#oneaday Day 743: Talk therapy

I've alluded to it a bit recently, but I thought I'd talk specifically about it today. For the last little while, I have been attending talk therapy. I have been meaning to do this for a long time, because there are lots of people I know and trust who have made use of it, but I always found the prospect of choosing a therapist and actually getting started on the whole process to be extremely daunting. How do you pick the "right" one for you? What do all the different "approaches" mean? Can I really afford to do this?

Well, the answer to the last one was easy; at some point in the last couple of years, I feel like I've got to a point where I'm in a relatively comfortable position in terms of finances — after many years of finding money an absolutely panic-inducing but unavoidable aspect of life, this is good — and thus I didn't feel that making what is a fairly substantial financial commitment to my own wellbeing was something that would be inadvisable.

Technically, you can get talk therapy on the NHS, of course, but my past experiences with that haven't been great — because yes, I've tried. In practice, what happened was that I got referred to a scheme by my GP, but left to my own devices to follow it up — something which I found very difficult to do — and when I finally mustered the courage to join said scheme, I found it absolutely, definitely did not fit my needs at all, as it was a group therapy session, and that was not a situation where I felt, in any way, comfortable.

I'd stumbled across a local organisation known as The Empathy Project a few times during past sessions of research, so this time around I decided to actually be proactive and contact them directly. Their therapists aren't the cheapest around — though they do have a scheme where those on more limited incomes can take advantage of semi-subsidised sessions — but they seemed like a legitimate organisation, and as good a place as any to actually see if Getting Some Professional Help was actually, well, helpful.

I will add that I started attending therapy sessions well before my current situation with Oliver, so thankfully I was in a somewhat more coherent, clear-headed place than I am right now — and I am glad that I already had everything sorted out well before I, as you might look at it, really needed this kind of support.

Anyway, to those of you considering starting some sort of talk therapy: I recommend it. It is Very Good to have a place where you feel like you can say the things that perhaps on a day-to-day basis you don't feel you get the opportunity to say under normal circumstances — or which, for one reason or another, you don't feel comfortable expressing. It is Very Good to have a place you can go where someone will listen to whatever you have to say, however much difficulty you might have explaining it, or however worried you might be about people not taking it seriously. It is Very Good to have a place where, if necessary, you can burst into tears and the only other person present there knows how to handle that.

Therapy is not a magic bullet solution to all the things that ail your mind. Mental health is complicated, and many of the things you struggle with are likely to be ingrained over the course of years, even decades. You will have times where you feel like you make progress, and times where you feel like things have gone a bit backwards. But it is a place where there are no wrong answers to difficult, abstract questions, and where, if you allow yourself to let go of many of the usual social restraints you might place upon yourself when around family and friends, you can freely express things that have been bothering you — and perhaps come to realise quite how much some of them have actually been affecting you. At the other end of the spectrum, it is also sometimes the case that things which have felt like they have taken over your entire life for a certain period sometimes just need you to be able to talk about them in a safe, non-confrontational and non-judgemental environment.

All this is to say that in the time I've spent in therapy so far, I've found it very helpful. I still have a lot of work to do on a lot of things about my life and my mental health, but already I have found myself able to acknowledge a bunch of things that are perhaps difficult to contemplate independently, to say the least — and I'm sure I will continue to discover things in subsequent sessions. I just need to get through this current particularly bleak episode in the saga of my life to be able to move forwards.

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