‘Many of my clients talk about how they had wanted to be in therapy long before making their first appointment. All sorts of things got in the way. Hoping things would magically get better, shame of admitting the need for help, fear of what would be unearthed, concern about what others would think, imagining that it would take for ever, to name a few. Mic Wright speaks about his journey in therapy and how thankful he is for having started it.
I’m in therapy. I have been since January this year. I will be forever.
What booze and pills were to some of my friends in recovery, bleakness and despair is to me. I got therapy just as many of them go to addiction meetings. For a time I was addicted to the depression, understanding entirely the notion that Kurt Cobain sang about on In Utero: “I miss the comfort in being sad.” But ‘sad’ isn’t the true extent of depression. It’s not the sadness that can kill you but the blankness, the nothingness, the inability to feel. Today, better to some extent thanks to therapy, I’m still a little surprised by happiness. That giddy feeling in my stomach is unfamiliar. The fizz and bubble of glee feels foreign somehow.
I won’t tell you what I talk about with my therapist or even what she’s called. The beautiful quality of therapy is that it is a private relationship, a two-way thing. On a Wednesday morning at 09.30, I’m in that room with the therapist and what takes place is shared only between us.
I can see why some people fool themselves into thinking their therapist is their friend. It is an intimate connection. The plastic is stripped from the wires; pure electricity can spark. With a therapist that works well for you – and it really comes down to personalities – you feel able to tell them anything and everything.
Some of you reading this column will be instinctively disgusted by the over-sharing. I know you’ll ask why I’ve chosen to talk about my therapy and to admit that I struggled with depression. Well, I’m not ashamed. Therapy isn’t just the preserve of celebrity drunks and drug addicts. Sometimes you have to admit that your own brain is conspiring against you, that your own emotions are not always yours to control. Going to a therapist to make sure my mind is in good shape feels the same to me as taking responsibility for my physical health. Without therapy, without a weekly mental M. O. T, I fear I’d slip back into black dog’s dark kennel again.
I’ll be straight with you – just as I’ve been straight with my therapist. I was very unwell for 8 months last year. I lost the ability to do simple things. The white page was a tundra of doubt for me, one I was afraid to make a mark on. Forms became endlessly complex; I put them off for months. All I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to hibernate from humanity and wake up again one day when my worries had evaporated.
The logic of depression is brutal and circular. You feel terrible but are convinced you deserve to feel terrible because you are such a worthless person. To break that cycle I needed to go beyond the kind advice of friends and family.
Before I tried therapy I was convinced that it was something that worked only for neurotic New Yorkers in Woody Allen films and the kind of navel-gazing hippies that make me want to throw myself into the ocean. The truth is that therapy works but it only works when you’re ready to let it and you find the right person to speak to. Medication can certainly save some people but all it did for me was provoke vomiting and stomach cramps. Therapy has freed me from the gloom that threatened to envelop me. I don’t imagine that I will never feel that despair again, but now I have someone who can help me fight it, who can pull me out of it with the stern, certainty of professional kindness.
I am thankful for it and it would be cheap at three times the price.’