Week 6: Adolescents in therapy

Reading Lena Dunhum's "Growing up in therapy" felt very similar to my own life experience. I have been in therapy since I was 16 due to severe anxiety and a disassociation disorder. I have gone to two different therapist and am soon going to see a psychiatrist. I can think of all the years of weekly therapy sessions, new diagnoses, and talking about myself for an excessive amount of time. I have not been as close with my therapists as Lena was, I would occasionally run into my one therapist at the dance studio when she was picking up her daughter. The other one asked to reschedule our halloween appointment so she could take her three year old daughter trick or treating. But for the most part I spilled every thought I ever had to them while they told me minimal about their life. Each one was different D the one I see now is more straight to the point, she calls me out when I'm being ridiculous, she knows me probably more then anyone. K was there in a really weird part of my life when I was at school. She was very caring and validating of my feelings, she felt strongly about women issues and always wore heels. Ive only ever cried once in therapy and it was in her office, when I was trying to decide if I should move home for a semester or not. This article described a life I am all too familiar with.

Neither of these writers to me felt as though their stories were too long or too short. However when reading "Growing up in therapy" the story although full of sensory details, was a tell story there was little left up to the imagination, you were hold how things happened and how she felt. Cousins was more of a show story it lacks lot of details but that seems intentional in order to convey something bad had happened without going into detail of what it is. You still felt the emotions of two friends needing to mend after a bad fight.

Both these stories feel so personal they must be true. You can write about therapy or two cousins falling out but in order to truly give the details they did there has to be truth in each story, you can not write either of those stories without including a little bit of yourself. Which is why I enjoyed them so much.