TWENTIES-Awakening With Therapy

“Truth is not far away. It is not hidden. 

It is planted deep in the center of your heart.

If you haven’t uncovered it yet, dig deeper.” 

     By the time I was twenty-nine, I knew that something was off with my life and I was doing nothing about it. Until one day, my bestie, Tanja, pointed to a book at The Halcyon Store and said, “You need to get that book!” It was called, Parents Who Love Too Much. Even though it was a parent book, I purchased it immediately and read it from cover to cover. The examples given in the book resonated with me. I WAS THAT KID! I showed it to my parents, “thinking” that they would catch on and see that the way they were parenting me wasn’t working. Can’t blame a girl for “trying.” My father ignored it, and my mom read it without much input. Clearly, it was up to me.  

     At the age of twenty-nine, I decided that I needed therapy. I created the illusion of safety because I told myself that my parents “loved me too much.” By going to therapy, I wasn’t disrespecting my parents, I just simply wanted to understand and change myself. I was still being their “good little girl.” 

     The therapist’s mouth dropped with my stories. Up to this point, I hadn’t received much validation for my plight. My friends (and my artist) were too busy seeing the THINGS that were given to me, continually telling me how lucky I was. In the first session, there was only one ominous statement that I can recall. He said, “It is like you have had a gun to your head your entire life.” As awful as that sounded, I knew it was true. I had lived a life of...”you do this...or else.” I never wanted to experience the “what else” part, so I did as told. As much as I loved being validated, I created an anger that I didn’t recognize. I was waking up to what I knew all along but had denied, a painful place to be in the awakening process. To deeply realize that control and obsession is not love and that now I am responsible for my life was as scary as hell. I knew that my parents weren’t there for MY best interest, but I had no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to get out from the dysfunction. I had leaned on them for my entire twenty-nine years, and now I had thrown myself in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. I felt disabled to be on my own, and yet I knew “deep in the center of my heart” I could do it. Always a choice. 

      In the following three years and beyond, I would make life-altering changes that would reveal the enormity of my father’s fear, destroying forever what we “thought” we had.