Therapy Helped Me Heal

This week I have been discussing relationships of various kinds. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a crucial part of my journey to having healthy romantic relationships… That is attending Therapy. 

Yes, ther-ah-pee! I have spoken with a therapist many times in my life and I’ve always found it helpful. Sadly, this isn’t a very ‘normal’ behavior in the black community. Most people, especially our elders, find it taboo or an extreme. Younger people tend to be curious but never consider or follow through ongoing themselves. I’m not ashamed or quiet about my use of therapy and I vocally attribute it to the healing I’ve had in my life. Because I am vocal about this, I have had many experiences with people who react with shock or confusion when they discover I’ve seen a therapist. “You were in therapy?! Why? What’s wrong?” For some reason, my people think you are 2 seconds from the looney bin if you have to see a therapist. But therapy isn’t always a ‘have to’ thing, it’s a ‘want to’ or ‘should do’ activity. This is self-care people. 

My Experience with Therapy  

The first time I sat in a therapist’s chair was in college, around my sophomore year. I’m not proud to say this, and I’m sure you won’t be surprised, but it was over a boy. Yes, a boy. It was my first real relationship outside of high school and I fell hard for him. Gave him my virginity and everything! I really thought we would be together forever. He was older than me and obviously smarter. He manipulated and gaslighted me the entire relationship, but I was young, naive, and operating on a skewed sense of what relationships would be like. Although he was terrible to me, I was an easy mark from the start because of my childhood trauma. 

In that therapist’s chair, once a week over the course of a few months I learned that I was attracting/attracted to unavailable men and this all stemmed from my relationship with my drug-addicted father. I didn’t learn that he was a crack addict until my adulthood. As a kid, I knew that my father was different than other dads and that became more apparent as we got older. My parents split up towards the late ’90s and their divorce became final around 2001. During that period, he was constantly in and out of our lives. He would make promises to see my brothers and I, buy us things, take us places and come to visit us. We would get excited, only to have him not show up or never follow through. But one thing persisted, he always professed his love for us, including my mom. As we got older, we learned to stop waiting for him or expecting much of anything, but sadly I had already internalized this behavior. Now, it’s not shocking to me that I was attracted to men who weren’t emotionally available, made grand promises, and declarations of love with little to no follow-through. Words meant more to me than action. 

Therapy helped me to realize these patterns, work through them, and eventually make better choices in my love life. Of course, my father’s drug problem affected more than just my love life and I’m not cured of my childhood trauma. It’s not something that a month or two of therapy can undo, but therapy did help me find a husband who is everything my exes and father are not.  It also gave me the tools needed to unpack the memories I have, identify, and talk about the experiences that affected me negatively.

The second time I sat in a therapist’s chair was about 10 years later and the experience was much different. Actually, there was no chair at all because I was communicating with my therapists via the mobile therapy platform TalkSpace. All of this took place last summer. I was about 6 months postpartum with my second child, living in a new state and in my second year of marriage. I had a LOT to talk about. In all honesty, I enjoyed my experience with Talkspace much more than in-person therapy sessions, simply because of the convenience of not having to leave my home. The only reason I stopped using TalkSpace is because of the cost. It just didn’t fit into my budget at the time, but I do plan to return. Even still, with the invention of therapy apps, it’s so much easier to integrate this into your every-day life for continued introspection, healing, and mental maintenance, rather than something abnormal and only necessary under duress. 

Why I advocate for Therapy 

Like me, many people experience traumatic events in their childhood and adolescence that contribute to their present-day problems, whether they realize it or not. Healing from those wounds helps to stop the spread of that toxic behavior from ruining your life and the lives of those around you. This is why therapy needs to be normalized in society but especially in the black community. From passed down ancestral trauma, systemic racism, the crack epidemic, and present-day civil rights movement, we have so much pain and trauma to work through. Learning from the past, attending therapy, and overall doing better is how we break generational curses and make the world a better place for our children. This is why I am such a big advocate for therapy and self-healing. Self-care is not always about bath bombs and red wine, it’s about this difficult, uncomfortable internal work that will literally transform your life. 

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