It's Time to Quit Therapy

Or At Least Reduce the Cadence. On Self-Centeredness as Wellness

Woods near the house where I grew up in Western Washington

I used to walk around the house before bed and jiggle the door handles when I was little. I would do this after my parents and sisters had retired to their beds, tiptoeing downstairs under the guise of needing a glass of water. I always already had a full glass of water on my bedside, condensation beading on the rim. I waited until everyone was asleep so they didn’t think I was crazy. There was no reason for me to be double-checking the doors. My parents always made sure that the doors were locked and that the garage was closed. Except for that one time they didn’t.

After returning home from dinner out one night, my mom or dad meant to press the button that closes the garage door, but they didn’t. The mouth of our house lay open all night, and a burglar wandered in and stole my dad’s golf clubs. My parents were understandably upset, and I was scared. For the next several nights, I stared out the window of my sister’s bedroom, which looked onto our street, confident that the burglar would come back for more - or worse, come back for our lives!

Back then, I couldn’t comprehend random acts of misfortune. Perhaps it was a budding writer in me, trying to make poetry out of the mundane, but there were no such things as coincidences. Everything was happening for a reason, an invisible yarn tying every incident, big and small, together. I didn’t understand that many criminals commit crimes where there is opportunity, and not always in a calculated manner. My adult mind now imagines the burglar patrolling the neighborhood for low-risk thieving opportunities and seeing our garage door wide open. The haphazard contents beckoning like food at a buffet.

It’s quite self-centered - and quite suburban - to think my family and I could be the subjects of a premeditated, cold-blooded murder. Who am I to think we’re so special? All the same, this was the beginning of a practice I would remain committed to for the next twenty-some years: rumination. Mentally fixating on something - typically something I was afraid of - with such intense concentration, I could shatter a sliding glass door with my focus.

It would begin in the morning. After those few nanoseconds of remembering who you are and where you are right after you wake up, I would launch into my subjects of rumination for the day. What was all that could go wrong? My parents could forget to pick me up from school, and I could end up homeless today. I could get kidnapped at recess. I could drink rancid milk at lunch. I could faceplant on the asphalt. And of course, our home could be burglarized, as our garage had been! This was a terrifying world we lived in, and if I didn’t devote an even amount of worry to every worst-case scenario, my face could show up on the evening news.

Naturally, an untreated, worried child grows into an anxious adult. And apparently, we were all worried children because we all seem to be anxious adults. Semantically, anxiety is undoubtedly the lamest of neuroses. Or at least it has the lamest packaging. Co-opted by the likes of Kendall Jenner and fellow influencers on Mental Health Awareness Day, it is the smoothest-brained of mental ailments. Once used to describe a natural fear response elicited by real and perceived threats, anxiety is now a balmy term used to regard nearly all levels of unease and stress. It’s a brand-safe confessional to People magazine. “I suffer from anxiety,” admits a starlet, looking forlorned out her villa window. Depression without the greyness, borderline without the teeth - anxiety has a flattened brand. Anxiety is “unwellness” in a glitter gel pen font.

Kendall Jenner Shares the Importance of Being an Ally to Those with Anxiety, from Vogue

Despite all this, “anxious” would be the best word to describe how I felt between the ages of 10 and 20. I would lay awake for hours on end, insomnia’s claws gripped firmly around my neck. I would reread essays upwards of a thousand times before submission and cry in the corner of my room as I awaited my grade. Every slammed door would make me jump, and every creak in the floor evoked panic. Ruminate, ruminate, ruminate.

I finally got to therapy at age 18 and began to talk through some of these worries and some of the potential causes - the Big Bad Thing that happened in my life so far (worse than stolen golf clubs) and its many aftershocks. The benefit of therapy, initially, was being able to talk through things with an unbiased professional, someone removed from my family and friends who knew what she was talking about. She gave me some helpful books to read. She helped me consider some new ways of thinking. Best of all, she helped me better understand what I can and cannot control. She helped me recognize that everyone suffers, yet so many can be resilient in the face of hardship. Two things can be true at once, and so on.

A book that randomly changed my life: Self-Compassion by Dr. Kristen Neff. Normally, I’m not one for self-help books, but I appreciated how forthright this author was about her own experiences in this one.

When I graduated college and moved to New York, I decided to delay finding a new therapist until I eventually decided not to find a new one at all. After years of weekly therapeutic care, my toolkit had become quite robust. I found myself able to weather regular storms without needing to dish out a weekly copay. It’s not that my life was now without challenge per se, but I felt able to rise to the occasion of tackling challenges that once left me winded, perhaps thanks to the therapist’s work and perhaps thanks to surrounding myself with better influences during the final stages of pre-frontal cortex development.

When I tell certain people about ditching my therapist, they sometimes react with shock, as if I’ve declared never to visit the dentist again. Our world is more pro-therapy than it’s ever been. Gone are the days of lying to your girlfriends about visiting a “shrink”; therapy is now a regular conversation topic around the wine bar and watercooler alike. It’s a prerequisite for dating prospects, particularly for straight women. Thanks to Mental Health Awareness, we’re more aware of mental health than ever. Being “in therapy” is contemporary shorthand for being well-adjusted and self-aware, not dissimilar to how a black square on one’s Instagram grid signaled political correctness in the summer of 2020.

Similar to “having anxiety,” “being in therapy” can also be a toothless concept, signaling something on the surface without necessarily needing to mean anything substantive. What is one discussing in their therapy sessions? Are they receptive to therapeutic care? Are they intaking what they’re learning or wiping their mental canvas clean after closing out of the Telehealth tab? Regardless, the chronic state of being “in therapy” is well-aligned with the concurrent trend of millennials and Gen Zers being hyper-focused on optimizing their physical, emotional, and social well-being. Even if you don’t “need” weekly therapy, what’s the harm in partaking? What’s the harm in brushing your teeth thrice a day instead of twice?

Who needs therapy when you have a book, pastry, and iced tea in Central Park?

Joan Didion once said that “it’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Increasingly, I’m finding this relevant to zillennails and their relationships to therapy. Therapy is excellent in helping the avoidant address their problems and the anxious reorient their thoughts. But it requires a level of introspection that, when performed in excess, can cause one to teter towards a disconcerting level of self-centeredness. If one already lives in a hyper-individualistic culture, such as the United States, continuing to place one’s limited free time solely on oneself in therapy may have an inverse effect. Remotely working within our own mental kingdoms and constantly evaluating the personas we’re conceiving via social media, we are already devoting so much time to thinking about ourselves. Whether you’re staring at your reflection in admiration or disgust, it’s still self-absorption - to an extent.

Life ebbs and flows and last autumn I found myself in an ebb. I had just moved to San Francisco, experienced a weird series of events as I was getting settled in my apartment, and Trump had just won the election. I found myself, once again, in a state of fear. My muscle memory dusted off its cobwebs and I was back in a delicious groove of chronic rumination. My mind had slid on a pair of old jeans from high school and was delighted to see that they still fit. Bloodshot eyes staring at the ceiling. Constant thoughts of plane crashes, wildfires, and buildings collapsing. My loved ones suffering. Burglars stealing my proverbial golf clubs, and so forth.

My initial thought was to get back into therapy. But then I imagined myself logging out of my work laptop, logging on to my personal laptop, experiencing another bout of Zoom fatigue, and logging off again to find myself alone and tear-stained at my bedroom desk. It was an unsavory image.

I was already doing everything a conventional therapist would suggest - exercising, eating well, seeing friends, journaling, getting enough fresh air, and so on. And due the aforementioned election, my fears were beginning to inch more existential than personal. The last thing I wanted to do was sit and talk about my immediate, rational, and irrational worries, which were already bouncing around my head all day. The antidote to my existentialism wasn’t theoretical, it was practical. I felt like I needed to do something. Help someone. Connect with something outside of myself.

I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing. I also enjoy spending time with children - in high school, I taught dance classes to children aged 3 to 17. So, on a whim, about a month ago, I signed up to volunteer at a tutoring center in the Mission that specializes in helping first-generation students prepare for college and beyond. After a brief interview and background check, I was paired with a middle schooler who needed extra language arts help.

At our first session, I felt nervous but prepared. I had registered for this in an emotional whirlwind - typically a bad time to sign up for something new - but felt ready for every possible outcome. An engaged student, an easily distracted student, an annoyed student - bring it on, anything.

What I got was a little bit of both. After getting settled in a coat closet of a study room at the center, I introduced myself to the student. I told him where I went to college, what I do for work, and that I write a weekly blog for thousands of readers. He was uninterested in all of that. What he was interested in were the books he was reading, which he took out of his backpack and showed me. He is also interested in the drama department at his school - he told me he landed a big speaking role in their upcoming production. He is also really interested in Roblox and explaining the rules of every game to me, which I had to deter him from doing so we could focus on the speech he was writing for class. He could choose any topic he wanted for his speech, and he chose “Why You Should Love Your Family.” We talked through the structure and some reasons why we each love our families and why loving your family is advantageous from a survival standpoint.

I’m still planning on chatting with my therapist, albeit on a less regular cadence - quarterly, if possible. I’m not expecting weekly tutoring to change the world, but I hope I’m able to help someone in some small way - the origins of my efforts are both selfish and selfless. Chatting with this student - begging him to close out of his Roblox tab, asking him about his family - gave me more hope than I’d felt in a minute, even if it was only by way of getting me outside of myself.

There isn’t a miracle elixer for “unwellness.” Working with a doctor and learning more about your tendencies in moments of fear is helpful, but there’s such a thing as living too internal of a life. Living completely inside of yourself is alienating - siloes you off on an island of your own, convinces you that your problems are yours alone to fix in privacy. It’s more likely that the answers are around you, as well as in you.

From a stroll through Mission Dolores Park, near the tutoring center

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