Notes From Therapy

(send my therapist a therapist)

This is how our hour together would typically go:

We'd be sitting across the screen from each other. Mid-session, my eyes would glaze over.

"What's coming up for you? Stay with it."

I'd squeeze my eyes shut, keenly concentrating. The pain is coiled up and hidden away from the light of my consciousness. I must let it out before it slithers away and I dissociate.

It usually took a few seconds.

When the tears come, my body heaves. The grief erupts like lava. It spills out of me with an intensity that is as unexpected as it is relieving.

This beautiful, ugly crying happened again last week. My therapist was across the screen, watching quietly. Some weeks ago, we'd decided to bring our four-plus-year therapeutic alliance to a pause. The weight of this decision had only just begun to strike me.

Is this the person who knows me best? Better than family, lovers, and friends? Does she demand less from me than anyone else?

My heart cracks, and it mends.

It is amazing that therapists exist. For me, finding M was like finding water in the desert. But then it is also somewhat sad that the only options for such agenda-less, unconditional support are in the context of a capitalistic transaction.Do I really have to pay someone to care for me in this way?

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From here

I've said it before - my experience is that therapy is terrifying, enlightening, alienating, and entirely essential work. Four years and a bit in, I'm stunned by the leaps we've made.

Here's a rough distillation of everything I've learned - this is part an ode to my brilliant therapist and part an attempt at tying loose ends. (What can I say, I'm trying to be better at endings.)

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Healing is not linear: I initially took a (naive) productivity mindset to therapy, expecting to tick off problems like a to-do list. I quickly learned to let that go. The insights come like fireflies - they are bright, brilliant, and fleeting. But you can't catch them all and preserve them in a jar to examine later. They become part of you, changing you in ways you can't always pinpoint.

Still, you can trust that they'll show up. I spoke to an acquaintance after several years last month on the phone, and she paid me the biggest compliment.

"Uthara! Have you realized you don't talk at the speed of light anymore?"

"Yes, and I haven't lost my keys or credit cards in years either! Would you believe it!"

The strength of the therapeutic alliance matters: The single biggest determinant of whether therapy will work for you is whether your therapist and you click. I got lucky - my therapist was the first person I spoke with, and it was an immediate fit. Instead of "Hi X, my name is Y, can we speak?" I wrote her a long, rambling, unselfconscious essay on WhatsApp recounting all of my troubles, and she responded gently and kindly. That was that. Serendipity at service.

Nothing is exactly as it appears:  I thought that what I saw was all there was. As is the surface of the pond was the whole thing. Through years in therapy, I've realized that the lens through which I saw the world directly impacted how I received people, places, and situations. The world, through my eyes, isn't quite the world as it is. It's the world colored, distorted, filtered by me. By my past - every hurt, every joy, every random Tuesday afternoon. And so I could see that it wasn't that my colleague from 2019 was being 'difficult,' I was simply projecting a past story onto them. As we did the work, it was inevitable that the world softened and opened up.

There is no escaping the family heirloom: About two years in, I began to note the recurring motifs in my parents' personal narratives and was struck by how closely they mirrored mine. A little digging and asking around, and I began piecing together what was an elaborate history of particular affectations and ways of being across generations. It turned out that I have my mother's side of the family to thank for an almost neurotic occupation and curiosity with the esoteric and my father's side to thank for my temper, mischief, and love for excess.

Learning about the intergenerational nature of trauma has been eye-opening - this stuff is the ultimate domino effect. I understand now that perhaps the most coveted privilege on earth is being born into a lineage of reasonably well-adjusted humans with healthy attachment styles.  And that the bravest, loneliest thing one can do is to be a black sheep.

Boundaries, Boundaries: Learning to say no without feeling like I've kicked a puppy has been my personal rite of passage. In therapy, we discover that boundaries are not acts of rejection but rather invitations to deeper connection. They are the framework within which intimacy can flourish. By clearly delineating where we end and others begin, we create the space necessary for authentic relating.

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This is the end of the list. I like lists because they help you make sense of a thing and give it structure. But life isn't quite so neat, and neither is therapy. You have to do the work and then do it over again and again. For now, I pause. But this is all still very TBC.

Much love. Have a great week!

A Gen Z person told me that it is not that deep.