in the first place. I came back every week, then every two weeks, with most of the same complaints. Didn’t she get tired of it?
I only began to notice that sessions with Helene weren’t as helpful as I imagined therapy should be towards the end of our tenure. Still, it wasn’t until she told me that I’d have to start paying her more per session, despite knowing that my financial situation was still precarious, that I stopped going.
I’ve been seeing Amelia for six (!!) years now. I was 24 years old when we first met, and she has seen me through both immense turmoil and growth. Much of that growth I owe to her, although she would say that I deserve most of the credit, that I did a lot of this myself just with a bit of guidance.
I obviously do a lot of talking each session, but she does her fair share, too. She shares insights to help me realize I’m not always alone in my experiences and challenges me to dig deeper and to find certain answers myself. She never dismisses what I have to say, and actively helps me reframe unhelpful ways of thinking until I reach that “aha!” moment (although sometimes it’s an “oh, DUH” moment).
She is brown, and doesn’t need me to explain the hurts that come with simply existing as a nonwhite person in this world. She gets why calling someone exotic-looking is not a compliment.
There wasn’t really any way of knowing Amelia would be the right therapist for me when I reached out to her on PsychologyToday. I probably didn’t even know it for sure until two or so years in, in the middle of the pandemic, when she saved me from absolute mental ruin. She gets real with me and is unfailingly honest about everything from my own strengths and setbacks to how the hell my insurance works. She doesn’t merely placate me or act as a sponge to absorb my words and give nothing back; I learn something from her and feel more prepared to face whatever’s outside her (virtual) office each and every session.
always love your writing even on tough subjects like mental health, thank you for being vulnerable and sharing this<3 also, f that cowgirl boho wannabe therapist lol