First Time Therapy

By Kyra Higham on March 3, 2017

Getting Therapy for the First Time

 

I realize that I am looking anywhere but her face,

“So, Kyra, why do you think you are here?”

 

The “here” in question is a room with pastel walls with lamps and old fashioned furniture to paint it warm. I’m sitting on a small couch using my coat as a blanket, across from the woman known as my new therapist, her clipboard and pen at the ready waiting for me to speak. I freeze up and grip the sleeves of my jacket tightly, not wanting to meet her eyes just yet so I scan across the room, observing my surroundings. I notice a vase of multicolored flowers at her desk. I admire how wonderful the arrangement is, especially as winter is creeping in.

“Thank you,” she says. Her voice is calm and even. “It helps to have some variety in the room.”

She reminds me of one of my favorite advisors from middle school: welcoming, kind, someone to whom asked constantly how I was doing. They didn’t look the same appearance-wise but her voice brought memories back. I close my eyes and take a deep breath as the memories fade away. For now, I’ll call this therapist Barbara.

Barbara is a therapist, mine, technically, but it is my first visit. I can’t say “my therapist” yet without being too aware of how new this is, how ~New York~ this is, but she’s asking a fair question. I place my latte on her coffee table, next to a box of tissues. I faintly register why they’re within arm’s reach, but I doubt I’ll actually use them today. If ever. Especially as I’ve managed to go without a therapist for seventeen years now.

“I’m here because I have some…problems?”

She smiles. I hold my breath.

It’s an awkward response, but it’s because I don’t know how respond to the situation. My mother saw her daughter crumble under stress before her very eyes and before I went to bed, I heard her talking to therapist after therapist finding the right one. Here in this lightly colored room, I can’t shake the feeling Barbara will simply drag out words from my mouth and work out strategies she sees fit. But it’s talk therapy and I hate talking. Often Barbara asks me questions to get me to speak but I stubbornly remain silent. I don’t trust her, not yet.

This past semester, however, my symptoms persisted: clawing my skin in a fit of anxiety in the mornings, chronic dread in the evenings, and a shit ton of flashbacks that came and went as they pleased. I told myself to breathe as I remain tongue-tied as my body heavy. I thought I was having a heart attack, but I didn’t plan on asking for help from my mother, who is a doctor. Or from anyone.

My mother diagnosed it as “just stress.” After all, school was hectic, my situation with my friends was wavering over my head, and my brother was diagnosed with cancer — all within the span of a couple of months. This all presented me with the very real possibility of a life alone, a life full of loss. This is my greatest fear, to live and die alone. But is that not something everyone’s afraid of? Anyone who’s 18 and unsure of his or her life gets through it. Besides, I could get out of bed and head to school, go to play rehearsal and laugh at my friends’ jokes. I can just go about my daily routine and I’ll be normal, right?

Turns out that that “stress” was a lot more than I bargained for. The stress that haunted my sleeping and waking life turned into anxiety, PTSD, and depression. Barbara had me fill out a questionnaire so she can a sense of where my symptoms fell under. Ever since I was a child, anxiety would cast its shadow and hovered over me like a monster I couldn’t shake. I distinctively remember at five years old, waking up well past midnight to finish my homework in fear that my teacher would yell at me the next day. She didn’t.

I learned at a young age that aloneness was different from loneliness as I spent most of my elementary lunch periods alone. Spending time alone increases and eases my anxieties and jealousies at the same time. They come like waves or tsunamis, pulling me out to sea. My mental conditions rise and fall with the phases of the moon, and drown my mind the way they used to when I was a child.

As I tell Barbara all of this, she nods, smiles more. I flinch, thinking she is lying through her teeth. She flips to a fresh page on her pad. It’s her fourth or fifth, I haven’t paid much attention to it, just the sound it makes. It’s awfully loud. I squeeze my coat sleeves once more.

Barbara asks, “Have you been to therapy before this session?”

My first answer’s yes. Then I added that I was always in therapy from the time I was small when I couldn’t speak properly or had a hard time walking. My older brother thought something was wrong with me and my mother shared that story with me when he asked that question for the first time there. I took what she said to heart and stayed in my room all day. I didn’t eat, nor did I sleep as her words echo in my head. As I cried into a pillow, I asked myself,

“What’s right with me?”

I laugh dryly at this, despite my closed up throat. But it’s a surprise when my breath hitches and my chest tightens. I fidget with my coat, stop to look down, then look at Barbara. She nods and I exhale heavily.

We begin to talk about my school life. It’s been crazy at school lately and I’ve had to fight back tears in the bathroom now and then. Anytime something changes, I feel it a lot more than others as I notice things people don’t bat an eyelash at. Changes at school, at home, in my friendship life; it all means losing something I’ve worked so hard for, forcing me to start over again and pick it up from scratch. Change makes me anxious and defeated.

Our conversation turns to my love life. Barbara asks about my first date. I talk about how when I was in middle school, I was nearly raped in a movie theatre, and he decided to cheat on me the Monday afterwards. Barbara is silent and so am I. I try to stop myself from crying, to keep up my façade of a strong warrior but my heart is hurting. Barbara asks me what happened next. I said that I turned into someone new, embarrassed. I shaped into my former self as a shell with a person completely new as an armor to protect myself from getting hurt again.

Instead of my coat, I reach for the tissue box. My mask starts to crumble but I hold it above my face.  As are the brief silences between Barbara and me, making me feel awkward and uncomfortable. She nods for me, with me, and the things I talk about — loss and/of love, fear and/of change, being ready for them all — in some small way, become things I can breathe in and breathe out.

My friends were once my lifejackets, but it was this pressure and need for perfection on the people I love that tested the waters. After all, they seem normal while I’m not.  Then I ask them for help but no words come out from them. And here I am, in therapy, wondering when and how enlightenment will come.

Barbara says gently,

“We’re out of time.”

“You’re very honest,” she adds.

 

I pause, my arm half in a sleeve.

“It sounds like communication is something you deeply value.”

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