What A Decade On The Couch Taught Me About Resilience

Trigger warning: This post contains sensitive topics such as mental illness.

March of 2015 marked my 100th consecutive month in therapy. There was no cake, no anniversary card — just another four weeks logged in the healing process.

It’s one of my biggest achievements, a notion I may have scoffed at when I started seeing Claudia* in my senior year of high school. But to minimize it now would be a disservice. The course I chose has meant honest, painstaking, and sometimes brutal work. I never anticipated the commitment therapy would ask of me, but I owe my life to it. My treatment has consisted of psychodynamic talk sessions, at least once, but sometimes multiple times a week, for almost nine years.

Growing up, I was always thrown off when someone would call me strong or brave. I understood why, intellectually. I’m a quiet risk-taker who has been left to her own devices quite a bit. I experienced trauma as a child and teenager but always managed to skate by on an “acceptable” life trajectory (or deemed acceptable in the overachieving milieu where I grew up). But I didn’t feel particularly strong.

I have intense, complex, and often debilitating emotions. As a toddler, my psyche dwelled on the homeless people lining the streets of our Manhattan neighborhood, overcome with sadness. I often felt very alone and disoriented by the breadth of my moods. My first bouts of insomnia were in kindergarten, and anxiety two years later.

My family diagnosed me as an old soul: hypersensitive, perceptive, and highly empathic, by their definition. Others have called me an “empath.” I am deeply affected by my interactions and surroundings. I absorb people’s energies and carry their suffering or joy alongside mine. Acute self-awareness makes it almost impossible to tolerate denial.

The branches of my family tree are dense with all sorts of mental health problems. My parents are loving, but have their own set of limitations. Luckily, they’re realists about what I might have inherited and sent me to a therapist when I was 10 years old. I had two doctors over the next five years, and I don’t remember much about either. I was barely scratching the surface.

To many people’s discomfort, I don’t “seem” like someone who’s in a lot of pain. I laugh. I have tremendous passions. I even have a baby face to this day. I am functioning, I can feel profound joy, but I am also not well. People I’ve loved have walked out of my life because this paradox eluded them. What was most heartbreaking is it eluded me most.

By age 17 I was increasingly dependent on substances, struggling with chronic insomnia and volatile mood swings. I knew I needed help. It was a strong choice, it was the right choice, but it felt easy at the time. You go to the doctor when the problem is still small and they patch it up. I did not know how much the endeavor would require of me.

Claudia is brilliant, and quickly picked up on a number of patterns in my thinking and behavior I was too proud to own up to. Honest self-appraisal was psychotherapy step one, and it took a long time. It took even longer to understand Claudia wasn’t just a well-paid adviser; she actually cared about me. Claudia emphasized understanding my relationship with her was key to understanding my relationships with others. I didn’t get it then, but she was right.

As part of my grand strategy of coping, I made it a priority to jump at opportunities. I thought I would grow strong enough through therapy and experience that I would learn to exorcise my pain. Unfortunately, that was a false premise. I was an unstable teenager with an addictive personality. Tried and true, drugs and booze made me feel stronger. The characteristics people had ascribed to me, and that I felt intermittently — authentic, stoic, tough — were suddenly categorically palpable. I felt a deluge of shame. Addiction-induced tragedy had caused my family undue grief; I knew better. But I didn’t think I deserved much more. And I could not bear to feel any more.

I also sought out meaningful romantic relationships for comfort. But the resentment I harbored toward my emotions swelled with most partners. “Control your sadness because I’m not strong enough to handle it.” “You never explained things got THIS bad.” “The whole ‘anti-depressants’ thing, it’s just not attractive to me.” (These are direct quotes, from three different men.)

I managed to stay with Claudia when I went away for college, traveled, and moved about. She gave me unbiased clarity and wisdom during every failure, loss, and heartbreak. She also facilitated the journey into my past and unconscious, the most taxing part of the work. I often wanted to quit when I first started reliving traumas in therapy. I wept through most of those sessions. Eventually, the weeping gave way to moments of transcendence. “Ah, it’s working,” I’d think, chipping away at an unresolved issue, tension in my chest cavity easing. But the next week I’d be back on the couch in despair, sometimes with no idea why. I could never upend the paradox. I would strive and grow but fuck up constantly.

In September of 2013, I moved to a very foreign country in what became a 15-month test of my fortitude. My time there included an abusive relationship and an actual armed conflict. I spiraled into a depressive episode and went back on psych meds after a successful year off them. I revisited some of the darkest places I’d ever been and even discovered some new ones. It felt like a massive failure.

For many years I nurtured a fantasy of resilience as a means to an end. Yet I’d continue to collapse, pleading with myself, Why haven’t you gotten a hold of this? Then it got through to me, not just to my brain but my heart, too: getting up after each collapse was the very definition of resilience.

One hundred and one months later and my most obvious mistake was the idea I had to expel rather than integrate the unpleasant to feel whole. There is no final destination where pleasure rules and pain is absent. I will always have to sit (or lay on the floor) with my pain, but I move forward, every time, and I don’t expect that to change either.

Amid my horrors abroad last year, I also finished graduate school, traveled, and even fell in love with a gentle man who is inspired by the honesty with which I face my issues. I could not have realized all of this without Claudia’s patience, wisdom, and acceptance, but ultimately I did the work. I do not quietly punish myself for my emotions anymore. To know your pain intimately is to be alive.

Of course, not everyone requires therapy or medication, but don’t neglect those parts of you that hurt. They require care and titration. Cry in public if the urge strikes, and don’t let people call you dramatic or hysterical. There is reason embedded in emotion, if you take the care to search for it. We women are wired for emotional excellence. In a world where we shoulder so much burden our negative emotions may feel especially unwelcome, but they are latent sources of power to be harnessed. This is never an act of narcissism but of love.

Confront your pain, however suits you. Anyone who diminishes self-care is emotionally stunted. I say that with no qualifications because it’s not an egregious sin to be emotionally stunted. Most of us never learn how to properly master our emotions because society doesn’t deem it important. It’s nothing to be ashamed of (there’s already way too much shame to go around), but remember those are others’ shortcomings, not yours. You don’t have to make anyone comfortable; you have no responsibility to be a bastion of outward strength.

It’s been like building a muscle — I had to shatter over and over in order to rebuild. To this day I struggle and remain in therapy, but I don’t live in constant fear of the unexpected. I know what comes next — enough of it at least.

*Name has been changed.