Spoiler Alert: Therapy is Awesome

I’m here to tell you the most important and most obvious realization I have maybe ever had. And that is the amazing beauty of what therapy can do, especially when you aren’t even noticing it. I sat in therapy today realizing I was grateful.  And I won’t sugar coat it.  Today has been shitty.  There has been grief and sadness that will be present for a long time after today.  But, I was grateful for the ability to not only experience these feelings without a sense of panic but to also experience these feelings and understand why and how those feelings are working in my mind and in my heart.

When I started therapy and especially when it started to get hard, a.k.a. when the real work needed to be done, I was angry. (As you all know if you’ve been reading my sporadic posts) I was angry that there were other people out there experiencing panic and experiencing anxiety and anger and  that they didn’t have to go to therapy. I was jealous in those moments of people who were able to go to a psychiatrist or a general practitioner who issued the medication without requiring talk therapy as well. And if it wasn’t for my therapist calling me and telling me to get my butt back in her office and to stop canceling sessions, I’m sure I would’ve found a doctor who would’ve written me the prescriptions without requiring the work.

A little background here.  In August of 2016, I had a massive panic attack that at the time seemed out of the blue.  I immediately went to a psychiatrist who was happy to prescribe Paxil and Xanax as needed after a quick conversation with follow up appointments every other month for a quick check in.  Shockingly, the panic attacks kept happening and I was getting more frustrated.  Finally, I admitted that I may actually have some work to do and after a year, I found a new psychiatrist.  This psychiatrist wanted to actually help long term rather than short term and required talk therapy if I wanted to continue to see him.  Conveniently for everyone involved, his wife is an AMAZING (I’m hardly biased) talk therapist who has helped change my life. Fast forward almost another year and here we are.

It has taken me a year to be thankful and to see the beauty in the work that I have done in therapy. I have experienced almost every emotion I could experience in the past couple of months and I have been able to witness the beauty that is therapeutic work. Instead of feeling frustrated that I have an anxiety disorder that is often brought on by my sensitivity to any and all emotions, I am grateful that I am able to experience happiness, joy, sadness, grief, and excitement to an extent that I don’t think everyone else gets to all the time. It can make things so much harder but it also makes me such a more empathetic person.

Last week, I actually started the process of going off of all medication.  Paxil is no joke and with my current prescription it will take 6 weeks to completely stop taking it.  Luckily, I haven’t needed Xanax in a few months.  One big thing I notice without medication, or less medication, is my ability to cry.  When I took Paxil, I noticed that I cried so much less—most likely due to that slight edge of panic in my emotions that was being maintained medically—and this will sound crazy, but when I started taking the medication I missed the crying!  Crying is so therapeutic for me so today when those tears flowed when I was feeling sad I was grateful again.  And instead of feeling a weird disassociation with that emotion, I feel relief.  (Let’s note, I don’t think I actually disassociated with emotions, but in comparison how I ‘feel’ emotions when I am not medicated it felt like my own form of disassociation—AKA I really feel feelings). 

Takeaways:

1.      1. Therapy is worth it.  My work in therapy isn’t even done, but today was just a massive moment of success. 

2.    2.   Medication can be and is SO helpful.  I will probably be on it again when needed at some point, but right now that isn’t the case. 

3.     3.  When things are hard, keep going.  There is beauty in the struggle.

A quick thank you  if you are still reading!  Thank you for sharing this journey with me and for reaching out when you do!