10 Years of Reflection

10 years ago, I was still living in St. Petersburg, working in the office of a tech corp, and still coupled. My life looked quite different: no singleness, no emigration, and no English as the main social language. It was when I found my psychotherapist: the turning point.

It was not out of need. I mean, I was in need of one, but I wouldn’t admit it. I was raised to be hyper-independent, never asking for help (because if I did, all I got was my agency taken away). I needed to believe I was fully capable of doing anything.

It happened out of curiosity.

In my circles, then, people avidly read popular psychology and understood the importance of mental hygiene alongside physical fitness. If you could afford an egg Benedict brunch, you should also do yoga and therapy. Part of the care package for self-reliant people who could afford it.

We aimed for self-improvement because systemic improvements weren’t an option. We all had a lot of shit to work through, anyway.

There is much to say on how many therapeutic approaches are individualistic, western-gaze, focused on fixing the self instead of building the community, ignoring the bigger picture, not always neurodivergent-friendly, or queer-friendly. I won’t dive into it here, but I am happy to acknowledge it.

There is much to say about the lack of certification for therapy, coaching, and other helping professions in Russia since their rise in the 2010s. You could do a three-month course and proudly call yourself a ‘certified psychotherapist’: the regulations were slow to catch up with demand. But you could also have 10 years of experience and a good education, yet still hurt the people you claim to help. It was a minefield ten years ago, and clients were sometimes disappointed. We had to rely on recommendations and learn on the go.

I was friends with practicing therapists because we had similar interests. I worked at the publishing house, editing translations about toxic relationships between adult children and emotionally unavailable parents. The bestsellers. Everyone agreed that we knew no one who wouldn’t benefit from reading them.

The society was full of generational issues: adults of the Second World War1 were only surviving, lacking the capacity to be emotionally present for their children. Their children grew up not in touch with their feelings and never felt good enough to earn love from those closest to them. It was a chain reaction that someone needed to stop.

Growing up as millennials who could afford it (in terms of money, time, and headspace), we had to soberly reflect on what we inherited and what to do with it. Many of us spent hard-earned resources and scarce time on understanding the emotional history.

For some of us, that meant losing many relationships, including with relatives, because they relied on us being compliant and silent. Only later, I found that the ultimate toxic relationship I had was not with my family, even, but with my country. It is like a nesting doll2: you hurt yourself because you’ve learned from those who’d hurt you that this is love. It doesn’t go away without introspection and focused work.

I’ve read in a book back then that 80% people in Switzerland had secure attachment style, based on some research. In the USA, only 50%. Similar reports from St. Petersburg landed at 3%. My therapist (and my friends who were therapists) joked that the last assumption was generous.

In theory (one good, basic book is Attached), attachment style could be changed over time. It reflects our expectations of the environment and the groundness in self. It improves if we are surrounded by “safer” people as partners and friends.

In 2016, I studied narrative practice, a delicate way to ask questions by centering the person who answers them, not yourself. During practice sessions, I saw how we bring our baggage into everything we do, filling the blanks with our own preconceptions. I felt the urge to clean the lens that I was looking through to see the world, so I brought less of my own baggage and could interact with real people, not my projections and preconceptions (or at least to move in that direction). It felt like a really important goal to have.

I was reading a lot about therapeutic relationships and found it intriguing. For example, books like ‘Existential Psychotherapy’ by Irvin Yalom, ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, ‘Maps of Narrative Practice’ by Michael White, ‘Enlightening Gestalt’ by John Enright, ‘The Search for Existential Identity: Patient-Therapist Dialogues in Humanistic Psychotherapy’ by James Bugental, and ‘Existential Counseling & Psychotherapy in Practice’ by Emmy Van Deurzen.

It looked like magic. How were they able to work it, really? And what could have changed for me if I were their client? Was I able to find something crucial, too?

It happened out of curiosity.

I followed a writer on Facebook because I loved her text and didn’t want to miss the next one. Later, I saw on my feed that she was also a practicing therapist, now looking for additional clients. I had a good gut feeling, so I made an appointment.

I disclosed right away that I didn’t have a problem or a request, but I’d like to try it out. This May, it’s the 10-year anniversary of our work together. 50 minutes weekly, first offline, then online in the same city, then again offline, and then online from a different country. Not getting the sessions covered by insurance. Paying out of pocket, just like I paid for yoga during all these years, or the swimming pool.

It’s difficult to dissect what changed in my life during these years because of this work and what was due to other reasons; it is all interconnected. But it was an essential part of a huge change in me. I wouldn’t recognize a person I was before 2016.

Psychology became a big interest of mine. Most of my friends and acquaintances before emigration were either actively in therapy, or were in therapy once, or were therapists themselves. We recommended new psychology books to each other. I remember discovering ‘Maybe You Should Talk to Someone’ by Lori Gottlieb and telling EVERYONE about this gem. Later, it was translated into Russian and became a bestseller. We all discussed what we learned from our therapy sessions as much as we discussed specialty coffee blends.

Moving abroad, I kind of expected that life in Berlin would be similar. But it’s really not.

I mean, I still have my international friends around who value and continue to have a therapist, out of pocket, regularly, working through emigration and all our own shit, on top of the state of the world that we witness, not being able to change much. On top of living with a work visa or a residence permit, from one salary to another, no generational wealth, being queer, fighting health issues, having no contact with family, stuck between languages, and trying our best to maintain the highest level of spoken German we can. I now admit that I need support, both mental and physical, and I am getting a lot of it via various sources.

But the German system works differently, and the habits are different. Private therapy is hardly affordable, and free options come with long waiting lists and many bureaucratic hoops — plus, most services are in German and not open to people who are not conversational in it. It is hard enough to open up, and to do it in a language you don’t feel comfortable with is additional pain.

My friend’s therapist says that being born in Russia and having grown up in Russia are two life-long traumatic events you need to work through during life, ideally from a safer space.

I learned that the type of therapy typically covered here by insurance (and therefore the one most therapists get certified in) is CBT — cognitive behavioral therapy. The reason is simple: CBT can estimate how many hours are needed to “fix” a problem, and that number can be approved. Ideally, within that timeframe, you solve it. But one method can’t solve everything, and many issues are rooted in a deeper, generational setup rather than in behavioral change.

The catch is that many other approaches are too vague to be covered by insurance in Germany.

Some require a serious time commitment. I’ve heard that psychoanalysis isn’t productive if you do it less than three times a week — ideally every day. Apparently, even skipping Sundays creates a “Monday crust” that hinders your progress. I mean, can you imagine adding daily sessions to your life? I can’t, though it does sound fascinating.

Other approaches go wide, working with reflection and depth rather than managing a specific issue. You explore family history… things you’ve been avoiding for decades… who you’ve been choosing as friends and partners… discovering the needs that you weren’t allowed to have because it made your family and society uncomfortable… you take the long way around to come back renewed, stronger. It’s rich and good, but also unpredictable and a burden for the medical system.

It’s harder in Berlin than I’d imagined to find people who debate types of psychotherapy over eggs Benedict. Most people interested in therapy are therapists, and their interest is dry and professional: it’s not a lifestyle or a common interest. It’s work. They are off on Sunday. And my friend in St. Petersburg, who is a therapist, is learning another method out of pocket over the weekend; she’ll tell me, starry-eyed, all about it during our next video call.

I notice that many people in Berlin don’t see therapy as an option because it’s seen as ad hoc rather than a regular supportive measure. You’re not allowed to have support if you’re not “broken enough”. You reach for it to “fix” things, not to improve your quality of life or your relationships. I kind of understand it; I have been there. But time has passed, and now I think the system I’m observing is robbing people of the chance to experience life more deeply, pushing them to leave it unexamined.

I am the foreign object here, so it’s on me to adjust.

But if there is one thing I’d learned from my 10-year journey, it is how to sit with discomfort.

So I’ll manage.

Or I’ll look for help.