My Confessional Booth: Talk Therapy
I’m now in my forty eighth year. I only learned three years ago that what I had lived with my whole entire life was actually called Anxiety. I’m well acquainted with depression, though I will never claim it as mine, I have learned how to identify the waves as they hit, and I know now how to surf those waves. But I had no idea that everything else I was feeling was Anxiety.
For seven years I had an on and off again Psychiatrist that I would force myself to go. She didn’t “heal” me, or even talk about healing, she would listen and take notes. I did not understand why she would just sit quietly, transcribing what I was saying, it kept her cool and removed from eye contact.
The room was always cold, cold tiles on your socked or often bare feet. It was like my confessional booth.
There was something comforting in the distance and in the thought that perhaps, she felt my life worthy of recording. Ironically, it was validation, credible enough for documentation, my life written in a notebook, in ink, to be preserved for future reference. It gave me hope.
I was on welfare, relying on food banks, struggling with addiction and a mother of two young girls.
I learned from her the value of time. To be on time. To respect someone else’s time. To spend time. To trust time. And ultimately how to feel worthy of time.
It takes time to heal. It’s a journey into wholeness, each year may we grow safer, wiser, more trusting of ourselves to go a little deeper, to become braver, to stand more solid upon our path, sure of ourselves!
From my psychiatric sessions, it was surmised that I needed to learn how to trust women. This felt way too deep for me to get my head around then, I was just trying to survive my life… riddled deep with anxiety and depression.
What she meant all those years ago was this:
“By whatever means necessary, learn how to fucking trust yourself Krista!”
When I came to the truth that I no longer needed her time, I began a journey of valuing my own time. And its in this time that I have found so much healing, forgiveness, grace and mercy for myself. I am still learning how worthy I am of mental wholeness. It’s been a long journey learning how to trust myself again. It’s that Inner Knowing that we all have… we just need to find our way back to ourselves again. To that resting place within, that calm quiet space that invites our Spirits and Souls to converse.
It would take me from that moment to this to tell you that I am still learning how to do this.
Realizing that my levels of anxiety has drastically reduced over the years, caused me to reflect on what had changed. I realized that, I have really learned how to ground myself and be present, and its these skills that have calmed my nervous system and has created a deep sense of peace and healing within myself.
I like to call this a place of mental wholeness when the sympathetic nervous system can be at complete rest. From this place we can learn how to respond to our environment. It’s a place of serene centeredness… and then we are so finely accustomed to this place that when we are triggered out of it, it is incredibly confirmable that you are out of balance.
I believe this is our purpose, to experience life in wholeness and I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he said the kingdom heaven is within us. It’s the purpose of our journey here, to free ourselves from the earthly programs we were born into and to remember ourselves as the pure and holy beings that we are, worthy of experiencing heavenly Wholeness!
