A while ago someone asked people to quote their tweet with things they learnt from therapy, it made me remember one thing I learned from my short stint in therapy. I was talking about how terrified I was of not doing well in my Masters degree and how I genuinely didn’t know how I’d react if I got bad grades. At that point I was actually quite scared of the mess that was my mind and desperately needed to know I’d be somewhat okay regardless.
My therapist asked me to mention someone I would say is my role model, for me that was my dad. And then she asked me to list out some qualities in him that make me think he’s such a great person and I did. I can’t remember everything but there were 10 things in total, I think generosity was there, and friendly, and funny, I think kind as well but I can’t remember for sure. Basically, she told me to rate myself on those qualities on a scale from 1 to 10. And then we got my score for everything over a 100, I think it was somewhere between 50 and 60. That’s not the important bit, the important bit was that after all that happened, she pointed out to me that I didn’t put anything about intelligence on that list. It absolutely attacked me, it was like a fucking gunshot into my psyche and I actually started crying. It was so weird, I had placed everything, all my self esteem and self worth on being smart and intelligent and doing well in uni and when that didn’t happen it fucked very very heavily with me and things took a dramatic downwards spiral from there. However, here I was writing down a list of things that I think makes someone an amazing person and I didn’t mention that? It was wild, I think that was the point that I decided that the whole school thing wasn’t a do or die affair. Coming to that realisation helped a lot, being less stressed over everything helped me to do a lot better in my Masters degree. I didn’t realise it till a couple of weeks ago but it really did help on a subconscious level.
I eventually got dumped by my therapist but that’s a wholeee different story and at least we dealt with that so win/lose I guess. Would I go to therapy again? To be honest no, I have abandonment issues and I cannot come and kill myself.
