Celebrating 10 Years of Therapy
How My Attitude Towards Mental Health Changed From My 20s to 30s to 40s
2011 and I was at a low point. Most alarmingly, it wasn’t clear that I could get out of my situation by myself. The mental stress and overwork at my job helped catalyze a physical disability of repetitive strain which created a vicious cycle. The bottoming occurred over the summer when I was supposed to be healing during a sabbatical. Being a proactive problem solver I tossed all sorts of Eastern and Western approaches to diagnosing and solving the pain in my hands and arms. Instead of finding a cure, I was losing trust in my own body’s ability to recoup and imagining a life of marginal productivity. This fed into my failure tiger fear, which was already heightened by the impending birth of my daughter. The beginnings of anxiety and depression convinced me that I needed to abandon my belief that only *I* could help myself and seek a therapist. I’ve now been seeing him for 10 years.
In my 20s I wasn’t prepared to embrace therapy. I’d been exposed to it via friends and family members but generally felt that I could solve my own problems by myself. That unless one’s situation was severe and verging on physical self-harm, therapy was unnecessary for me — I was better off thinking and working my way out of my anxiety. Others, they might need this…
