shit, i think the therapy worked

If you count how long I have been in psychotherapy, it’s been six years. If you count how long I have been in therapy all together, well, I met my first therapist at the age of sixteen. To say the least, therapy is something I know very well. And now, as a mental health professional myself, therapy has practically become my second language.

I know my attachment style. I know my triggers. I know where my fear of abandonment comes from and why rejection can sometimes feel far bigger than the thing I am actually being rejected from. I know about boundaries, nervous systems, trauma responses, inner children, cognitive distortions and all the other words you eventually collect after spending enough time sitting opposite someone asking, “and how did that make you feel?”

I can intellectualise the absolute shit out of myself.

I knew why I was doing things while continuing to do them anyway. I could recognise a pattern as I was actively repeating it. I could tell you that something was a trauma response and then proceed to respond to it exactly as my trauma intended. There is something both impressive and deeply irritating about being incredibly self-aware and still making the same fucking choices.

Little did I know that a huge part of therapy is actually not only learning, but accepting that there isn’t something deeply wrong about you.

For years, I think I approached therapy with the underlying belief that there was a version of me somewhere underneath all of this that needed to be uncovered. A healthier, calmer, less emotional, less complicated version of me. If I could just understand myself enough, process enough, heal enough, eventually I would get to her.

Of course, this isn’t how therapy worked. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here reading my blog series, shit, I think the therapy worked, because I would probably still be sitting in someone’s office, on someone’s waiting list, or lying on my bed pages deep into another self-help or psychology book that promised me all the answers.

Therapy is a deeply individual and personal journey, and what worked for me may not work for you. But in the hope that I can squish together my own personal experiences with my professional clinical expertise, I’m hoping this series can give you little snippets of the things I’ve learnt along the way — the things that genuinely changed something for me, the things I wish I had understood sooner, and the things that took me years to actually accept rather than simply understand.

So, in our first part of the series, I want to welcome you to the world of core beliefs.