Life Unchained: Show Up at Therapy

There’s a difference between going to therapy for an hour and showing up at therapy with emotional courage. To show you what I mean, I’m going to give you some peeks behind the curtain of my own recent experiences with the therapeutic process. There’s some deep vulnerability in what you’re about to read, but if you’re feeling “Stuck” in therapy, I think seeing authentic emotional courage in action might help move your needle.  

I’ve had multiple therapists over the last forty years. I’ve just completed an intensive series of therapy sessions over the last few months that have really helped me metabolize emotions and move forward on things I needed to let go of.

In my writing career, I’ve worked with a lot of psychologists, neurologists, and high-performance coaches. I’ve even dated three psychologists. So, as I’m pushing 50, I understand the landscape a lot better than I did as an angsty teenager crying over the girl who broke my heart.

Now I’m not going to play therapist for you. I’m not one, don’t go thinking I’m giving you psychological advice to live your life by. Do what your therapist says and don’t sue me. Instead, I’m going to help you understand what showing up at therapy looks like through the lens of my own earned experiences.

Showing Up At Therapy

I know there are some people out there who think going to therapy is a sign of weakness. The truth is, “Showing Up at Therapy” is one of the strongest things you will ever do. Now I don’t mean just walking in the damn door, sitting down, and fighting the temptation to not grab a handful of Skittles from that colorful bowl on the therapist’s coffee table.

It’s possible to sit down in that chair, stare across at your therapist as they put that happy smile on their face, and jibber jabber for an hour. I admit I have gone to the therapist and done the psychological equivalent of “Talking about the weather” for an hour. Dropped the $20 co-pay with the receptionist and patted myself on the back for going to therapy.

You get next to nothing out of this kind of experience.

I’ve watched people I loved, carrying a big fat, glowing problem on their shoulder, walk into therapy. And I thought,, “OK, the therapist is gonna straighten this out, and I don’t have to say anything to them.” Then they came out of that session, and the ten after it with the same fat glowing red problem. I have lost people I loved more than sunshine to their unaddressed mental illness while they were still in therapy.

The truth is, it’s entirely possible to go to therapy for years and not get jackshit from it. If you want the breakthrough, you have to do the work.

Do Your Own Homework

When I was in sixth grade, I suffered a lot of painful losses and deaths in the family. My father, who was hurting terribly in his own ways, was in and out of my life in ways that cut deep into my spiritual bone marrow.

The adults in my life were reeling with their own grief, and in those days, no one thought a kid could suffer from depression. Naturally, my schoolwork started to suffer, and my mother’s only solution was to simply do my math homework for me.

We’d sit at the kitchen table. She’d turn the math worksheet upside down to make the handwriting look sloppy like mine. Then she’d fill out the problems, trying to explain it to me, while I sat there, with a numb mind pretending to pay attention.

So of course, when the final test came up in class, I bombed the damn Hiroshima. I don’t think I even spelled my own name right!

If you walk into your therapy session and all you do is make emotional small talk, you’re not going to really learn the lessons. The therapist will do their best to prompt you or hand you a technique to metabolize the emotions you’re struggling with. Yet you are the one who has to do the work to really let the integration process happen on the inside.

The therapist can't hand you the answers you need any more than my mom doing my homework helped me learn fractions. The only way you really learn it down deep is to embrace the process and do the work yourself.

Showing up at therapy isn’t some big dramatic moment most of the time. It’s a choice you make in the middle of a sentence. It’s when you catch yourself explaining why you did something… and you stop.

You strip it down. Instead of “She was pushing me too hard,” you say, “I pulled away when things got real.” Instead of “I had my reasons,” you say, “I was scared.” It’s uncomfortable.

It feels like you’re saying something you shouldn’t say out loud. That’s usually how you know you’re finally getting somewhere.

What Doing the Work Looks Like

In my 20s, I struggled with a lot of unhealthy relationships, and treated therapy like an emotional dumping ground. Something would break my heart, tweak my fears, or kick my ego in the nuts, and I’d just unload in the emotional landfill of my weekly therapy session.   

I was talking to him about how I was losing feelings for this beautiful, intelligent woman I was dating. How just like the last one; she was nagging me and pushing me to change in ways that “Aren’t me, man.” Dropping a laundry list of her little faults, how she doesn’t understand, she likes strawberry, but I like chocolate, and we’re just too incompatible. Just like the last girl I dated 6 months earlier.

I could tell by the wry smile splitting his scraggly red mustache that he knew exactly what was going on with me. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake it out of him. Yet I just kept prattling on with my shallow rationalizations about how her flaws were killing my attraction to her.  

I started thinking, “Is me losing attraction to these women a sign that I’m turning gay?” For three sessions, I ruminated about how I might be secretly homosexual even though “I don’t think dudes are sexy.”

All that going out to the bars, listening to music, getting drunk, and staying in constant motion to distract myself was a coincidence. Sleeping in all the time was to fight the hangovers, and I was working super hard.

Excuses covering up rationalizations, to cover up the faults I was finding in these women. Until I finally ran out of ways to run. Then I finally broke, and I realized, like Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero, I was the problem.

In a moment of absolute catharsis, I collapsed. Snot raining on the therapist’s carpet, I finally gave in to the fact that I was afraid of the deep love and intimacy she’d offered me. He helped me up, told me not to worry about the carpet stains, and we started talking.

I put in the hard work to realize that what I was dealing with was called Dismissive Avoidant Attachment Style. A childhood attachment wound that went back to my father coming and going in my life. How it made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be loved. And when I stopped having my mom help me with my homework and buckled down to earn good grades, he started showing up again. Making me feel like the love I really wanted was conditional.

I put in the hard work to “Break Through” on that attachment wound. And after four months apart, I went back to that girl whose heart I broke. Held myself accountable before her, accepted that she was probably going to reject my emotionally broken ass, but that I needed to “Do the right thing... for me.”

She ended up taking me back. I worked on being a better man to her. I "found myself" as a good partner. And even though the relationship died for other legitimate reasons. I’d proved to myself that I was indeed capable and deserving of love.

It was because I “Showed Up At Therapy” that I was able to go on and have some wonderful, happy relationships. More importantly, it taught me that I could show up for myself, confront myself, and heal other so-called “Demons” that still needed to be dealt with.

Honestly, this process of self-confrontation and emotional courage is uncomfortable as hell, but it cuts straight through the noise. Once the truth is sitting there, plain and unpolished, there’s nothing left to argue with. The problem becomes something to face and finally start working on.

And the therapist is right there to help guide you, without just handing you the answers.

What Does It Look Like

Now showing up at therapy, giving yourself over to the therapeutic process looks different for each of us. Now I’ve been through decades of personal growth and healing.

So I can’t tell you what “Showing Up At Therapy” will look like for you. While there are grand moments of catharsis and realization that happen in the therapist’s office. Where it really shows up is in the simpler moments of your life.

What it looked like for me came as a complete surprise. A few weeks ago, I was at a comedy show with a psychologist friend. The headliner was a therapist in their “Day Job” calling himself Tony the Shrink. His act called for a lot of audience participation, and the people in the front row were glacial.

I jumped in with some answers to his cute questions to keep him from bombing. We had some fun back and forth about “Fighting Inner Demons” with a spork to keep the poor guy’s act going.

My friend turned to me and said, “That’s really true about people struggling with their demons.” And without thinking about it, I told her, “I’m not afraid of what’s inside.”

It took me a hot minute to realize what I’d said.

Now I’m not saying my inner world is all unicorns farting rainbows, while the rest of you poor bastards struggle in a neurotic swamp. The point is that showing up at therapy with emotional courage doesn’t just save you time. It teaches you how to trust yourself to handle the tough topics ahead.

If you want to go deeper into Life Unchained you can follow along at Eric Beuning’s Author Page. I’ll be building it piece by piece.