no, i haven't gone to therapy yet (but i want to try)
Every once in a while my friends ask me if I've started therapy yet. After all, now that I'm back at home and unlikely to move anytime soon I don't really have an excuse not to. But I just keep dragging my feet about it.
There are several reasons I think I haven't done anything to start therapy. For starters, I'm not sure what I want to get out of it. I think earlier, at least a few months ago when the breakup wounds were still fresh, the pain was all I could feel, and it was easier for me to single out talking about it as my need for therapy. Even if I felt sheepish putting "difficult breakup" as the reason I was seeking therapy, at least it was a reason, and one I imagine is fairly simple for therapists to comprehend at that.
While I still have trouble moving on, it now has competition from work anxiety (among other things) as my chief concern. Will I need to single out one of these issues to focus on in therapy? Will a therapist specialized to talk about one of these areas be any good in others? I know the best way to find out the answers to these questions is to get in touch with therapists and dive in headfirst, but the doubt they generate still holds me back.
I'm also not sure what a therapist could do to help me, especially now that I can pinpoint the causes of my unhappiness to multiple sources. I'm pretty sure I'm not clinically depressed. Nobody can help me get out of work hell except myself (and maybe a career coach). Is the progress I might make with a therapist worth the time, energy, and money I could spend on other things? Should I even bother pursuing therapy, or should I use that time to job hunt or work overtime (or, I don't know, do yoga)? (Again, questions that would easily be answered if I just got started. But my feet feel glued where they are.)
Because it's been more than five months (wow, almost half a year) since the breakup, friends have stopped asking me about it, but just because I don't talk about it anymore doesn't mean I'm past it. (Trust me, even I get sick of hearing myself talk about it like a broken record.) Recovery isn't obeying a clear trajectory. Some weeks I can glimpse a glimmer at the end of the tunnel and others are April all over again. I was telling a friend that now it just feels like a part of me has died, as if water (or tears, maybe) got into my emotional circuitry and short-circuited part of the motherboard. My modules for feeling unadulterated happiness/contentment are broken, and I don't know how to fix them. (Is this what being an adult is like? Am I just being dramatic about it?)
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