Therapy bursts

I just finished a burst of continuous therapy, which is to say I had it several weeks in a row. This happens now and then, when I go months in between, and I feel like I'm just not operating efficiently. I liken concentrated psychotherapy to when you have dull pains that you need to treat and rehabilitate. In this case, I've been feeling kind of mentally spent for a combination of reasons, and talking through that with a professional, understanding the causes and what I can do to cope, is the outcome that I'm after. It's also helpful because the therapist I've been seeing for years is too busy to see clients, operating a larger wellness practice that includes the new therapist. Fortunately, she seems to have figured me out pretty quickly.

For this series, a lot of my "spentness" is rooted in parenting challenges and just the overall mental cost of the last year. Lots of bonus issues, too. I have an intense and challenging job, but as long as I'm (mostly) getting the outcomes I hope for, it doesn't factor into the fatigue as much. It contributes, because you can only do so much in a day, but it's everything else that adds up.

There are a few takeaways and actionable things to do. The first is that the parenting will never be all wins, and I have to accept that we do an awful lot of the right stuff. It's not easy, but we're operating as well as can be expected. Diana and I spend entirely too much time feeling bad about taking time for us, and that has to change. There are a ton of tactical things we can do differently, many of which we learn with his therapist. It's an ongoing journey, and there really isn't a destination.

There's a lot more to tell, but I'm not going to share it broadly. The short story is that I have a lot of self-awareness that I didn't have a few weeks ago, and I can work with that. Working to be a better human being is hard. Already though, I'm feeling a little less spent, and happier than I was. I can see now that I've been in a bit of a funk.

This is the part where I am endlessly frustrated that most people don't have access to mental healthcare, and if they do, it's often stigmatized as something you only need if you're broken and less of a human being. We really need to change that.