People are always like, “running is my therapy,” and “the beach is my therapy”—but think about it: Anyone whose ever actually attended therapy knows it sucks. It is not the beach.
Going to therapy for six months last year was both the best decision for me in the moment, and the craziest I have ever felt.
All the crap we dug out from being so neatly tucked away in my angry body. There it was at once for me to look at, directly, and wonder…WTF do I do with all of this? Keep, toss…donate?
For six months Dr. Sarah and I systematically picked it apart while I thought,
why am I crying?
why am I getting pissed off about old stuff?
why is this unrelated thing so triggering?
Up at night, sorting.
Overthinking.
Crazy.
Therapy, as elections, is not a beach. It is the work we do to get to the beach. The blessing of both is not the process—it’s what is possible after you’ve dealt with the old and made room for the new.
One thing I am realizing is sometimes both things are worth losing friends over. Sometimes that is even the point.
We did this four years ago, and will do it again in four more years. What is changing? What isn’t? How am I feeling about the economy and the people I’ve let close to me?
As I flipped a new decade and looked back on my life with a therapist, the most important thing I learned was that my instincts are as valid as everyone else’s. I’m here to look out for me—for my family, my community.
I knew that, logically, but I hadn’t been living into it. I’d truthfully just been letting too many people store their unanswered bullshit among the rest of my hoarded anger. Hanging onto stuff that wasn’t mine to carry.
As an example: When I described the stress I was feeling over mingling with…we’ll say ‘an anonymous person in my orbit,’ Dr. Sarah quickly simplified, “it sounds like you don’t like them.”
Is that a thing? I can just not like them?
This is just one of many ways I’d been unfair to myself in relationships. The work I do to consider the beliefs of other people, to really try to understand the decisions they make—it’s only productive if they are doing the same for me. Like our wise prophet Taylor Alison Swift said, “putting someone first only works if you’re in their top five.”
I’ve done a lot of research in past elections to understand how people end up in certain binaries. I’ve ‘live and let live’d people who cannot fathom what I appear to support four years later. I don’t have to keep caring this much about the thoughts of people who do not care this much.
If someone sees the decisions I make in politics and defaults to a posture where I am deranged and mentally ill? I can let them believe that.
If they find out I vote Democrat and auto-conclude I am an ‘evil’ mother who wants my son to become a female? Cool. Bye.
Some would call this jumping-to-extremes the Donald Trump effect and I think that’s fair. At 41 I’m allowed to expect more from my people.
Bless and release.
Therapy taught me to put a higher value on communicating my positions, and I will continue to do that.
It also taught me that loyalty is not a fair trade for personal boundaries. It is not my responsibility to take care of another’s feelings about the way I think. My responsibility is to be fully who I am and let folks sort out for themselves what to do with that.
In a world where it is this easy to get busy and hoard away years worth of anger? Therapy.
In a world where naivety often connects us with folks who aren’t good for us? Elections.
Unfortunately we do have to embrace the suck of this, for “the beach” is only as sweet as the work we put in right now.
Keep, toss, donate. ♥