Therapy Is Cool
And Why I’m Seeing
A Psychologist
This blog post has been a long time coming. Where do I even begin?
I guess I need to go all the way back to the beginning of this year. As you know, we moved to Melbourne in March this year on very short notice, following some visa difficulties and my subsequent decision to pursue a masters in Marketing and Communications in Melbourne. I always knew that I wanted to do this master, but didn’t anticipate that 2019 would be the year. As it dawned on us that we only had two options - leave Australia for good or study - we decided that it didn’t make sense to wait another 2-3 years to do a master if it could help us stay in the country now. And so I applied for universities in late January, got accepted mid-February, quit my full-time job, had my last day at work on the 1st of March, moved to Melbourne and had my first day of uni two days later on the 4th of March. All in all, it was a 1½ months turnover. It was pure madness.
I really wasn’t ready to move to Melbourne. I had built up my dream life in Sydney, everything about it was perfect and I couldn’t have been in a better place in my life. Reading through my old journal, there are many pages with the words “LIFE IS GOOD” scattered in capitals across them because I was just so damn happy. The irony in all of this is that I was always perfectly happy moving countries/cities when I was younger and didn’t really care too much when my parents spoke the all-so-familiar sentence “We are moving again”. This really was the first time that I wholeheartedly and decisively did not want to move, and yet I self-inflicted this heart-breaking decision upon us.
Between January and March, there was lots of uncertainty about the future, heated discussions, financial worries, heartfelt goodbye’s and last-minute moving admin. Then April came and I had to transition from full-time work to being a student again, whilst settling into our new life in Melbourne and processing the whirlwind of months that it had been.
It was somewhere around that time that Phil started getting unwell. I don’t really remember when, where and how, but from one day to the other, he just suddenly started getting these crazy dizziness spells that would force him to lie down and not move for a couple of hours. This was accompanied with sporadic headaches, stabbing chest pain, cramps all over his body, heat flashes at night and sleeplessness. And it only kept getting worse. I distinctively remember one afternoon where we tried to go for a walk (at this point Phil had already stopped exercising all together) and we had to turn around after 20 minutes because Phil felt too weak.
And so the search for the needle in the haystack began. GP’s, blood tests, ECG’s, CT scans, MRI scans, neurologists, cardiologists, migraine specialists, naturopaths, osteopaths, reflexologists, acupuncture, Chinese medicine. You name it, we did it. I will write a whole other blog post on Phil’s health struggles and what we learnt in the process, but I’m only touching on this now to paint a picture of what was going on.
At one point, it got so bad that Phil had to stop working altogether. This was when I was in the midst of uni assignments and between that, my coaching clients and freelance work, it felt like I had nothing left in me to be there for him. He didn’t say anything, but I know that he would have needed me during that time. But I wasn’t. I was too stuck in my own head, my own worries, deadlines and mourning over my “old life”. I actually made Phil feel like he was a burden on me, handicapping my productivity and overall routine. After a couple more weeks of this, Phil decided to fly back home to his family in Thailand and do a 1 ½ months intensive Ayurvedic treatment protocol there.
I think this is when it really hit me how I hadn’t been myself lately and that I wasn’t in a good headspace.
I had been holding in my own struggles because I didn’t want to burden Phil any further, and at the same time I felt so incredibly guilty because I wasn’t fully there for him. You have to know, Phil and I met when I was knee-deep in my eating disorder struggle, and this trooper of a guy stuck through it all. He’d been my emotional rock throughout our entire relationship and this was the first time that I couldn’t lean on him. This was/is arguably the hardest thing he’s had to go through to date and it should be “his turn” to be taken care of, but I didn’t step up to the task.
That realization and the guilt and shame that followed knocked the wind out of me. I felt useless, selfish, demotivated and didn’t know how to break out of the cycle. It got to a point where it started to really affect my eating habits (hello ED rearing your ugly head!), sleeping patterns, workouts and uni productivity. I felt shit most days, and didn’t really want to see anyone or do anything.
I remember having a particularly shitty day and sat down that afternoon to journal. My journal is my confident – it’s been my saving grace ever since 11/3/2011 (the first day I started a journal) and I often have break-through moments in my journal practice. As I sat there, crying, I wrote the words “I think I’m going through a mini depression right now. And I think it would help to talk to someone. I just need to talk.”
I had my first psychologist appointment in October. Even before the appointment, I already felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders when I booked the appointment. The simple act of raising my hand and saying “I need help” was enough to nudge me out of my rut.
But I still felt some reservations towards seeing a psychologist – after all, Phil was the one with debilitating health issues that forced him to put his life on hold, and yet he was “keeping it together”. He should be here, not me. I’m so weak for doing this.
In our first meeting, my psychologist asked me to explain why I had come to see her. As I sat there explaining everything that had happened thus far in 2019, I realized just how much had happened. The reluctant last-minute move, the big life transitions, Phil’s health, struggling to find a routine in our new home…I didn’t even realize the enormity of it until I started listing it all out to a stranger.
Which brings me to this important point: there is tremendous power in talking to a third-party person about your life. Someone who can objectively assess the situation, ask the right questions and hold space for you to be heard.
That is literally all I needed. Since our first session, I’ve been seeing my psychologist every three weeks or so, and it feels like a veil has been lifted. I can see clearly again and have been able to create space for my emotions. Before this, life had been happening at lighting speed and I didn’t take the time to process it all. But this has given me the opportunity to dissect what I’m feeling and work through things as they happen.
Sharing this with you guys was so important to me. I know other people’s life’s can seem flashy through social media and make you wonder why the grass is always greener on the other side. Let me tell you, it’s not. The grass is greener where you water it. 2019 has been a hell of a year of us, probably the most challenging on our relationship thus far, and it certainly wasn’t always as fancy as my feed may make it look.
I’m not ashamed that I’m seeing a psychologist, and neither should you if you are or thinking of seeing one. Your problems aren’t too small, and you don’t have to suffer from a depression for years until you do something about it. In my case, it only took +/- two months of not feeling myself until I decided to see someone. I honestly believe we all can benefit of working with a third-party person to work through our shit, which is also why I’m such a believer in working with a health coach who can relate to your struggles through prior personal experience.
