Why my healing didn’t start at therapy

At the end of a year in which i had separated from my wife (now ex-wife) after I had left the family home to move into a friends house, with barely any money, I had a one day a week job, and had been looking for work and been knocked back from all of them for 6 months, I decided that I needed to go to counselling.

I had already realised in the space and hospitality, maybe even retreat, from what was my home, that I had stuff I needed to deal with too. And stuff that I thought I needed to overcome because I was to believe that everything was my fault.

Counselling, Therapy, Professional help?

Why did I leave it so late?

Was I scared of what it would expose? Well to be honest, there wasn’t much left that wasn’t now on the table, but still even so.

I thought there would be a lot of work to do on me, so many things I had to deal with, where would a counsellor start?

Then again, it wasn’t therapy that was the beginning of my healing and recovery. It was the recognition that I loved myself to want to go. That I was important enough to invest in myself to do this. The space in a safe place to heal a bit, to make a step up, to have gone through all this and not completely crumbled, and be in a place of clean air, started the rebuild from the rockest of bottoms.

It took a few weeks for the therapy to be arranged, and those who were demanding I do it put on the most pressure, but this wasn’t for them, it was for me.

As I went for assessments for the therapy and met them, I was asked as series of questions, I remember thinking at the time that I was confused, and had experienced so much in my life that I didn’t have any sense of value of myself, so the things I thought were incidental, were actually important, one day ill write about them too. I thought I was pretty self aware, what I actually was was professionally very competent, and a high achieving, compassionate person, that had ignored the things that had hurt for a very long time.

My healing didn’t start at therapy. But my healing didn’t continue without it. Yes I know that it may be expensive – I also know that it may not work for some, and I’m not a therapist and dont pretend to be. But It is a matter on what you are prepared to do about loving yourself. Can you afford it – you might not be able to afford not to, and it may not take as long as you think. Starting could be the hardest part.

I can only talk about my therapy journey. Was I slightly terrified, yes. Was it hard work, yes. Because for the first time this was about me. Giving myself there attention I had given so many others for years.

Though I am sure its not the end of the process for me, for therapy and possibly trauma therapy. I wanted to talk about therapy, about counselling, recommending it, for, even as a fairly sensitive, open, relational male, this was a difficult, but necessary step, and one I wholly recommend.  Men, value yourselves, your heart and emotions – nothing is solved by running away and hiding. Once spoken, and let out, the healing can begin.