On Effort in Therapy

I do my best to be as transparent with my counselor as I can be; however, at the start of my journey this was not the case. There were many uncomfortable thoughts and feelings I had that I waited a long time to share. As anyone who has been in that position knows, it’s hard to be so vulnerable with someone who you don’t know very well. But the one feeling I had that I waited much too long to disclose was this one: Self-care is hard, and I don’t want to do it.

Firstly, I’d like to provide some context in the form of a timeline of my journey up until this moment. Starting in 2017, for a slew of reasons, my mental health declined steadily for about three (3) years before I realized that I needed to get professional help. There had been passing comments from friends before this, but I never took them with much weight.

After that realization it still took me about four (4) months to actually go to my first session. I’ll be honest, there was no diligent search or intense vetting process when it came to selecting a practice and a counselor; I procrastinated for those four months until I got so frustrated that I booked the soonest appointment at the closest practice to me at that time.

There weren’t many noticeable differences in my mental state in the first month, and it took the first three (3) months to really dig up the deeply buried sources of my struggles. After six (6) months I made great progress, but I plateaued and fell back into a cycle of self-destructive behavior that led to a “relapse” and a third suicide attempt. It was at this time that I decided that medication was necessary for me to move forward, even if just for a short while.

Two (2) months after I began taking my prescribed medication, my progress in re-establishing a healthy mental state rocketed past milestones I never thought I’d be able to achieve.

Now, it’s been a little over one (1) year on this journey and I can say that I am in a much better place; by that I mean that I’m not scared for my life anymore and I look forward to each new day I get to walk on this earth. I still struggle from time to time, but this year of serious work got me to a place that I’d call my “new normal.” Often I think about this timeline and where I started and where I am now, and I think, “I could’ve done this in half the time.” But why do I think that?

It was because I failed to tell my counselor that I didn’t want to go to therapy anymore. I never let-on that I was having so much difficulty with the work we were doing; I was never honest about how much I hated being vulnerable and going through my childhood traumas and shedding light on all the horrible thoughts and emotions that took up residence in my mind day after day.

But, if I had been honest about those feelings, I think I would have made much faster progress. I wouldn’t have stopped going to therapy. I wouldn’t have “relapsed.” I wouldn’t have found myself in that dark place again where all I could think was that all hope for a happy life was lost and there was nothing I could do to change that. After that, I realized that my problem was this: I lost my momentum with self-care because I did not have a healthy relationship with Effort.

Effort, to me and in this context, has always been a scary thing. It meant that I’d be thinking outside of my comfort zone and uncovering painful details about my life. At that time, Effort bred pain, and like a good little human I subconsciously did everything I could to avoid that. That was, until I was finally honest about that very feeling.

It took time but I worked with my counselor to develop a healthier relationship with Effort that would allow me to accept new work instead of fear it. I started with small, infrequent actions that rewarded me for completing them. They were often slightly inconvenient or included some form of minor Effort, but completing them would teach me that Effort amounted to good things at a small scale. Once my subconscious caught up to this idea, and once I’d been conditioned to that new emotional response, it bled into other areas of my life. I started craving tasks that involved more and more Effort because I knew that the payoff would (usually) be greater.

For example, I began by writing down one thing I liked about myself and pinning it to the wall above my bed. The Effort was small; I had notecards and push pins that I had to get out of my drawer each time and I had to sit for a moment and compliment myself. I tried to be as consistent as possible with it. Eventually I was doing it once a day, every day, because it made me feel the slightest bit more positive about the world around me. This continued for a few weeks before I started upping the Effort.

Health and wellness is something I decided to use as a pillar of my self-help journey, so sometimes I’d go to an inconveniently located store to get something special to me, some kind of food or product that I couldn’t really get anywhere else but that made me feel good or healthy. Then I started being more diligent with my exercising. Going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to go for a short jog was something that took an enormous amount of effort for me but also made me feel so good and productive. It was these more elaborate tasks that really drove the point home that Effort is a tool I could use to better myself instead of a hazard that could only hurt me.

I realize that this concept is not new and it’s not very difficult to see for most people, but if you’ve ever struggled with your own mental health on a level beyond words than you know that these ideas are not ones that come naturally. Depression makes it extremely difficult to think objectively about anything, let alone analyze the concept of Effort as being a tool for good rather than just a trigger to make you curl back safely into your own mind against the howling winds of despair. Not to mention that, when going to therapy and working on these issues, it’s difficult to figure out why your progress may be falling short of your expectations.

For me, my relationship with Effort was harming my ability to work on my mental health, and that wasn’t obvious to me. Identifying this issue started with identifying my feelings of avoidance and procrastination when it came to therapy. From there I was able to work with my counselor to be transparent with those feelings and eventually discover that the difficulty I was having was not shrouded in mystery, rather it was coming from somewhere I did not think to look in the first place.

Transparency about emotions is key in therapy, it can teach you very valuable lessons about yourself, and it can save your life.