Therapy

"Writing is my therapy"

I wrote these words about five years ago for a high school creative writing class, in a fit of caffeine and sleep-deprived stream of consciousness writing. It seemed to express well at the time the ability of writing to serve as an outlet for my thoughts, feelings and relationship angst.

As melodramatic as that pronouncement was back then it actually seems accurate now, though I suppose now I'd elect for something less emphatic "I find writing to be therapeutic". In addition to my sparse additions to this blog I've been writing a lot more that hasn't made it here. I've nearly filled the notebook I brought with me, a gift from an old friend and teacher, and I've just started to work on filling a smaller notebook with poetry.

There's a kind of satisfaction involved with watching the blank white pages get filled with words, a sort of constructive instinct, the kind of satisfaction that I imagine you get from
tending a garden, or perhaps cooking. The comparison with therapy is also comforting from a pragmatic standpoint; even if my writing isn't read by anyone other than myself at least it's cheaper than a therapist.

Since I arrived here in Argentina and in light of my father's recent death, seeking "professional help" is something that's been suggested to me by my host mom here, something I've talked about with my mother back home and was brought up by a friend of mine (who also happens to be a therapist). So I thought about it. And it's something that I have mixed feelings about...

Among my people, you don't go and "see somebody" when you have a problem, you just deal with it. The "people" I refer to are those hardened Midwestern folks of Teutonic and Northern-European descent, who have lost jobs to vanishing industries, lived through tornadoes and snowstorms, and lost husbands and sons before their time. In other words, my Grandmother.

Garrison Keeler describes us as "people who disapprove of any sort of weakness in the face of cold weather. We're Northern European stock and we're meant to be stoics and you're meant to pick up your feet and get out there and do what needs to be done, we don't tolerate weakness in the face of cold. Cold is not a personal problem, everybody else is as cold as you are so don't complain about it." I think the same can be said (although perhaps to a lesser extent) about another force of nature: death. In the aftermath you just have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other and do what needs to be done, without asking or expecting help from anybody.

This was certainly true of my grandmother. Years ago, when her daughter, my mother, was just a a sophomore in college (about the same age as my sister is now) she lost her husband. When my mother asked her recently what she did after losing her husband she said "well I just had to get by--I was alone and I didn't have the help you have."

I have my own personal resistances to the idea of doing therapy. Talking about intimate thoughts and feelings with a therapist seems about as strange a practice as prostitution, to pay a stranger to do something that is usually reserved for close friends (and I do have to pay out of pocket, I recently found out that my insurance will not cover it). I'm not trying to put down therapists, (at least two of the people who have commented on this blog are therapists) it just seems odd to me that's all.

Sometimes for whatever reason your friends/family can't be burdened with listening to your problems as much as you need them listened to (and the world wide web can be less than receptive at times). Also my host mother has been trying to get me to go for a while. Finally my mom said that "your dad said that it helped him when he went into therapy 20 years ago". So I made an appointment with a woman that my program adviser suggested.

I'm hopeful. I'll let you know how it goes.