I Believe in Therapy

Yes, I believe wholeheartedly in therapy. I firmly believe that God has worked through sessions to speak truth and breathe life back into my life. 

Does that make me weak? I certainly don't think so. Does that mean that I'm dramatic? I don't think so. Does therapy make me less of a person than those who choose not to attend therapy? No, I really don't believe that it does. Does that make me a BAD Christian to go to someone else for therapy? I don't think so, because I believe God uses therapy all of the time to heal and restore and bring hope to MILLIONS of people who choose to attend therapy.

Science has proven time and time again how effective and helpful it can be to see a therapist for trauma, grief, relationship struggles, life coaching, and general encouragement. As someone very wise once said, "there's no one in the world who wouldn't benefit from it." Therapy is a gift I have been blessed to experience. 

I dislike the negative stigma of weakness attached to it. Those who think of themselves as too "put together" for therapy or somehow that they're better people, stronger people because they don't "need to see a therapist" are poorly educated about the scientific benefits of therapy and the ways God has used therapy to change millions and millions of lives for the better.

These are the rantings of someone who has personally witnessed the powerful and amazing benefits of attending trauma and grief therapy. I will continue seeing a therapist until the day I die and I'm going to be a healthier, mentally, emotionally and spiritually stronger me because of it! Therapy isn't just for those who are struggling, but for those who want to improve any area of their life.

And let's be real.....every single one of us has room for improvement, don't we? We're all a dang mess. Every single one of us. We're all a mess, and we all need God. God has used therapy in amazing ways in my life.

You feel as if you may not need it in your life? That's perfectly fine. I'm not saying everyone needs to see a therapist on a regular basis. But I do think it is extremely rude and prideful to think that therapy is beneath you or something that only weak people need and something only "rich people" can afford. Nothing is further from the truth. There are thousands of therapists who make therapy affordable for anyone who needs help.

Bottom line: Science proves therapy to be effective and beneficial. Life is hard and some of us want help. That doesn't make us weak. Perhaps it makes us smart? (notice I didn't say smartER, I simply just said "smart") Smart because we're willing to receive help that is available.....because let's face it, trying to do it all alone and hold it all together is exhausting for every single one of us.

So what? I go to therapy. I love it and it's changing my life. 

{ My Own Understanding } : That Time Proverbs 3:5-6 Hit Me in the Face

The last few months have been incredibly hard. Not only is grief hard -because it is- but figuring out how to move forward, how to put context around losing my dad, how to figure it out and understand it all- it’s been hard. Incredibly hard. In fact, I can’t even put it into words, but those of you who have gone through something similar, perhaps you understand all too well when I say, “it’s hard”.

What some of you know by now is that for the past several months, I’ve been in a very intense form of trauma and grief therapy. It’s been working wonders and I really do feel that God has been working and moving in my life through these therapy sessions.

Losing a loved one is tragic anyway you slice it. Losing a parent sucks. But there was something so horrible in the way that my father passed away. A man so healthy, so full of life, so wonderful, he wasn’t supposed to go so soon. Some of you followed along on our Caring Bridge site and understand maybe a little more about our time spent in the hospital. For the sake of my readers, and for the privacy of my family, I won’t go into details about what happened and what we saw. But trust me when I tell you, it was not pleasant.

There were images and situations that rocked me to my core and those images and situations caused a lot of anxiety in my life- to the point of panic attacks and then, at the beginning of the summer, a brief time spent hospitalized.

DISCLAIMER: Don’t feel bad if you weren’t aware of this. It was my choice not to publicly announce it at the time. In reality, it was a very brief stay so we didn’t inform many people about it. That was my choice and I knew that someday I would want to share my story. At the time, it was a very personal matter and I chose to keep it that way. Please don’t be offended if you didn’t know at the time. I’m choosing to share it with you now. Okay, back to the story…..

After I was hospitalized, they were able to regulate my medication I was on (for depression) and figure out what exactly caused me to have my meltdown. Before I was discharged, I was enrolled in an Intensive Outpatient Program called Clarity for my anxiety, and I also found a personal therapist who works with me one-on-one with my grief and trauma therapy.

Currently, I’ve finished the Clarity program. It was life-giving to say the least! It was a difficult and emotionally exhausting month, but so so so worth it. I’m no longer a slave to my anxiety and panic attacks, and I know better now how to handle the feelings of anxiety when they come. Since I’ve started my EMDR trauma therapy however, the waves of panic and “fight or flight” have become less and less.

That’s what I primarily want to focus on today: what I’ve been learning on my journey through trauma and grief therapy.

In the months I’ve been working with my therapist, we’ve re-processed and worked through the triggers or the traumatic images and situations that caused me to enter into full on anxiety/panic attack mode. In doing so, I can happily say that I have not had a panic episode in a little over 3 months. A HUGE victory considering I was used to having about 1 every single day since losing my dad.

Now, I’d say we’re in the stage of figuring out how to move forward from the loss and actively grieve. Before, I wasn’t able to do that because the memories and images were fragmented in my mind and they caused too much panic. They needed to be reprocessed before I could revisit them and grieve safely. But now, my sessions have been consisting of me wrestling with big, deep questions- trying to make sense of it all.

Those of you that know me know that I can’t stand it when I don’t understand something. I can’t move on unless I feel like I understand it or can attach some sort of meaning to it. The loss of my father has been something I haven’t been able to understand, and that’s been hard for me to come to terms with. I couldn’t just accept the fact that you live and then you die. Where does my faith in heaven come in? At this point in my life, I didn’t understand everything about my faith. If I can’t understand it, how will I ever be able to move forward? That’s been the question I’m currently wrestling with, and it feels like I’m just going in circles.

I always leave my therapists office feeling a little bit better than when I walked in, but for some reason, yesterday, I left feeling a little discouraged. I left with this uneasy feeling that I’ll never be able to understand what happened, and that was unsettling to my Type A personality. I had come to the realization that my mind wasn’t going to be able to give me an answer to the why question and that I wasn’t going to be able to “figure it out” or understand it completely. I was looking to myself for answers but was coming up blank. I needed to go somewhere else to find answers. But where?

If I’m being honest, I felt overwhelmingly guilty that I hadn’t thought of this sooner. After all, I love God and I absolutely love spending time in His word and spending time in prayer. I consider myself a Christian, a follower of Jesus. I trust Him and do my best to do what His word says. I believe in His death and resurrection on the cross. I believe that He conquered death. I believe in Heaven and eternal life. He is real to me. So then WHY was I so completely blind to what He was trying to tell me through all of my months of struggling?

“Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and do not depend on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5

“Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.” Proverbs 3:6

There it was. The solution to my questions!! The why behind my inability to understand and make sense of it. The reality of my limited human abilities. My desperate need to trust God. It came to me when I was reading my daily devotions. It was taking me through Genesis 3- you know the story- Eve was tempted into eating the fruit and sin enters the world. I parked on verse 6 and something about this particular verse struck a chord in me.

“She saw that the tree was beautiful and it’s fruit would be delicious and she wanted the wisdom it would give her.” (Gen 3:6)

Right there, I saw how similar I am to Eve. Like her in the garden, I wanted the wisdom of God. I wanted to be able to understand ALL of God’s plan. I wanted to understand more than what God made me to understand. I was discontent with the way God crafted my brain’s ability to comprehend and make sense of life’s circumstances.

I ask “Why did this happen?”

God tells me “Trust me. My ways are better than your ways.”

I ask “How do I move on? How do I survive?”

God tells me “Trust me. I love you and I will show you.”

I ask “What does this mean?”

God tells me “Trust me first. It’ll make sense later.”

I wanted so badly to understand why my dad had to die and how I was supposed to make sense of it. I wanted the knowledge that only God has. I was being like Eve. The truth of the matter is, if God gave me all of the answers and all of the knowledge I was demanding, where would my need for faith and trust in Him come in? Faith means NOT having all of the answers but trusting God to take care of my life.

It took some time of humbling myself when I realized that the only thing I’m supposed to do through this is to TRUST GOD with ALL of my heart. The Bible says it clearly, I’m not supposed to depend on my own understanding. It’s pointless to do so because it leads me in circles.

Trust God. That’s it. And HE will SHOW me how to move forward. He will SHOW me which path to take. HE’S GOT THIS. Because God is God, and I am not.

Father, forgive me for the ways I’ve been leaning and depending on my own understanding about life, my pain, my loss, my purpose. Forgive me for not trusting you with my whole heart. Help me to have a faith that doesn’t need all of the answers but that trusts wholeheartedly in the hope you give. In the Holy name of Jesus, Amen.