Episode Summary
In this episode I share my experiences of my first therapy session. All straightforward stuff. We opened on administration (always a good place to start), talked about how the sessions will run and then got into it. We covered a lot of ground including learned helplessness, vulnerability, rejection and what love means. I also share an unexpected emotional reaction I had that took me by complete surprise.
Episode Transcription (Edited)
Welcome to today’s episode of the Hope, Help and Happiness podcast.
Yesterday I mentioned at the end of the episode that I was about to go and have my first therapy session. Well, yesterday I went and had my first therapy session. This was recommended to me as part of my journey through the NHS efforts to support me.
Yesterday I recounted how at the first assessment the nurse I was speaking to recommended I have some form of counselling. She didn’t feel that CBT (Cognitive Based Therapy) was appropriate for me. I’d already turned down antidepressants and so she felt I would benefit from counselling.
The problem with the NHS is it doesn’t offer counselling as part of its service. They offer all sorts of other treatments but not counselling. However I was recommended to go and get some. They suggested a local service that I contacted and got an appointment which was recounted in yesterday’s episode.
So yesterday was the first session (which took place after I recorded yesterday’s podcast).
I walked into town and went back to the therapy rooms I’d visited last week for the assessment. The rooms are off a small road opposite a car park. To get to them you have to go down four concrete steps to get to the door that’s below street level. A loud knock on the door and the therapist comes and collects you and takes you to the therapy room. And then when they finish, they escort you out.
There’s no waiting room so you can’t hang around. You have to arrive either dead on time or you’re late or if you’re early you hang around until your allotted time. When I got there, a young woman was sat on the steps, absorbed by her phone waiting to go in.
They try and stagger the appointments so visiting patients don’t have potentially embarrassing situations where you bump into another patient standing outside, obviously waiting for therapy. But this time it didn’t work for some reason. This woman is possibly late or the appointments clash and they (whoever organises these things) didn’t realise it.
She said she hadn’t knocked yet as she was early for her appointment so I gave a loud knock on the door with the large brass door knocker. A few moments later, a therapist opened the door and meekly peered out to see who was there. It wasn’t therapist, it was the one for the woman stroking the screen of her smartphone. She went in, the door closed behind them and so I continued to wait.
A minute or so later, my therapist, the one who did my assessment last week greeted me at the door. She invited me in to the narrow hallway behind the rather heavy door and led me to our room. As I walked in I took my coat off and made my way to the chair that was obviously mine.
The room is small, it’s below ground level because it’s in the basement of an old building. The walls are painted white and there’s an old fireplace from whatever it used to be used for in the past. There’s a small radiator in the corner that was on keeping the room warm.
My chair is a small whicker chair with cushions with a small table next to it. On the table there’s a box of tissues if people start getting tearful. There’s also a small clock facing the therapist so they can keep track of how long the sessions are taking without having to look away at a clock on the wall. These little things are in place to make sure the session goes as well as they possibly can.
The first thing we did after sitting down was to do some paperwork. I had to sign an agreement, which basically says if they feel I’m going to be at a risk of harming myself or others they’ll need to do something about it. We talked about the fees, how much it was going to cost me, and that the session was going to happen every week at the same time until we both agreed I no longer needed any help.
Once the admin was out of the way, we sat down and started talking. The first question she asked me was how I felt about having her as my therapist. My response to her was this: in the last seven weeks, I’ve recounted my story six times. I’ve explained six times to six different people what’s going on with me. So it is a relief not having to start a session by having to do that again and work with someone who has a degree of understanding and experience of my challenges, albeit brief.
I told her of my experience with the NHS, how over seven weeks I’d had six letters, two face to face meetings, three telephone sessions with five different therapists, three emails and 3 phone calls over 48 days to discover that I wasn’t going to get any treatment for another 216 days. She was quite shocked at that.
We then start talking about how we were going to conduct the sessions. In the assessment session, I said I wanted someone who’s going to be tough with me. Whilst I obviously need empathy about the way I’m feeling, I don’t want to be wrapped up in cotton wool. If I need to do something, I need to do something. I asked that she’d be tough on me where necessary.
Then the session started. Now I didn’t really appreciate that in these therapy sessions, she’s not going to tell me what to do. Her job was to get me talking and then reflect back things I say and probe things and maybe ask questions to get me thinking deeper. Effectively I do all the work.
Sessions like this are about getting to the root cause of the problems. I think it was Freud who identified 100 or so years ago that often many of the challenges we have in our life come from deep rooted childhood traumas.
I’ve never really focused on my history in that way before. All I’ve wanted to do is fix the symptoms of whatever the problems might be through CBT or meditation or NLP, or just good old coaching or whatever I might have tried in the past. So this is the first time I have gone down the route of really deeply exploring issues from the past.
Whilst I’ve never really been skeptical about this approach, one of my areas of concern is whether I can access thoughts and emotions from the past? Because I’ve tried before and I’ve never really been able to tap into them. I’m not saying I’m skeptical, but I’m certainly wary of whether this is going to be an effective route for me because I’ve never really been able to tap into those things.
I won’t go through in full detail what we talked about once the session got going because I can’t really remember – there was a lot of stuff we covered.
But here’s what I can remember:
We started off by talking about where I was with learned helplessness and the fact it was causing me problems and we explored why that might be the case. Then we got into talking about whether I should share my challenges with some of my friends – people who care about me. I know a couple of them had recently been concerned about me but never really expressed exactly what they were concerned about so I was able to deflect the conversation with them away from that topic.
We talked about whether I should share with them and I said I didn’t really feel comfortable with that level of vulnerability. We discussed that and it was a bit uncomfortable. One of her challenges to me was maybe vulnerability is something that I need to embrace and experience as part of my growth process. (I did ask to be challenged after all!).
That’s an interesting point. I’m going to park that one for the moment because I’m not quite sure I’m ready to go and tell all my friends this is what I’ve been experiencing. Partly that’s because I don’t want to burden them with having to worry about me. It’s not fair that should have that burden even if they choose to take it. And I know some of them would.
This is also where the stigma comes into it. I don’t want to feel inadequate or feel deficient in their eyes by admitting it. And that’s how I would feel. They probably wouldn’t think that way. But I will feel that way. So we talked about that and it was quite an interesting conversation which then led into what am I scared of about being vulnerable?
I think ultimately it’s the fear of rejection. So we started talking about rejection in the past.
And here’s where I suddenly realised I might be starting to crack open some of the challenges and the reasons for challenges. Because whilst we talking about rejection out of the blue I suddenly had this, I’ll call it a “glitch” of emotion. A glitch of welling up. I got choked and I felt slightly tearful.
I don’t know where the hell it came from, but it just appeared and I was shocked. I was shocked because I’ve never had that before. I wasn’t talking about anything that was necessarily upsetting. I was just talking about this concept of rejection and all of a sudden it just hit me.
It was only a small glitch and I could have suppressed and hidden it, but as I was in a therapy session, I just mentioned it to the therapist. I had to compose myself even though it only affected me for about two or three seconds.
But I was just stunned that something like that had come up. It gave me hope that perhaps this is a route forward for me to be able to start to heal some of the wounds that might be behind some of the challenges I’m facing.
So that was really interesting.
We then got onto the subject of fixed and growth mindset – something which I’ll explore in ore detail in a future episode. We also got onto the subject of my immense perfectionism and wanting to do things right. This is is related not wanting to be rejected, which is related to feeling the need to be good at something in order to feel worthy in other people’s eyes. This is back to the issue of me seeking acceptance through my achievements.
We also talked about doing something just for the sake of enjoying it.
I got into a bit of a mental loop because I thought, well, what do I enjoy? I realised I actually enjoy the process of learning new stuff. But then I questioned why do I learn new stuff? Am I learning new stuff so I can do something even better so people will like and accept me?
And all of a sudden I start to doubt my intentions about starting something new. That’s how screwed up my mental process have become. So we explored that for a while and that was quite interesting.
We also got onto the subject of what love actually means (there’s a deep and profound topic if ever there was one) and all sorts of other topics too. As this is the first of probably many sessions, the conversation was always going to go in all sorts of different directions and I recognise that, but it was an interesting experience.
These sessions are going to happen every week now until we decide I no longer need them. I wonder how long this will take and what will be unearthed in the process.
So that was my therapy session. Nothing more to say really.
Until tomorrow.
