When I walked out of therapy at 19 years old, I thought, on some level, that I was fixed. I wasn’t delusional; I knew I had flaws. I just thought I had ironed most of them out. By the last of my six university-sponsored sessions, I didn’t have much left to say, let alone new problems to tread over. I was confident – overconfident, in that smarmy, un-self-aware way – that I had solved the puzzle of myself.
This was the fourth time I had done therapy – the first three stints occurred during my parents’ drawn-out divorce, my estrangement from my father, and the court-mandated sessions that arose when he wanted that estrangement to end. From these experiences, I took away two things: one, that therapy is where you go to find problems, with the aim to get rid of them. And two (it being the Noughties and early 2010s) that going to therapy admitted an ugly truth about yourself; that it was something to be ashamed of.
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