Therapy Saved My Life

True Story - Trigger Warning

I first went to therapy about 34 years ago. With time and age I’ve found I’m ok with dating myself.

When I first started therapy back as a teen I was suffering from the trauma of finding my cousin who had killed himself. Sorry to be so blunt. It’s a brutal truth that changed me, my life and had just turned my world upside down. He hanged himself and it was a gruesome find.

That experience was like someone taking a sledgehammer to my brain and rattling my psyche in a way that is still unconscionable. I’m over it now, but sharing to give a little perspective. Things like this stick with you, stay with you, shape you, shift you, morph you and change you.

While the trauma itself maybe a one-off momentary happenstance its permanence cannot be understated.

So I did the obvious thing. Well let me rephrase that, I was a teen so I was lead to the obvious thing.

Therapy. (5 Life Changing Benefits Of Therapy You Shouldn’t Ignore.)

Therapy was a subtle dance between fear, anxiety, anticipation, stress and at that time what felt like a far reach for relief of some kind.

The Extent Of My Trauma

Considering the horror of the experience most of the people in our world are not equipped to hear or listen in any great detail or length or with any amount of presence.

So therapy was the obvious thing. I’d go seek out professional help to get over the traumatic thing that had altered me on so many levels.

However beyond just the experience that latched on to me there were things that happened as a result. It’s the type of thing that morphs into others things.

The most awful side-effect of this experience was the fact that it gave me insomnia. (Checkout this short video offering insight into my treatment at the Stanford Medicine Sleep Treatement Center.)

It was such a traumatic shock to my psyche that I just stopped sleeping. I couldn’t sleep. I was so on edge just waiting to step into the next awful thing. I developed from that moment forward an intense fear of opening doors, being alone, a fear of walking at night, being in the dark at all.

The thought of falling asleep to potential nightmares of the boogey man, some twisted psychotic dream of people nudging me to take my own life handing me nooses, or my parents taking their lives, me finding my friends in that same horrific way I found my cousin, my mom turning the knife on me in the kitchen while chopping vegetables, etc. These are the kinds of nightmares I began having after that experience. It felt as though there was always something scary lurking in the shadows.

It was all so hard to process. I still couldn’t wrap my brain around what I had discovered and twisted thoughts kept coming to the fore in my waking and exhaustive attempts at sleep thereafter.

I’d begin to fall asleep and wake up in a cold sweat from the new story in my mind’s eye that was taking shape and taking me back to some freaky unimaginable scene or reality. I was so shook that I lived in anticipation of something really bad happening at all times.

My pension for scary movies was gone and the idea of someone scaring me or the few times friends who did jump out around a corner or my crazy ex who was the original jackass before the MTV reality show who loved scaring me and saying boo gave me anxiety and caused melt-downs. For an extended moment in time I couldn’t reconcile between fact and fiction.

This is the extent of the PTSDish trauma I had developed. (This conversation here with Dr. David Bonanno from the podcast offers more insights into PTSD.)

I had never even dealt with death up to this point let alone finding someone dead and in this way. It’s not a pretty sight.

And all my meager attempts to unsee what my eyes and brain permanently registered and lodged into my frontal lobe were unsuccessful.

Those images and memories were stuck to me and so I began a years long process of therapy in a concerted attempt to unstuck myself and soften those pictures that were epoxied inside my mind.

Finding A Great Therapist

Despite my misfortune I fell upon luck with my designated therapist through Kaiser in Oakland. He was a psychologist, a reputable one who had decades under his belt. I’ll call him Dr. B for the sake of anonymity.

He was apt at listening to traumatic things and even had a knack for getting all the gory details out of you.

Dr. B was tall, thin bordering gaunt. He had dark hair slicked back in a sort of 80s mullet/feathered back and a very dark beard. It seemed as if his beard was darker than his hair. It was very neatly trimmed nearing some kind of hopeful perfection. He was very sure of himself and very measured in his speech, cadence. His walk had a slight swagger to it as he’d lead me into his softly lit room overlooking a bevy of plants in the oasis like garden sanctuary with his big windows perched above. His confidence gave off an air of intimidation at times. His office seemed like it was designed for crying. It was soft, serene, tranquil, secure with undertones and colors that encouraged and welcomed pouring your heart out.

I still remember the soothing sounds of the little indoor waterfall on the ledge of his desk and the warm light, that beige leather couch and the cushy purple pillows, the boxes of tissues that were dispersed about and his sturdy wooden throne like chair he’d eye you from with that inviting gaze to share in excess to your heart’s content.

Dr. B was different than other therapists cause he offered great affirmative consolation. Not that I’d been to any other therapists, but just looking around at the other psychologists and psychiatrists that would come out to take their patients in to their designated safe spaces for extended sharing, he was special. He had my number and knew exactly how to get me to not only diverge, but splurge even into the depths of the dark and muddied details. I’m sure there were times he was thinking T.M.I., but for the most part he just grinned and beared it. Or perhaps he liked it? As good as he was at getting you to share I think he must really have enjoyed it in some way. It was his thing and he’d made one hell of a living at it. He’d even go on to open a very successful practice in the South Bay becoming a highly sought after psychologist with a massive waiting list.

How “Getting It Off Your Chest” In Therapy Saves You

So how exactly did therapy save me?

For starters, it was liberating, freeing and I now understood that catch phrase, “get it off your chest.”

I would generally feel lighter all though there were certainly moments where I felt triggered by my sharing having resurfaced all the guts and gore of that awful day in early September in the early 90s.

Rehashing seemed good and on a few occasions bad, but overall after having put a couple of years into it I felt some kind of healing descending upon me.

What therapy gave me was a safe space to talk about what I’d been through over and over again minus any judgement. Sometimes you need to rehash it countless times to truly be free of it. It gave me a strong sense of having been heard rather than mostly dismissed by my peers, the school counselor and on occasion my family.

It also laid the foundation for what would become a decades long inward self-inquisition. I learned the art of contemplation in those sessions with Dr. B. (I’ve since gone on an incredible journey of self-inquiry. Download my signature creation — The Ultimate Self-Inquisition Guide here.)

He’d ask me quizzical things that would force me into deep reflection and re-evaluation of the narrative I was telling myself and him.

He’d get me to rethink my own thoughts. He even went as far as proposing new ones to counterbalance my muddled ones. He’d offer opinions which is generally not done in therapy, but I’m ok with that cause his perspective gave me tools to manage my anxiety. His suggestions offered a path to healing that my own stresses couldn’t conjure up. He’d quick-wittedly reshift my story to one that was more in alignment with growth and acceptance. He had a way of pulling me out of my victimhood stance to dance with the idea that maybe I was a strong survivor who was solid-footed. And perhaps I was even someone who could entertain the idea of fearlessness after all I’d witnessed.

My hangover from the trauma began to slowly subside. These new imaginings in Dr. B’s office helped me grow and lean into new possibilities of how life worked and how trauma could teach us things about ourselves and our potential to make it no matter what.

I stuck with the therapy cause there was more trauma in the waiting. It was less than a year after the first traumatic thing that I was accosted at gun point sending me in to an even darker despair. Life is hard. (More on that another time. I’ve got trauma tales for days hence all the inner soul work I’ve committed myself to over these past few decades.)

I started to have an awareness and understanding around trauma. I matured with the wisdom Dr. B imparted on me in those late teenage years into my early 20s. I started to cultivate greater empathy for myself and others who’d been through hard things.

I began to understand the power of listening and presence and how it had saved me as I was reconciling the scary memories in that beautiful safe space that Dr. B had curated up on that little hilltop in North Oakland.

Those formative years with my therapist were nothing short of magical. The healing I underwent with Dr. B’s sound listening and sharing skills was palpable and necessary for my survival.

I saw Dr. B for five years until work in the network news business pulled me away.

And even now all those years later I have a fondness for the healing he awakened within me that truly saved me in a really big way.

I talk a lot about mental health in fact so much so that I’ve been sponsored by BetterHelp because of my work through my writing and conversations with mental health experts in the field. For more check out this post — The 7 Greatest Mental Health Talks or this one What Kind Of Therapist Do I Need?