Article: Why I Bother with Therapy

This article / narrative essay was inspired by a question I was asked. It wasn't an easy one to write but I wanted to be open and honest in my answer to the question.

Why I Bother with Therapy

By S P Clark

Why do you bother with therapy?  This is the question I was asked by a friend recently, and indeed is a question that many punters of the Therapy Airline are often asked.  Those of us who are frequent fliers have not only earnt our airmiles but have often wanted to scream at the question.  It’s like asking a person with a ruptured spleen why they went to a surgeon.  To improve their situation, to get better, to mend that which is broken.  The obvious answer, though, never seems to quench the inquisitors’ thirst for knowledge, which inevitably leads to more equally asinine questions and exclamations: why would you talk to strangers when you can talk to your friends?  You must be rich to afford that!  Do you think it helps or are they just saying it does? Can’t you just…move on? Cheer up!

To unpick the main question of why I bother with therapy, and perhaps to be efficacious as a form of therapy itself, is the main reason for tackling this as a written exercise, a narrative essay of sorts. 

Throughout my late teens and twenties, I, along with many peers, experimented with drugs.  As for so many of my age group at the time, it was fun.  Unfortunately, I was one of those who became addicted, hooked by the barbed metal that didn’t want to let go.  It wasn’t an immediate thing.  It slowly crept up on me.  The tendrils of addiction weaved their way around my body and rooted themselves underneath the skin so gradually that things were almost beyond repair before I was even aware the problem existed.  Relationships crumbled, trust was eroded and the shame and pain I felt about myself became so great that the only way to numb them was by retreating to the very substances that caused or exacerbated those emotions. 

Through those years I functioned reasonably well, able to conceal the things I was doing.  Conceal?  Okay, I lied about what I was doing.  I became adept at sweeping the leaves over the puddle, brushing the dirt under the rug, and painting over the rot as it continued to bed in.  That’s what drugs do.  They make a liar of you.  Each lie with ever-increasing complexity, each lie uncovered more self-hatred for the deception towards those I loved, each lie revealed the depths to which I had sunk. 

Friends, family, acquaintances…even perfect strangers…had all tried to help.  Some by pretending there wasn’t a problem, some by being hard and forceful, some by enveloping me in their arms, some by encouraging conversation, some by assuming the best, and some by driving me daily to a clinic in the hope that I decided to enter through that red door (with peeling paint where you envisioned being peeled from the ceiling and forgotten like the crimson paint crumbs on the floor) with the wired glass panel not only keeping us out but obscuring those within.  None of these attempts at support worked, no olive branch was grasped, no safety rope was clipped to the harness – after all, the harness had been dispensed and I took myself walking along a path that I couldn’t see.  It was dark, dangerous and dirty.

How long could I carry on that way?  How long should I carry on that way?  How long did I want to carry on that way?

My breakthrough moment, my rock bottom came when I found myself stealing from the most vulnerable to afford the Elysium I craved.  Vividly I remember snorting cocaine from the floor of an abandoned flat (where “real drug addicts” went) surrounded by broken syringes, used prophylactics, and bodies slumped somewhere between life and death – you could never be sure who still had breath in their lungs.  I needed help.  I had reached my own realisation that this had to end.  That I couldn’t continue down this path.  That if I continued to descend the steps, farther down into the noxious air of addiction, that I would soon be slumped somewhere between destiny and fatalism. 

I found somewhere to go and talk.  At first a group session or two which didn’t quite work, except for providing me with new contacts for better drugs and more people to blame.  If this was going to work, I had to find a better way for me.  As a writer, I have always been able to express emotions through my pen and this somehow lifts a little of the burden, lightens the load as I work through this thing called life.  Examining myself alone, investigating my own addiction allowed me to build up the courage to attend therapy, one-to-one, and confront my demons.  It took many years, but I conquered them.  I have slipped back occasionally, usually when things are tough and the demons and old ways of coping like to knock on the door and remind you that they are always willing to grasp you and sting you with their arrowed tails and poison you with their forked tongues. 

Pinpointing what helped about it, what the remedy for my malady was, what precise and trusted methods were used to unpick the seams so tightly stitched by time is hard to elucidate upon.  It was the non-judgemental approach, emotionally detached, professionally uncaring yet filled with desire to see me improve.  It was the knowledge that I wasn’t the first person to reach out, the person to fall flat on their face having cut the ropes of the safety net with their own grinding teeth, and the knowledge that my therapist (MY therapist) had helped others – so many there was a chance that they could help me.  It was the tools they gave me, the techniques and tips to try when the great grey tornado tried to pull me into the centre of its storm; how to breathe, how to calm anger, how to manage panic attacks, cravings, lapses, need to control and the need to lose control.  The support offered in how to mend bridges brick by brick, how to let go of the building blocks when the chasm had grown too wide and how to learn to love myself again. 

It was a gift, therapy.  One for so long I felt that I wasn’t worthy of, didn’t deserve and certainly couldn’t imagine would help. 

I won’t now bore you by going deeper into every incident in my life or emotions that swell where I am aware of the pull back to therapy as a coping mechanism, a comfort, a challenge to my inner makeup to push through, and to not give into the pullulating chaos that so often infects my brain at times of grief, stress, loss, or pain. I will just speak of a build-up of several events in a limited space of time that has recently seen me return to the company of the couch.

It was June of 2022 when two close friends died in a traffic collision.  An event so tumultuous that the vehicle not only connected with their car, but it also crashed into the lives of those left behind.  Their families distraught.  Their friends inconsolable.  Their lives – snatched in the changing of a traffic light.  A lorry travelling at 80 miles per hour smashed into the side of their stationary red tin box of a car, as red as the therapist’s door, and claimed the lives of two 37-year-old men.  We’ve never known if they died instantly or whether it was the flames that claimed them.  The burning orange tsunami that engulfed the car could have been the last thing they saw.  The image of them perishing in that way, amidst the molten metal with seat fabric and ash dancing in the thundering wind haunted me.

In October of 2022 I was faced with the second event.  I was raped.  Dragged down an alleyway.  Pushed down and raped.  I could hear people walking by on the main road as he tore into me behind the cover of a dumpster.  Drain water at my knees.  I froze. I couldn’t speak.  I couldn’t move.  I became a rigid lump of pain and fear.  All joy escaped through my pores in an instant.  All my hopes and every dream I ever dreamt oozed through my flesh into the surface below.  A lump of pain and fear feeling the semen as he ripped through my body; this anonymous, invisible attacker.  Feeling the shame and disgust bubble inside me.  Hearing the metal of his belt as he walked away sated.  I thanked him…I think I thanked him for stopping.  The only words I could muster from the pit of my muteness were bon mots, words of gratitude, words of unfiltered weakness.  Words of undeserved kindness, perhaps.

Living with flashbacks, fear of it happening again, and until quite recently the thought that I may never be able to be intimate again, or that I was unworthy of love.  For a time if anyone so much as touched my shoulder or hugged me, pulled me close in any way – I felt inside that it was about to happen again.  I became angry, sad, a whirling maniacal mess of emotions.  Like some bipolar Grand Old Duke of York – when I was up, I was really up, but when I was down… 

The flashbacks could appear from a storm grate, from the sound of footsteps, the smell of petrichor – the dreams of falling and sinking.  Outer-bodily experience of watching myself get hurt but never able to stop it from happening.  Never able to see his face.  Never able to distinguish who it is doing this to me.  I had one dream where I saw the word hope floating above me as tiny men (almost like stick characters) slowly punched holes into the letters until they dissolved – behind the word was me with my jeans pulled down just enough for him to enter, almost seductive, almost willing it to happen.  Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I could be vanished, evaporated into thin air. I was deracinated from everything that kept me sure.  Steady.  On course.

I thought for quite some time that the only way to end the pain was to not be alive.  But…I resorted to my old ways.  Drink and drugs – this time they didn’t numb, they just released emotions.  Unconstructive means to tackle an unimaginable ache of the mind.  Once again, those I shared this with rallied around to try to provide comfort and succour to build me a road out of the mire.  Most people were also hurt by being told.  Some chose to disbelieve because it was too hard for them to manage.  But they left, in just the same way as he did – with a feeling that I should be grateful for their ‘honesty’.  I guess this is the reality of living in a society where my truth matters more than fact, where offence is a bad thing despite the ability to just dislike what someone says (after all people are offended by many of the things I hold dear: freedom, equality, etc.) and where people cannot disagree agreeably.

In November 2022 we lost Barry.  Which is strangely the hardest to write about.  He was the best person to have had in my life, to have shared part of my life with for so long.  A true supporter, friend, and a one-of-a-kind miracle that left us too soon.  Leaving me with one fewer confidant, and a heart that was already struggling, now in a state of disrepair.  Condemned. 

At the end of this piece, I’ll share links with you where you can read more about some of these experiences but more detail at this point would be superfluous.

Returning to therapy was almost not a choice.  I felt as though I was laden with boxes and didn’t know how to put them down, and even I’d somehow managed to place them on the table I wasn’t strong enough to unpack them.  Trying to continue alone was making things heavier.  Mistakes at work, an anger that frightened me, crying constantly, cancelling plans, a fear of walking alone, a tiredness and lack of energy like nothing I’d known.  I also felt like the world would be better without me like this, I couldn’t bear to live if this pain was all there was.  Something had to change.  I had to try something. 

Going back wasn’t easy.  It somehow felt like a failure.  Previous experiences with therapy and counselling were meant to have fixed me, made me strong enough to withstand anything life propelled in my direction, but suddenly I found myself prostrate on the floor, unbalanced and I had to seek help.  What a failure! The first hurdle was to come to an acceptance that returning to therapy wasn’t a failure, but a sign of strength that I knew when I needed help and reached out for it.  I’m not sure if I accepted that or came to an agreement with myself that I’d consciously not judge myself for “giving it another shot”.  Initially I didn’t tell anyone that I was returning, wanting to allow my space the privacy to process the choice and the freedom to stop if it wasn’t right for me.

I went for a year and was given tools and support, and a way of isolating each issue.  That way I could focus.  Instead of seeing a world of problems with no way of fighting through it, I saw smaller emotions and difficulties that could each be eased and helped by separating things.  It didn’t feel as though the problems were insurmountable.  And suddenly, I had someone who had to listen, who had to help and at a regular time and place.  Friends and family cannot offer that – they all have their own lives and concerns too.

I gradually saw a pinhole of light through the blackness of trauma, a dazzling narrow beam blinding my eye.  A chance perhaps that I could find a way through.  That pinhole grew and grew, and the barriers became clear to see, and a path to managing them became possible to tread.  A smile came back to my face but not for other people’s benefit, it was just there. Sometime after stopping the sessions, certain elements flared up as I approached my 40th birthday, and the second-year anniversary of the rape was looming into view.  Flashbacks returned and concentration lapsed, pain began to replace joy again.  I sought help again and am proudly back in therapy. 

I now know that the path that I found is never going to be smooth.  There will be potholes, and trip hazards and sometimes I’ll walk back down it, but I now know that I will eventually turn back around and carry on down the road.  I accept that some things I will never recover fully from, and that is fine.  I just hope that I will continue to manage them better, and that I will keep those boxes light along the way.  As I write this the boxes are heavy, but the support is strong.  I know that I will continue in therapy, and possibly forever if that is what I need.  It may not be for everyone, but everyone should have the space to talk when going through their darkest days.  I am grateful that therapy can hold our hands as we continue on our journey.

© S P Clark

LINKS:

• To read more about my experience with rape, you can purchase One Year with Mister R: A Poetry Collection of One Man's Journey with Sexual Assault

• You can watch a video I created to accompany my poem Addiction to understand my battles with drugs: Addiction

• To learn more about my mental health battled you could watch: One Day at a Time