a tale of four therapists
why it didn't work out with therapists 1, 2, and 3
Content Warning: This post explores aspects of mental health and contains discussion of disordered eating, self-harm, and suicide. Please read with care.
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“Seek therapy.” It’s a phrase I see in comment sections and online forums. Masquerading as helpful or even compassionate, it’s functionally an insult. The speaker usually doesn’t mean you should actually seek therapy—they just mean to signal that they are emotionally and mentally superior to you. We used to virtue signal; now, we therapy signal.
With how the extremely online—and TikTok in particular—talk about therapy and use therapy jargon in everyday speech, one would think that therapy is the answer to all of our mental and emotional malaises. But I’ve found that therapy is, in fact, more like falling in love—it’ll happen multiple times throughout your life, with different people, and each time, you’ll be convinced that this is it, this is the time that you’re really, really healed.
I know this because I’m on my fourth therapy attempt now. And each time, there was something wrong with the set-up—sometimes, my therapist was to blame; sometimes, I was more to blame.
attempt #1: college, junior year
The first time I went to therapy was in college. I had extremely disordered eating—sometimes subsisting on sub-1200 calories a day for weeks on end and sometimes binge-eating an entire package of Chips Ahoy! Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. I don’t even like chewy cookies, but my friend down the hall would have them—and in my lowest states, I would sneak into his room, eat the rest of his cookies, go to the store to buy him a new package, and then eat the new package until the number of cookies matched what was originally in the carton. I wasn’t like the other binge-eaters—I was a scrupulously meticulous binge-eater!
My body pumped with adrenaline the entire time. Would I make it back before he gets to his room? Can I consume the cookies in the new package quickly enough, before he comes back? What if he catches me in the act? I don’t know whether I was more addicted to the act of binging or the espionage intensity of trying to not get caught. To this day, chewy cookies taste like self-loathing and disgust to me.