It took me twenty years to find a suitable therapist. Don’t stress if you haven’t found yours yet.

(Image Credit: Freepik)

By Sarbajaya Bhattacharya

SMore often than not, the right mental health expert is found through trial and error. When I found mine, I realised I was on the path to finding myself.

It was 2021, and the COVID-19 pandemic had taken over the world. Millions were walking back to their homes from all parts of the country; news channels were predicting the onset of the apocalypse; and my parents and I were locked in our two-bedroom house in the south of Kolkata.

The gloom and anxiety all around was creeping into our bodies drip by drip, and I was unaware of when I reached the verge of a breakdown.

It was a regular summer afternoon by all measures. Light was seeping in through the dining room window. I had finished my lunch and walked into the kitchen to put down my plate; instead, I hurled it on the floor with great force. As I watched it break into bits, I realised it was cathartic. I quickly snapped out of the feeling. And within seconds, I was scared of myself: at my apparent senseless act, which didn’t seem so to me at all. But I instantly knew I had to seek help.

It was not the first time I was seeking mental health support. Just that, I had not seen a counsellor for about five years and my experiences before that were nothing to brag about.

Talk therapy

About 20 years ago, in 2005, I strode into a bare room in Jadavpur University and sat across an elderly gentleman who smoked a cigarette while I offloaded my teenage angst to him. I was fifteen and terribly upset with the world and everyone in it.

During one of my particularly animated narrations, his phone went off. My therapist chose not to silence the loud Nokia ringtone, answered it, and wasn’t bothered about keeping the conversation short.

He sent me home with some advice and a headache.

I didn’t give up though, or I couldn’t give up. I am still not sure which is true.

I began looking for another therapist and soon found one within the same university campus. She was middle-aged, kind, and affectionate almost in a maternal way. Her room had a red bulb outside, and people waited if it was on and could enter if it was off.

She told me that everything I said in that room would stay between the two of us unless she saw tendencies of self-harm. It was the first time I heard something like that and it made me feel very secure.

But I was not satisfied with her responses to my questions. They felt generic. For instance, when I said I was feeling anxious about something, she would say, “Yes, it’s natural to feel this way. A lot of people do.” But I wanted to know why I was feeling anxious. I needed answers to my specific condition, not a general understanding about how a lot of people feel a particular way.

After a few sessions, she gave me a diagnosis: chronic but mild depression.

I felt as if I needed more than the mere counseling this motherly figure was providing me with, even though I did not know what was lacking.

Psychotherapy

In 2015, almost a decade later, when I had been manipulated and lied to by confidants, I sought help again. Mental health support was always something I sought only when I needed it. It was the last resort, never the first.

The next mental health professional I met was a psychotherapist, who followed the Rogerian method, one I had never heard of.

For three weeks, I explained the current state of my life to my therapist lying on her small bed. She suggested Muscle Relaxation Therapy, when she asked me to focus on each part of my body, beginning with my toes and ending with my head. “Do you feel better?,” she asked me.
I most certainly did not.

The next time, as I lay on the bed again in a room made chilly by an air conditioner, she asked me to imagine a tree-lined path that led to a river or a lake and myself walking down this path. This was supposed to be a scene of calm and serenity, but it made me anxious because I was unable to focus.

“How do you feel?,” she asked me. I felt the same as I had before the session.

Psychoanalysis

Coming back to the day I savoured the crashing sound of the plate, I didn’t know where to look for help as although mental health is always urgent and necessary, the whole country was in lockdown.

A friend put me in touch with someone who put me in touch with a therapist. That call was life changing. For the first time, I was asked what I was looking for. I was not meeting with someone because it was closer home or because it was all that was available. I was made to feel like I could ask for what I wanted.

I thought for a second and said I wanted the therapist to be a woman and not have patriarchal values. Since I was asked, I also said I hated someone who said “It is okay to be sad” and “Other people suffer too.”

“I can put you in touch with a psychoanalyst,” came the answer.

I knew what psychoanalysis was. Not in the way people vaguely know Freud, but because I had done a course on literature and psychoanalysis, which focussed extensively on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as part of my master’s degree. So, I was curious to see what might happen.

I took the first session, and there has been no stopping since. It has been the longest I have stuck to something for my mental health. These sessions have seen me through life-altering events, including the sudden death of my parents from cancer.

If you do go to a counsellor and say you are feeling scared before your mathematics exam, they will probably tell you that it is normal to feel scared before exams, that a lot of people feel scared, and that you’ll be alright.

But a psychoanalyst might ask you why you feel scared. And the answer, very often, is not that you are scared because you lack mathematical skills, but that you are scared of humiliation or the reaction of your parents to your possible low grades. That tells you something about yourself.

I think that’s where psychoanalysis begins. Getting to know yourself is not easy or pleasant. It is hard work. It cuts you open and shows you everything: the blood, the gore. But, in the end, when you are, hopefully, stitched back up, you have a better understanding of who you are.

With this, at least I know that I have more than a diagnosis—I have a destination.