Therapy Session 39: One Year of Therapy and Have I Accomplished My Original Goals?

Session 38 was an excellent session to lead to my first anniversary. During that hour, we discussed finding a balance between my past and my new life. That was a great transition into measuring the progress I’ve made since starting therapy.

This week last year, during this time, I walked into JHJ Therapy, grieving, and literally in a fog. I was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted due to months of caring for my father.

Starting in January of 2019, I watched my father fade before my eyes. It was the most heart-wrenching thing I’d ever lived through, and honestly, I had no idea how I was going to get through it. My father was a strong and robust guy. A few months before he got sick, he was on a three-story roof making repairs. Then just a few months later, he was too weak to stand most days, and I had to lift him when he fell. It was soul-crushing.

When I walked into my therapist’s office, I had been just going through the motions of life. In actuality, I remember very little about the time between May 2019 until about November of 2019. So when I arrived, I had been functioning on auto-pilot. I was professionally performing at a very high level, even though I don’t remember much of it, nor do I remember how I accomplished that. The brain is a mighty thing.

Today I asked my therapist:
Where have I improved since arriving at your office one year ago?
Where can I stand to make improvements now?

Your goals were:
🔸 You felt broken and no longer wanted to feel that way.
🔸 You wanted to make life improvements and be a better person.
🔸 You wanted to resolve the issues you had with male figures and others, you had growing up as a child.

Honestly, I don’t remember saying any of that, even though that resonates with me 100%. That’s primarily because this is some of the work I’ve been doing for the past year. The first few months of therapy, I was in a grief-induced fog, and as I said, I was going through the motions of life. I was functioning well because I’d done some of the best work I’ve done professionally. Nevertheless, a lot of that time was and remains foggy.

How do you think you’ve done Anais? Do you think you’ve accomplished your goals?

I honestly didn’t expect to have the question thrown back at me. So it took me by surprise, and I really had to think about it.

Feeling Broken
I feel better emotionally, mentally, and spiritually better than I ever have in life. These feelings are 100% due to the work that I’ve done in these sessions.

Becoming a Better Person
I don’t know that therapy can really MAKE me into a better person. I think that takes a willingness to look inward and improve once recognizing issues that need work. I have been doing that for most of my life, but therapy gave me more tools to do so, more and with a higher success margin.

Resolving Childhood Issues One of the most important things that I’ve done in the past year is to pick the scabs related to childhood and the family that I grew up with that substantially impacted me. I needed to dive into my childhood to help me embrace healing, forgiveness, and moving forward. That doesn’t involve apologies to other people in a “tv making peace with people” kind of way. It’s also not about making excuses for certain behaviors or things that may have been dysfunctional. It’s more about ME making peace with the situations that happened in my childhood, and recognizing the humanity in people. That was really tough, and it took months.

The end result was getting in touch with my feeling about my childhood, forgiving those that could not be what I needed them to be and recognizing that people work within the framework that was passed down to them by their parents. That unraveling involved my father, biological mother, toxic sibling and others.

Anais, I think you’ve made great progress in your ability to see the humanity in those that were connected to you in your family, and that has been positive for you.

Those sessions were tough, but they allowed me to release a lot of past hurts and put all of that behind me. These things had been a part of my entire life, and it was good to unburden myself.

You still move back into your comfort zones. Some of those are:
🔸 You don’t open yourself to people enough.
🔸 Your life is still very compartmentalized.
🔸 You need to work on doing more things for yourself.

I will give your questions more thought, and we can revisit this during our next session.

Session 39 was thought-provoking, and it gave me some feedback from my therapist and directions that I need to focus on in future sessions, and life. Therapy is Good – ALL. THE. TIME.

I needed this YEAR! 

I would love to know your thoughts on this session, therapy in general, and more about your journey in getting better in touch with who you are through therapy. Reach out, let’s chat on FB, IG, and Twitter. Until then, Happy Healing.

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