How therapy helped me | Mental health update #4

It’s been awhile since I wrote a mental health update and my last therapy session was two weeks ago so I wanted to make another post about my mental health and how therapy helped me.

Last summer I wrote my first ever mental health-related blog post where I talked about struggling with self-harm and discovering that I have anxiety and depression. I talked about never telling anyone that I was struggling with these things from a very young age and someone sent that blog post to my parents when they were on a holiday and since then everything changed.

At some point I’m still angry at that person because it wasn’t their place to tell my parents that I was struggling with these things because it should’ve been my decision but when I look at it from a different point of view, I get why the person sent it to my parents. He or she probably wanted to help me and thought that was the best way to do so. I still don’t know who that person was because my parents never told me and I kind of want to know but at the same time I don’t want to because when I’ll see that person in real life, I’m not sure how I’m going to feel or react.

So when my parents discovered ‘the truth’ they wanted me to go talk to someone and that’s how I started going to my college counsellor and told her everything that was written in my blog post and she suggested talking to a professional because she wanted me to get better and she couldn’t give me the help that I needed. We looked together for a therapist and I had 10 sessions and I feel better now.

It was really hard to tell everything during therapy because sometimes I was a bit anxious about telling the truth and to be honest I still haven’t told everything but I am in a better place now. I started talking more about my anxiety and depression and my therapist was definitely the one for me. She uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which means that I need to focus on positive things or just make negative things positive, it’s a form of therapy for dealing with problems, it focuses on solutions and encouraging the person to change their way of thinking. I learnt to see things in a different way and learnt how to deal with my emotions. I’m a very emotional person and I cry very easily, which is something I hate about myself. My therapist taught me that it’s okay to be emotional, it’s okay to cry easily because that’s just who I am and the faster I accept this, the easier it’ll get to be okay with how I feel.

Even though I only went for 10 sessions, those 10 sessions really helped me. If I compare myself to how I was last summer, I really changed. Last summer I barely got out of the house, felt really depressed and sad and didn’t want to do anything. Now, I did so many things this summer, I feel motivated to go to the gym, I tried new things, … I’m definitely in a better place now but that doesn’t mean that I still don’t feel anxious or depressed, or that I’m ‘cured’, I still have these feelings, but now I know how to deal with them and how to prevent feeling like that.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is not for everyone because not every person has the same mental illness(es) or every person is just not the same in general. I do, however, recommend talking to someone, someone you know, someone you know on the internet, a professional,... The choice is up to you, but a therapist really helped me and perhaps one can help you too!

My other mental health updates:
Mental health update #1
Mental health update #2
Mental health update #3