It’s February 2023. My therapist and I sit opposite each other in the church where my sessions take place every week. A table stands between us laid out with the usual props: a box of tissues and two glasses of water.
“How have you been since I last saw you?” she asks. I rattle through the week: still no contact with my six-month situationship, not speaking to my parents, convinced a friend hates me because of her tone of voice, got too drunk and cried myself to sleep at the weekend. The 50 minutes whirl by. I leave feeling lighter. But there is something else too: a pang of guilt. I didn’t ask her anything in return. In fact, I don’t know a single detail about her life, because I’ve never asked.
Twenty years ago, going to therapy meant something was wrong with you. Now, for members of my generation (I’m 27), it’s a topic you casually drop into conversation over drinks. I started therapy at 23, privately, in the spring of 2022 and stayed for just over a year, returning again for a few months after six months travelling when my life felt slightly chaotic. For the most part, I loved it.
Before therapy I rarely spoke about my childhood. In hindsight I probably should have been in therapy earlier: I was adopted from China at ten months old, then my adoptive mum unexpectedly passed away when I was four, and my dad moved in with a new partner a few years after, having six biological kids of his own. I didn’t know how to regulate my emotions, I avoided conversations about my family, and my self-worth was on the floor. So when my therapist first asked me what my relationship was like with my parents, the tears began gushing out of my eyes.
Therapy gave me space for emotions I’d spent years swallowing with no fear of judgment. Speaking to a qualified stranger about my history offered me comfort and validation I didn’t realise I needed. Obviously I was paying her, so she was, in theory, obliged to be rooting for me, but it felt empowering to be supported by this random woman who handed me tissues each week to dry my face and lifted some of the weight from my chest.
After following her advice, I slowly began putting myself first — something I had never done before. It felt wildly uncomfortable setting boundaries in dating, with my parents and even with my friends. Confronting issues or feelings I would usually ignore resulted in awkward conversations and feelings of shame. Without realising, I’d always presented myself as someone relatively chilled, easy, polite and agreeable. The thought of asking for more, or saying no, made me feel violently sick, as if I was demanding or needy, or worse, disappointing someone.
At first the changes were positive. Then they began to backfire as I started to worry less about my feelings and more about how they were being perceived. In telling people no, would they think I was selfish? Was I becoming unlikeable? I couldn’t tell if this was self-respect or if I was becoming too self-involved. At the same time, I had begun to see people use “therapy speak” out of context, to manipulate those around them. I feared becoming someone who bragged: “Well, my therapist told me this…”
It all made me question: is this helping me or is it just giving me a language to understand myself and excuses for being an emotional wreck? Therapy has taught me to look inward, but when is looking inward productive and when does it become navel-gazing? Every feeling suddenly related to an origin story, preferably rooted in childhood. Every reaction needed unpacking. It was as if I couldn’t just be sad, I was sad because my anxiously attached inner child was being triggered.
And while this language can sometimes be useful, it can become a trap. After a year it began to feel as if I was mindlessly yapping about my life and relating everything to my “trauma”. I was overthinking every situation and relationship. A text from a date cancelling plans resulted in panic attacks from me linking it to being abandoned when I was younger and therefore being hopeless in finding love because everyone will eventually leave me. But there are only so many times you need telling that you are the way you are because of what happened when you were a child. I didn’t need to debunk everything every week. So, in the summer of 2024, I quit.
I’ve thought about going back to therapy this year. The past year has been eventful — I’ve lost some close friends, completed a master’s, started a new job and moved flats four times. I’m still not talking to my parents. But going back feels as though I wouldn’t discover anything new, it would just be me complaining about my life.
It is great that my generation is so open about their mental health and that going to therapy no longer comes with a stigma, but I almost wish I hadn’t trained myself to look so deeply into everything. Now I analyse everything to the point of exhaustion. In my experience, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
