What I Learned in Therapy

Dec 27, 2024

It has been four years since I started and stopped going to therapy. With just a few sessions (due to financial limitations), I did not expect to learn a lot about myself and my behavioral tendencies that kept me within the confines of my hostile mind.

The first few sessions

With my own money, I paid for my sessions which was short-lived due to financial limitations. It was expensive and I was not able to sustain it.

During my first session with my therapist, it went along the way we were told about it in movies. Mostly it was me talking about:

For most of the time I have been alive, I considered myself a deeply self-aware individual. I prided myself over knowing what I think, what I want, and where I want to go. A few conversations more inside this airconditioned room inside Ateneo de Manila University, I was told to keep a gratitude journal.

I kept thinking that it was easy. I have been writing my whole life and what would it take for me to start writing about the things that I am thankful for.

A week passed and I did not write a single word. I came back next week for my next session and I told my therapist a convenient excuse as to why I was unable to write.

"I'm only used to writing creatively. When I write for myself, I can only express myself in figurative language."

That was stupid. Stupid of me enough to craft that excuse to hide the simple fact that I do not know what gratitude is. I was blind to this experience. I am only able to articulate this lack at this point because I was incapable of seeing this lack to my therapist.

But I did try to write. At least in the most minimal effort. I would try to sit down on my laptop and try to express what I am currently feeling. Eventually, I was able to put down words, typing what seems to be the closest representation of my emotions into words. Once I was done, everything that I wrote ended up becoming metaphors. Figurative phrases that I too, must decipher in order to understand. At that moment, it felt that it was the best thing I could do to state what I feel. What I just wrote are the amalgamation of my feelings condensed into figurative language. I believed that that was what defined me as a writer. Yet, something was missing. Throughout years of writing, it never occurred to my why I write the way I write. It never occurred to me to stop and think what I was trying to say. At least to sit down, do nothing, and actually try to think about what I was trying to communicate. I have never dug that deep into my own creative process.

The catalyst for understanding myself

After a month, the pandemic hit. Needless to say that I was not able to return to therapy. But that writing prompt had always got me into thinking about the reasons why I am doing the things that I am good at.

I thought of the reasons why I left my creative writing circle and how it is connected with my recent conversations with my therapist. My days in quarantine accelerated the process of introspection. Eventually, it made sense to me by arriving to three conclusions:

  1. I closely associated myself with leftist community, adopting their ideas and attitude towards art without having a clear foundation of my own politics.
  2. I believed that writing is a political act, which discredits my voice as a writer who only writes about self-reflexivity that is devoid of praxis.
  3. I enjoyed writing about the abstraction of nothingness because the obscurity of the idea will always obfuscate clear language expression.

With these reasons, I realized that all my previous actions were leading towards self-abnegation because of brewing shame and guilt. Shame of being unable to participate in the practice of the ideology that I believed in. Guilt for having selfish reasons to coexist with my peers when my purpose for writing is entirely different. These surfacing perception of myself and my creative practice led me to stop writing entirely. Even then when I did not know my own true reasons, I made up reasons to convince myself that:

Which are both lies I told myself to live with the idea of deliberately abandoning what I love to do for a greater good.

As time went further on, still not writing, a lot of things made more sense. Working in corporate removed me from my most immediate and familiar community of creative space. I compared myself a lot with most people I met during this period in my life and I realized that:

This feeling of near-isolation made me look at myself different. Away from the familiar creative people where talking about the most abstract ideas can just click with anyone and spur a conversation. This was not the case when I started working and left me with an unfamiliar feeling of self-reflection. What have I been doing all this time?

What's writing got to do with all this?

If the old me attempted to write these thoughts, it would probably be laden with metaphors.

The light from outside the window, peeking from the most minimal gaps of the closed curtain attempts to illuminate this dark room I'm in. No other soul in sight. Or maybe it is just my assumption that I am alone. If I try to speak, what comes out of my mouth is a smoke of black. No sound. Only wisps of condensed air illuminated by a source of light too far for me to reach.

Hell, why did I never take too much attention trying to close read my own writings. See, even then, I knew what I want to say. But I just needed it to have a layer of figurative and the symbolic at the same time to make it more interesting and call myself creative. At some point, I still believe it made me productively creative. I still carry the practice of fusing concepts from different areas of knowledge and seeing a potential unique idea that it may carry.

Then I found out that I was never actually trying to say anything. Writing is my own way of expression but I never had any experience worthy of writing. So everything that I try to write about eventually leads to writing itself. I had no identity when it comes to writing. No foundation upon which my writing stands. So I tried to find the most abstract ideas and write them down because I can never make something concrete and simple deep. I did not know how to look at something ordinary and find the poetry in the mundane. My process was always the opposite: start with the depths. Hit my audience with the truck of the void on their faces and bewilder them with the smokes and mirrors of obscure language. That was how my subconscious handled writing.

Yet, I knew that I have the natural tendency to be honest and this writing practice of mine only developed a subconscious self-distrust. It was a growing self-hatred for my own revered passion. I have been lying to myself for far too long and I intuitively knew that I needed to stop this charade.

So I stopped writing.