I Resisted Therapy for Four Years and Then Could Not Imagine Having Waited

I had four years of reasons not to go to therapy, each of which felt legitimate in the moment and which I now recognise as a series of progressively less convincing arguments produced by the part of me that did not want to go.

The first year it was the cost, which was real but not as prohibitive as I made it. The second year it was the belief that therapy was for people who had problems more serious than mine - that what I was managing, though uncomfortable, was within the range of normal and did not require professional attention.

The third year it was a vaguer but persistent sense that going would mean acknowledging that I was not managing as well as I was performing managing, and that acknowledgment felt like a loss of something I had not identified as important until I imagined surrendering it.

The fourth reason, which arrived in the fourth year, was simply habit - I had not gone for so long that not going had become the default. I was 27 in San Francisco, working in a demanding role in technology, and the reason I finally went had nothing elegant about it: I ran out of ways to explain to myself why I kept waking at 4am with a specific quality of dread that bore no reliable relationship to what was actually happening in my life.

My first therapist was not a match - a thing I had not known was possible until it happened, and which I initially used as confirmation that therapy was not going to work for me. My second was significantly better fit and the difference was almost immediately clear.

The most valuable thing that therapy gave me, which I did not expect because it was not what I had gone for, was not the resolution of the 4am dread - though that improved significantly. It was the discovery that I had no reliable practice of examining my own emotional experience.

I was functional and analytically capable and almost completely in the dark about what I was actually feeling at any given time beyond the surface labels I had assigned to things. I had been operating my emotional life with the equivalent of a two-word vocabulary in a language that has several hundred.

The work of expanding that vocabulary was not comfortable. It was the most useful thing I have done for myself in my adult life. I think about the four years of reasons I had not to go and they look, from here, like exactly what they were.