This Is Us
Therapy Isn’t for Everyone
Let’s talk about the people harmed by mainstream mental health
The first time I sought out therapy, I was met with a smiling gender-conforming white lady who furrowed her brows when I described the pain I was in and said softly to me that it “must be so hard.” It made me immediately want to bolt from the room. Instead, I just sat there and cried.
I was in graduate school, depressed and unmoored, and the therapist was overseeing a social anxiety group I was desperate to join. She sat me down on a couch across from her and asked a few gentle, quiet questions about what it felt like for me when I tried to make friends. I didn’t know how to answer. I never really tried to make friends at all. Friendships were driven by an invisible machinery I didn’t know how to take apart or reassemble. There was a deep longing inside me for connection, but if you put another human being in front of me, I’d freeze up. Which is exactly what I did in the therapy office.
It seemed pathetic that I couldn’t give voice to my problems. It was clear the therapist was disappointed by it. More pathetic still was the fact that I was in my mid-twenties and had no close friendships and no conception of how to make them. My inner life was a painful, pitiful mystery to me, and this woman wanted me…
