Tim Ellison
Introduction
Introduction
“If you break your leg, you are going to go to the doctor to get that leg healed. If something inside of you feels like it’s wounded, it’s just like a physical injury. You got to go get help. There’s nothing weak about that. It’s strong.”
- President Obama
I can’t believe I’m really doing this. After months of pressure from everyone around me, and my spirits getting worse, I finally gave in. Everyone told me this would help me so much, and that it was the first step towards the end of this battle, but I didn’t want to hear it. I’ve never been one who is easily convinced by anyone, to do anything, so this had to be my choice. Here I am, sitting in this waiting room with my mom Cherie, my head full of questions. Constantly asking myself how I got here, and wondering how this is gonna help me at all. I never thought I could feel this low, this defeated. How was talking to some stranger going to help me get through this? Therapy was something I’d tried before, but after the first experiences didn’t go well, I thought I’d never return. As I look back now, and I probably was too young to really understand or take advantage of what was being offered to me by the therapist, and the whole idea was just too much, at the time.
I’ve been in and out of the hospital so many times for medical issues, that Boston Medical Center feels like more of a second home for me, but this time was different. There was a nervous feeling I couldn’t get past, butterflies I couldn’t lose, as if it was my first time in the building. The woman we were waiting to see couldn’t come out fast enough, as I felt like everyone in the room was staring at me. Being twenty-one in the Pediatric waiting room is awkward under any circumstances, never mind being there to see a therapist.
Finally, a woman comes out and calls for my mom and I to follow her back to her office. Seeing that the last therapist I saw was a man and the one before him was an older woman, it took me by surprise to see that my new therapist was a young woman. She introduced herself as Michelle, and invited us back into her office. The walk felt like it went on for hours, as the questions and worries started to pile up again. I began contemplating everything that was going to happen during my first appointment. I wasn’t expecting to say much, and seeing that my mom was there, I figured I wouldn’t have to.
When we got into the room the first thing I noticed was how cold it was in there. I was looking for some comfort and I couldn’t find it, even with all the cliché depression posters on the wall, nothing was working for me. The introduction portion felt much like an interview, obviously not your average interview, though. The questions started coming, one after another, causing me to dig back far into my memory for the answers. Most of them were questions that I’ve already heard, what felt like one hundred times already, but some were new. Those are the ones that stood out to me. As the questions got more personal, I started getting more intrigued by what felt like, just another conversation, not a therapy session. It actually wasn’t nearly as awkward as I thought it would be, and although the questions weren’t ones that I could just breeze through and give routine answers to, I didn’t mind answering them, because they really forced me to think.
For the first time in a very long time, I was doing something that actually felt therapeutic for me. While answering her questions, I also started simultaneously answering questions of my own that I had for myself. This wasn’t going at all how I thought it would, it was a lot better. I had first imagined myself sitting there, as my mom talked to my new therapist while I just listened for the most part. Maybe I’d have to nod or shake my head a few times if necessary, but I thought I would just sit back as my mom took control. She knows me so well and wants what’s best for me, so I felt comfortable with her leading the way.
Despite what I anticipated would happen, there I was, spilling out some of the most difficult times of my life to a complete stranger. Just prior to agreeing to this appointment, I had told myself that I was done communicating with people, for the most part. I was starting to feel like no matter what I said, there was no resolution to my problem, and no one understood. I had expressed myself before, completely opened up, just to continue to feel the same way as before. This is why when the idea of therapy was brought up, I was always quick to shoot it down. I was told there were only two ways to treat depression, one was by going through some sort of therapy, and the other involved taking prescription medication for it.
The idea of taking medicine was always a no-go for me. I thought that I would make me feel like I was inferior to everyone around me. Nobody else was taking meds to help them to cope with what they were going through, at least not that I knew of, and that was a part of the reason why I was so against it. I heard a few people say taking the meds made them worse in different ways, others say it just didn’t work. On the other hand, the doctors, of course, were trying to convince me to try them. I never really considered the possibility of taking meds for something other than physical injuries. I would say it was just the overall bad stigma about anti-depressants that led me to turn my nose up at them. Since I was being so stubborn about the idea of taking meds, and I felt like I had to make a decision of some sort, I decided to allow my doctor and my mom to hook me up with a therapist.
My experience there was drastically different than what I had anticipated. I was finally able to just sit back and reflect on all the things that were causing me to stress so heavily. Michelle used different methods and exercises that helped me sort my thoughts out for the first time, since the depression had taken hold. Sometimes when you’re depressed, you forget what you were even sad about in the first place, and fall into something a lot deeper and darker. It’s tough to explain, but your thoughts get all foggy and compiled into one huge emotion, and it completely kills your mood and motivation. You just become totally shut down with no explanation. You can’t express what’s wrong because you don’t even know anymore. You fall into a rut and don’t have the energy or desire to talk to anyone anymore because you see no point. For a while, that’s exactly where I was. I wasn’t really open to any suggestions anyone had, and continuously shot down ideas for treatment from those around me. I felt like there was no solution and hoped that it was something that would just go away. But in my very first session, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I was starting to figure out why I was so sad again.
Michelle, allowed me to separate my issues into different categories and then helped me make a plan on how to attack these issues. Some of them carried more weight than others, some were almost impossible to completely solve. It was a process of prioritizing for me. What were the things that triggered my depression the most? Once I figured out which of my stressors I was going to tackle first, I felt more in control and had a sense of direction. Leaving that office, I was feeling a lot more hopeful then I had originally thought I would. I was anticipating leaving the hospital feeling exactly the same as when I first arrived, maybe even a little more annoyed than before. Instead, I actually felt like I had a plan to follow. Talking to my therapist allowed me to actually set goals for myself. Those foggy thoughts were starting to become clearer for me.