Therapy

There exists what some people consider an alternative to antidepressants, and what other people would call an adjunct. I fall into the adjunct camp, because cognitive therapy alone didn't cut it, with any of the multiple therapists. I could have spent much less, but more productive, time in therapy had medication existed when I first started.
That was in high school. The school I attended had a psychiatrist from an Ivy League school come once a week. Now, I recognize that there's a difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, with the former primarily being concerned with the underlying physiology and drug dispensing and the latter with your thought process. The lines then, however, were more blurred then, since Prozac hadn't yet revolutionized treatment and made it easier on psychiatrists.
This guy had no empathy whatsoever. It was like I was speaking Greek. I was ready to jump off the library roof, and this guy was like, "Why would that bother you?" after I expressed a particular concern. If my thinking was in fact misguided, I thought that it should have been incumbent upon him to offer insight and perhaps remedial steps. No chance.
The next guy I saw was while I was in college. He was into diagrams.
Because you grew up without a father, your mother assumed this responsibility (circle overlapping circle). Because your mother had no husband, she turned to her sons to fulfill his responsibilities (more circles overlapping).
I felt like I was in math class. And understanding the situation didn't necessarily help with coping. Perhaps we would have gotten to that point, but my mother, who controlled the purse strings, called him up and told him I was behaving worse. To his credit, he wouldn't tell her anything, since he was treating me, not her, but she badgered me to such an extent that it was easier for me to stop going.
The next guy, whom I saw when I was out of college for a few years and in the working world, liked to talk a lot about himself. Not that I mind a therapist relating his own experiences to demonstrate similarities between those situations and my own, and also perhaps to offer potential coping mechanisms, but he ran on too long, and I was paying him. Toward the end of my time with this guy, I started to be more honest, since I hadn't really been candid with a therapist following the response I got to my candor from the guy in high school. It isn't easy to be honest when what you are conveying cast you (or so you think) in a negative light. Anyway, it was at this point that he told me that smart people sometimes don't do well in therapy because they can outsmart themselves. That is, they convince themselves, in a highly reasoned way, that A is the cause of B. But it might not be the case. So, to make any progress, you have to be honest and willing to accept that your perceptions might have been wrong all along. You probably wouldn't be in therapy in the first place if you didn't have a problem with those perceptions.
The next person, about five years later, became my enduring relationship. We were together about 10 years before she moved to a distant state. It took me about five years to decide I had the energy and could summon the candor to re-enter therapy. And sometimes I would go see her and tell her right off the bat that I didn't want to be there. There were, in fact, times that I didn't have the energy. Maybe that was my way of pushing her away. I had decided that I wanted a female perspective, but then I didn't want any perspective at all. But I persisted, and the medicine helped, and out of our honest exchanges arose a turning point. It was as simple as her telling me that she agreed with my assessment of a situation, when I had been so conditioned to think I was wrong. This was a woman telling me I was right. This was an entirely new situation. It may seem hard to believe that that was a turning point, but when you're conditioned from childhood to have no opinion other than your mother's opinion, it's only natural to fall into the same trap over and over. My mother didn't encourage independent thought. This therapist and I had our peaks and valleys. We tried EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which involves watching dots of light move across a panel. The eye movement is supposed to facilitate the release of bad thoughts, as in you're letting them go. We did it here and there but I suspect never gave it enough attention. We did make some significant progress, the most pivotal being the adjustment of my thought process so that I didn't translate everything as potentially catastrophic. Self-talk. I talk to myself too much, and it's a constant struggle to overcome myself, so to obtain a tool that would help me toward that end was invaluable. It was worth the 10 years, but we eventually broke up. We were getting stale, anyway, familiar with one another, comfortable, but not making any real progress.
She left me in the care of a colleague, who I like but don't see anymore. She was pleasant to talk to, supportive, but maybe not tough enough on me. She's the one who referred me to the holistic-medicine practitioner and some Buddhist-like schools of thought, though she didn't try to push an agenda. To their credit, neither of my latter two therapists were opposed to medication. The two earliest probably wouldn't have been, either, but the pharmaceuticals then just weren't what they are now. And I probably wasn't conveying forcefully enough to them the distressI felt, anyway. The middle psychotherapist, the one who talked too much about himself, didn't seem to have a problem with drugs.
When I think about it now, there were earlier therapists of sorts, as well. Priests, I guess, who were the people to whom people like my mother turned. Ok, so that was misguided. And there were friends and friends' parents, and I cringe to think about how I must have come across as groping for something to fill a void, even though I was. All in all, therapy has been a good thing. It takes time and persistence to find the right match, though. And it takes energy and commitment and a willingness to feel vulnerable. Not an easy recipe for success. And sometimes it all seems so pretentious. Why should it matter if I'm depressed? There's a lot worse stuff going on in the world. There are people who say you shoudn't take medicine because when you hurt, that's when you're really feeling and really living. If that's living, then I don't want it. In the end, I have to live in my own head, and I'd rather make it tolerable. To that end, therapy helps, but the drugs are good, too.