This is Panic 13 – Therapy

Well folks, it’s been a long time coming this one so I wanted to share my experiences that I’ve had with therapy. I should say now that I am throwing counselling and therapy under the same title here, basically any sort of talking related bits to help you get well as it were.

Apparently having therapy sessions regularly appears on those lists of “things to do before you die” which always struck me as odd. Before I’d really thought about it, therapy was a thing people did when they were ill. Now I’ve grown older (though not necessarily wiser) I realise that things like therapy can be very helpful and reflecting on who you are and why you do certain things with an objective observer can be very useful.

I had a smallish bout of therapy back in early 2004. Looking back I was physically not that bad but for a messy break up with someone had left my head a bit of a mess and it spiralled a bit from there to the point where I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I was having infrequent panic attacks as well which obviously wasn’t helping matters.

I got put in touch with a guy called Arthur through the church I go to. Arthur had training as a counsellor which sounded ok to me, he said he didn’t want any money from me because I was a student at the time so thought “well I feel bloody miserable and it’s costing me nothing but my time so why not?”

Arthur was actually a really nice old boy (he was nearly 80 when we met) and was also very good at what he did. Now as it was through church, yes there was a Christian element to what was going on which I know is not everybody’s bag. That said whilst we prayed at the end of every session and he occasionally pulled the odd part of the bible out to explain a point, he knew what to say. It wasn’t “your ill feelings are the work of the devil, repent sinner!” sort of thing, but carefully considered thoughtful words from a guy who shared a belief system with me.

That was a while ago now and since then my anxiety issues have come more to the fore than minor bouts of depression. I should also point out these recent visits to therapy were not through my GP so the waiting times were drastically cut down.

I actually asked to be referred to someone through occupational health at work. Work had been really stressful and I’d suffered burnout after trying to do everything for everyone. When I came back to work, I sat down with my boss and asked if there was scope to see someone. They don’t want me having time off ill, I don’t want me having time off ill and I wanted to take more of a grip on my problems. As I’ve said before, I owe it to myself and my fiancé to be as healthy as I can be. It’s right that I make that effort and so my boss referred me on.

In any one year through my work you can have 7 sessions total. It seems like an odd number but I was told it was one introduction session to get to know a bit about me and my issues and then 6 actual sessions as it were. I was actually pretty grateful for the fact I got someone relatively close to home, round the corner from my other half in fact so I could go and see her afterwards.

A session was about 50 minutes, give or take a bit, which is a good amount of time to delve into stuff and develop ideas without being too long and straining your brain too much. It sounds kind of cheesy but it was always on comfy chairs in nice well lit, pastel coloured rooms, I guess to try and be as relaxing as possible. The one thing that I noticed, probably because I never sit still for more than a few minutes at a time is that the room was set up so I was nearest the door but could never see a clock in my line of sight. To be fair that’s a sensible tactic. The client feels less time pressure if they are not looking at the clock.

We covered a lot of ground actually in a few sessions. A lot of my issues (and this is not going to shock anyone who has even the most basic knowledge of psychology at all) stem from my adolescence and growing up in the home environment that I had. We dug back into some of the decisions made by me and for me, what I liked about them and what I didn’t like and had a look at some of the things that may have triggered me having anxiety issues and panic attacks.

It was actually interesting to sit there and have someone help me do nothing but reflect on my and why I do things for a sustained period of time like that. The whole process threw up a lot of issues surrounding being assertive when I need to be and why I am so passionate about things and get so wound up so easily. We also spent a lot of time looking at how I could perhaps relax better and get rid of the megaton of nervous energy that I seem to have so often. We talked about me doing things to “let things out” like singing more and how the physical act of breathing out or singing could be useful for me as I hold stuff in.

It’s odd to think when you first try some of these techniques that you’ll be using later but I realise that I am using some of them, particularly some of the assertive linguistic techniques. I did learn a decent relaxation technique that I was told to try at work. The only shame of course is I never get 15 minutes to myself to try it.

My series of sessions have ended now and I need to decide where to go from here. I either go back into the primary care route and talk to my GP again and possibly go down the route of the improved access to psychological therapies, or look for other free therapies or pay.

I think the best thing for me to do right now is ironically what I’ve been doing; sit, contemplate and think about where to go from here. I don’t need to instantly rush back into another kind of therapy or constantly need to analyse who I am or why I do things.

It was a useful process though and for us anxiety sufferers, I actually recommend it. I talked in part 9 about wondering why an individual attack happened and this is just an extension of that. This is me looking at the bigger picture of why I have all my panic attacks and it can only do good I feel.

Now…time to chill out on that couch.