Therapy

I’ve had a lot of therapy and I don’t think any of it really has anything to do with my current level of happiness, which is high. If there were coping tools it gave me , or realizations that altered my worldview, or subconscious changes that came about as a result, I don’t know what they might be. No, I think it’s all circumstance. These days I have exactly what I want (by this I mostly mean a baby), I am doing what I like (largely whatever I want), and I am getting lots of fresh air, sunlight, exercise, socialization, and healthy food. Simple as that.

I don’t mean to minimize depression; it was very defeating and self-perpetuating for me and I know how debilitating and painful it can be. I am simply not convinced that, for me, living more healthily wouldn’t have been just as good a solution as therapy and medication, if someone could have gotten me to do it at the time.

I first visited a therapist shortly after my parents divorced, when I was five. I remember it quite well. The woman, who was affiliated with my mother’s church, became excessively concerned when I told her that one of the many fun things I enjoyed doing with my father was playing horsie (you know, he would get on all fours, I would ride on top–I do the exact same thing these days with Baby; it’s all fun and games). A sensitive child, it was clear to me that she was getting the wrong idea, though I couldn’t conceptualize exactly what she was thinking, and I became quite anxious about talking to her. My mother didn’t make me go back.

When I was in college I was quite depressed (I think all it was was my super-dark room and my melodramatic long-distance relationship with my now-husband) and ended up in talk therapy twice a week. What we talked about, beyond my complaints about my mother, I can’t recall at all. Really, I didn’t have a lot going on at the time. I think once when my husband bought the house we live in now we talked about real estate in New England as compared to the Southeast. There was some more serious stuff I certainly could have benefited from airing out, but I never felt comfortable enough, or motivated enough, to do so. My main recollections revolve around the time I saw my therapist at the mall with her two small kids. At our next session, I asked her her children’s ages, just being friendly, really, and she wouldn’t tell me, wanting, instead, to know how her having children made me feel. I quit therapy shortly after that.

Finally, when I was going through my several years of infertility, I entered therapy again. I knew something like nine pregnant people, including many at work, notably two supervisors in succession, and was just miserable at my job and had developed some obsessions about making sure stoves were off and curlers unplugged, things like that (if I couldn’t control my ovulation, then by golly, I was going to control something). I started seeing a very smart woman who turned out to be a lesbian who repeatedly expressed her confusion about why people want children, and kept trying to talk me out of it, telling me about studies that showed how marital satisfaction decreased greatly upon procreation. Still, we had a good rapport, and we spent a huge amount of time talking about my tortured girl-crush on my then-supervisor, and she encouraged me to apply to grad school, which led to all kinds of good things for me. Eventually I visited a psychiatrist who prescribed an anti-anxiety medication which I took, with great results, until I found out I was pregnant a few months into grad school, at which point I quit the medicine and the therapy both.

Once while pregnant, and shortly after Baby’s birth, I did go visit the psychiatrist, who specialized in “women’s issues,” but it wasn’t because I felt like I needed it; I just felt like I should, to be on the safe side. And I visited my anti-baby therapist when Baby was six weeks old, bringing her along, struggling to feed her by various methods during the whole visit, unable to converse really at all. Given my nerve-wracking pregnancy, scary birth, miserable breastfeeding, and agonizing cold-turkey weaning experiences, combined with my history of depression and anxiety, I kept expecting to have some serious post-partum problems in that area, but no. Maybe all that therapy did fix me up, possibly getting treatment for my PCOS helped thus leveling out some crazy-making hormones, or the medication rewired something, or, and this what I think, my life and my psyche are finally in harmony. I think that was my problem all along.