The Value of Quality Therapy
Picture of Vera Shadle
Why quality therapy is worth every single cent: Super Bowl weekend just up the road from the Big Event, and our local grocery store is pretty busy. While I’m exchanging pleasantries with the cashier, at the point that I’ve loaded about half of my purchases onto the conveyor belt, a woman charges up behind me. While turning her back to me and talking to her teenage daughter a mile a minute, she starts unloading HER groceries. I grabbed one of those separator bars and put it by her stuff, and say, “Uh, excuse me, but I’m not finished here.” Her daughter, facing me the whole time, said not a word to her mother. The woman turned around and was shocked to see me. Her shock rather undercut a belated apology. I looked at her, paused, and said, “Okay. [Pause] Um, thank you.”
What does quality therapy have to do with this? I maintained control as a stranger violated my personal boundaries because she failed to notice my existence on the planet. Some hot buttons from childhood remain hot. Fortunately, however, I’ve learned to create a more measured response.
In the rictus of acute and chronic rage and sadness that constituted the waking hours of my childhood, I would have stayed silent, perhaps bursting into tears. In young adulthood, when I regained my voice, I might have lashed out and verbally ripped this woman apart. Such would be the legacy of being raised in a home by parents disabled by trauma, alcoholism, and mental illness.
It is fair to say that my life can be easily divided into two stages: Before Process and After Process. Before Process, all the skills I learned allowed me to survive a chaotic childhood, but they had proven themselves in young adulthood to be a serious liability to my happiness, or even forward progress, in life. The Process taught me that I had learned what had allowed my brother and me to take cover in the trenches of the war at home. I also learned what a more stable and loving home would have taught me. One of the most critical understandings I reached was that none of what happened was my fault; yet it was very much incumbent upon me to incorporate the information and find another, more compassionate way to respond to the world around me.
During the weeks of the Process, among MANY things, I learned what a proper childhood would have been like, and I learned how to meet the needs that had been trampled so many times before while growing up. I have often said that my Process teacher and I raised me up all over again. I am alive today because we got it right this time.