I had a wonderful therapist to whom I poured my heart out for over a year.
Finding a therapist is like finding an apartment. You need one, you want to love it, but sometimes you compromise because time and urgency prevail. It’s not that you choose the worst place to live, but at some point, you realize that you settled. Even if you start looking again, you’re already disillusioned with the process.
I searched for over a year to find the right therapist and eventually connected with someone who seemed to understand my needs. She was excellent at some things, but there was one thing I wish she had told me that could have changed my life forever.
Now that I know it, it has. I am a firm believer that if you didn’t get it, you didn’t need it. Whatever was withheld from you was done so with purpose. The message comes right on time.
I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear it then, but after I stopped therapy, it was obvious that I had indeed lost myself.
My therapist didn’t know that.
She couldn’t have known.
There was no way for her to deduce that the woman she was speaking to bi-weekly wasn’t the me I had known myself to be. She couldn’t have recognized from my words alone that I had changed. None of my friends had noticed, so why should she?
When I started therapy, I was in a deep depression—one that even I, someone who has suffered from depressive episodes their entire life, didn’t even recognize. I was in a dark place, and no one noticed.
But allegedly, I had checks notes ‘friends’.
There is something so intriguing about suffering and how invisible it is. It hides in plain sight. My suffering seemed unbearable to me, but it wasn’t apparent to those who knew me, certainly not to those who didn’t, and certainly not to my therapist.
The woman she was treating was going through ‘something’, and together we were going to figure it out and come out on the other side. I left therapy before that could happen. When I left, I think I was more in it than I’d ever been. Whatever ‘it’ was had swallowed me whole.
They say things can change in an instant. But what feels like an instant is actually an awakening. Butterflies emerge from a chrysalis, but do they know how long it took to change from a caterpillar?
I don’t really know how, but somehow I changed. The idea was to return to self. Return home.
But the home wasn’t in the past. It wasn’t a place I’d been before. The home I returned to was my spirit of consciousness—the universal home that we all knew before birth and are constantly trying to find in the physical world.
Yet somehow, I was home. I had emerged as a version of myself closer to the real me than I had ever been, and I wish my therapist would have told me then that I was ‘that bitch’.
In my mind, I had always thought of myself as ‘that bitch’, but with no real hierarchy or standing. To me, all women were bad bitches, and I was just one of many towing the line. That must have been one of the more frustrating things about me.
Not only was my inner being fed up with it, but the people around me were visibly ill. I was in the trenches, really acting like a resident instead of a visitor, and I was paying the price.
No matter how comfortable or uncomfortable you feel at any given stage in life or environment, the universe will never allow you to stay there. Life is about frequency and resonance.
If you don’t match your surroundings vibrationally, it will be as uncomfortable for you as for the people around you.
It could be a physical space, a relationship, a job—anything. We all exude a vibration that pulls us towards where we are supposed to be, and the longer you stay where you don’t belong, the worse you will feel.
I wish my therapist had said, “I can tell that you’re better than the experiences you’re engaged in. You’re better than the job, the friends, the men, the women. You have higher standards; you want more. You expect more of yourself. Let’s get a plan together that puts you in the place you’re supposed to be. Work towards that.”
That is what I needed to hear because the reality is we are all given a promise at birth, and those who strive towards that promise are chosen and exalted in ways that infuriate those who have ignored the call.
You are ‘that bitch’ when you accept that being a minority in everything and of everything will isolate and frustrate you at times. It will cause others to be mean to you or isolate you. People cannot stand to be reminded of what is possible but that which they have not strived for.
It’s like the chapters of The Alchemist, where the shopkeeper admits that he is not going to Mecca. He has spent his entire life wishing he could, only to make the wishing more important than the going.
So many people drown in their desires instead of swimming towards their goals.
When you remember that your only job is to keep going, to keep striving towards your dream, you aren’t leaving yourself behind—you are getting closer to the real you. And that is a remembrance of what was promised to you. That’s the secret, and that is what therapy should remind all of us.
You are here because you have forgotten yourself. And if you have a really good therapist, they’ll help you remember.
Leave a Reply