How Therapy Can Change Your Life

Not What I Expected

I don’t know what I expected, but here they are: the house painters we’d booked weeks ago, large men with friendly faces and a radio that plays the Classic Rock station while they work. What did I expect? What you see on TV or in old cartoons, I guess: a man in overalls and a painting cap, cheerfully swiping a paintbrush and whistling while he works.

What the painters at my home today are doing is not that. There’s a lot of banging and stripping, blasting and wrapping. They’re cheerful enough and still friendly, but bear an uncanny resemblance to what my journey though therapy has been like.

My first impressions of therapy were, again, not unlike something I’d see on TV: sitting on a couch talking about my feelings, cheerfully swiping the paintbrush of the events of my day over the siding of my mind, maybe even while whistling! But what therapy became was the same hard work as my real painters. There was a lot of work involved. A lot of noise, a lot of banging around as old memories came to the surface and hard-weathered problems needed to be stripped away. I confronted (and still do) friendships in my life as broken as the shutters that have fallen off of the front of my house during thunderstorms; and I am still grappling with how ugly the thoughts in my mind are and how much they resemble the peeling flaking ugliness of the old paint that flitters to the base of my driveway like so many chipped snowflakes.

It is a well-known fact to those who go to therapy that it is hard work, indeed.

A song plays on the painters’ radio: Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.”

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?

Can I handle the seasons of my life?

I don’t know.

I don’t know if I can either. Actually, that’s not true. I know I can, although the difference between handling them by myself and handling them with a therapist is immense. And so I value the work, as hard as it is. I value therapy the way I am valuing the current havoc that is being wrought on my house for the same reasons: because after all that hard work, there will be something beautiful left behind. My home will look refreshed and bright and welcoming after the painters have done their good work; and I will be able to sail through the changes of my life after mine.

If you’re deciding whether or not therapy is right for you, I highly encourage you to consider the difference it can make. It may be painful at times and it may take a lot of effort in some places, but the reward is something you can look on with pride and love.

Until next time, be well!
Christy

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About the author: Christy Gualtieri is a freelance writer specializing in pop culture, religion, and motherhood. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two children. Christy also blogs at asinglehour.wordpress.com and tweets @agapeflower117. You can  follow her here on eTalkTherapy for inspirational articles and different perspectives as they relate to good mental health.

Effects of a Prolonged Pandemic on Mental Health

We’ve Never Not Known Together

“It’s like… I think everything’s going to be okay, but I have no idea what’s going to happen next. And like, none of you know either. Like… we’ve all never not known together.” – John Mulaney

The second Summer of Covid-19 and things look…off. On paper, everything is pretty similar to every other summer: pools are open, kids go to camps, traffic is resuming, there are BBQs galore and big fireworks shows for Independence Day. But off-paper, things are different. Take sports for example: the Olympics are happening in this sort of truncated way, with sound effects piped in to make it sound like the vast emptiness of the seats are filled with people, even though they’re not; yet the NBA championships are hosting full-to-capacity stadiums. The Stanley Cup finals were odd in that on the American side, crowds galore could cheer away together while in Canada, only a few in comparison could. Masks are highly suggested in some states, completely an afterthought in others, and rapidly becoming mandatory in places where the Delta variant of the virus is threatening to rage with impunity again. And forget even thinking about the next school year!

How does the ordinary person go through it all? Comedian John Mulaney, in the quote above, wasn’t referring to Covd when he was talking to Stephen Colbert on the Late Show – this was before Covid – but the sentiment, to me, applies exactly. I also think everything is going to be okay, but I have no idea what is going to happen next.

And all of this uncertainty, all of this unknowing… it’s not a great feeling. Sometimes I feel alone when I say that. I certainly do when so many people I know are just taking Covid in stride, declaring it a thing they just need to deal with the way we need to deal with lots of catastrophic things in our lives. And they’re not wrong; there’s a very real possibility that Covid will just be a thing that hangs around forever now, the way extreme weather does, for example. I’m just not there yet.

I don’t know if the precautions I am taking are the correct ones. I don’t know that I’m just delaying an inevitability if this thing really does keep going in its relentlessness. I don’t know when things will return to a normalcy I’m used to. And it’s true that we all don’t know, together. We are all just looking at things one day at a time.

I don’t know that it’s wrong to do that; to make decisions based on the outcome of what we’ve done before. That’s how we learn, isn’t it? We make mistakes and remember (or try, to) for next time. It is also true, however, that the stakes feel higher.

The “new normal” is everything but, but it is a reality. It’s not a reality we asked for, but it’s here anyway, and so the question becomes how we’re going to adapt. Your adaptation may look different than mine, but as we go through our days, let’s keep in mind that what Mulaney said was true: we’ve never not known together. We may indeed not have the right answers. But we’re all trying. And please know you’re not trying alone!

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eTalkTherapy - talk with a counselor online

About the author: Christy Gualtieri is a freelance writer specializing in pop culture, religion, and motherhood. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two children. Christy also blogs at asinglehour.wordpress.com and tweets @agapeflower117. You can  follow her here on eTalkTherapy for inspirational articles and different perspectives as they relate to good mental health.