Member-only story
I Failed To Open Up in Therapy
And That’s Okay — It Was my First Attempt
On some occasions, my brain serves me a perfect analogy on a silver platter.
Back in 2015 I had a weird dream. In it I was moving with the help of my partner. I was just shoving everything I owned into all these boxes without sorting through them. I wanted to sort them — there were things I didn’t want to keep taking with me from place to place — but it was time to move. My partner said he could help me carry the weight, but he couldn’t help me sort through everything. I had to do that myself.
This dream prompted me to see a therapist. I had been trying to sort through my emotional baggage up until that point, relying heavily on journalling and reading books. But I was hitting a wall. I asked my partner to help me do some exercises from a book, and this made him uncomfortable. Which was very reasonable. Your partner cannot and should not become your therapist. I was just so comfortable with him, though.
My partner was the first who got me to really open up to emotionally, something I’ve found hard at best and dangerous at worst. The two serious relationships I’d had before him were with a hothead who would try to use my emotions against me and mocked me once for crying. And I do mean once; it was the only time I cried in our 18 horrible months…
