Is Therapy a Good Thing To Do?

Let me tell you a therapy story

Q. Do you believe in therapy? Do you have a therapist? What are your thoughts on going to therapy?

A. Sure. This is my story.

One day I went to therapy. Digital video therapy.

My life doesn’t make sense, I said to my therapist.

Interesting, he said, voice muffled. (He was eating a salad.) 

I can’t figure it out, I said. 

Well how do you feel about your life? He asked.

See, how I feel is the problem, I said. I feel guilty about everything. I feel shame. I feel trapped inside a glass jar. There is no reason for this. I should feel differently than I do.

No! He said. There are no shoulds when it comes to feelings.

So I should just let myself feel this way? I asked

Yes, he said.

But what if my feelings are false alarms, little computer bugs based on bad programming? I asked.

Well if you feel these feelings, he said, then you can trust them, and you can honor them.

What? I said. So my feelings are automatically trustworthy simply because they are felt?

He said: if you want them to be. 

I said: oh gimmeabreak.

And then I left the video call, went into the kitchen, boiled a rage potato, and then spent the next two years writing letters to this soft-brained salad spinner, pushing my pencil HARD into the paper, mad about feelings, determined to prove that my therapist was up a tree.

Here are a few of those letters:

November 11th, 2011

Dear Therapist,

First of all, I should be clear that I respect you. I know you are trying. But this idea of my crackpot feelings “being trustworthy” strikes me as a problem. If I feel, for example, that my family secretly wants to cartwheel me into a volcano, then you’re saying I should trust that? Call the police preemptively? No. Feelings are crumpled data. They require discernment. They require triangulation over time. Get with the program, Therapist! And that program? Is the stupidity of my programming. Do NOT make a stupid person (me) feel powerful. I need you to not do that. This is therapy college 101. I need you to keep me in check. Prevent me from ruin. Don’t empower me. Don’t validate my experiences. Don’t see things from my perspective. My perspective is shit! And I cannot handle validation. And my experiences are ridiculous. And I cry like a rat. And my stories are cabbage. And my feelings are plums. Yes. My emotional world skews comically negative, unmoored from all reasonable reality. You want me to trust myself? Clearly I cannot do that, because I have no basis for upbeat living, and this, dear Therapist, is precisely why I’m coming to you.

Put simply, Therapist: I am an unworthy sailor, plowing my little aspiring Titanic into a billion gigantic ice floes. I’m doing that constantly. And apparently I am doing it on purpose. Stop me! I need you to stop me. 

Cordially,
LB

December 8th, 2011

Dear Therapist, 

I guess it started when I was a child. My stupidity. That’s generally when things begin (you taught me that, do NOT take it back now!). I was a child in a stupid world, which made me even stupider than I already was, which was honestly pretty stupid. I mean: I was smart at some things. Like school. And spiders. But life? No. The kids called me Raisin Head. Yum, can I eat your raisin brain, they would say to me. Ha ha I saw your mom crying in the window, I would say back. We don’t have any windows, they would say. It was my dad’s window, I would say. And then I would run away. Ha ha joke’s on them. I didn’t even have a dad.

Anyway when I was nine I would lie in my race car bed at night and pee on the tires. I did it on purpose. It was so warm. Long thin ropes of mystical yellow fizz. The tires were so gross. The sheets were pulverized. My mom hired someone to clean it up. Do you drink a lot of water before bed? The cleaners would ask me. No I don’t drink any water at all. I drink beer. I was nine. This was a good joke to do. But do you see what I am saying, Therapist? I don’t remember being a baby. I only remember being nine and pissing on my car bed nightly. 

I had a desk in my room that I never used. It was covered in all sorts of goo. It was sticky and made me sad. I had a plastic tub of rainbow gummy worms sitting on the desk. One summer they melted and became a big alarming rainbow gummy cube. That cube lasted three years, and then I started puberty, and then I got a speeding ticket, and then my girlfriend started dating a DEADBEAT soccer player four years our senior. Any answers in here, Therapist? Tell me you are listening. 

Warmly,
LB

January 23rd, 2012

Dear Therapist, 

When I talk about my childhood antics, you say “It sounds like you were trying to find yourself,” but that is wrong. I didn’t want a self. The idea of a self was scary to me. I sat in a minivan one day, when I was 10, and said “I am LB” and felt the alien strangeness of my own name. I became aware of Being Itself. I threw up in my Sprite. Why should we have a self? A self is a cognitive knot, the appearance of firmness amid flimsiness. A self sucks SO much barnacle butt. You want me to be true to myself, I know. But that? Is the worst idea ever. Because I will be rooting around forever. Because the self is a moment-to-moment construction, a wispy constellation we whisper into existence. And since the self is such a non-thing, then how could I ever find it, pin it down? And if I can’t pin it down, how could I ever be true to it? Grow up, Therapist. You are creating the very problem I am trying to solve. You are making me feel like a “person,” which makes personal problems possible.

Proof: even though my so-called self is skittering into a void forever, when you and I have our meetings, a self appears! A self enters the world! Just by you asking me weird questions about “did you ever want to kiss Kim Novak in Vertigo.” A self I created just for you, Therapist, who truth be told I think is wrong but still admire more than Christmas afternoons. Nothing real. Nothing actually true. But a self that helps me impress you with my authenticity and justifies me spending a bunch of dough to talk to you on my iPhone 4, your face barely visible through my spiderwebbed screen.

Warmly despite it all,
LB