My ex and I tried couples’ therapy while we were engaged in 2015 because we were having difficulties with communication. It didn’t last long because we each had strange experiences with that therapist. My experience was that she, I’ll call her D, often forgot important details of my life and talked about her own trauma a lot. For example, after telling her a memory of my parents when I was a child, D told me that her dad made her watch while he drowned her cat’s kittens in their bath tub. Okay, D, that’s horrifying and awful. I forgot about my trauma again (is that how therapy works?). Needless to say, D wasn’t a good fit for either of us.
I didn’t try therapy again until 2017 when I heard an ad on a podcast multiple times for Better Help. *Online therapists at your fingertips and you don’t have to drive to an office!* I’d been experiencing phases of bodily and mental shutdown after specific events took place (my whole life) and I wanted to get better at not resorting to locking myself in bathrooms and daydreaming about sharp objects. Not wanting to be alive was a very, very common feeling for me and I believed that was how everyone felt. Back then, I wanted to stay alive because I knew how suicide affects loved ones. My childhood church had a resigned pastor whose son died that way in 2002. It shook an entire community. I stopped scarring myself for 7 years after that. Self harm showed up in new ways, like pinching myself, punching my legs or my head, all as secretly as possible, in the back seat of a car, church bathrooms, my bedroom, etc.
Anyway, my guilt around potentially causing suffering by ending my own suffering (a vicious cycle) was the driving force for why I wanted to go back to therapy. Better Help has a questionnaire when you sign up so you can be paired with a fitting therapist, someone who has experience with your very specific reason(s) that your ambition to live is low. I checked off a few boxes, one of them being “religion.” At the time, religious trauma wasn’t widely recognized, so I think that explains why I was paired with someone who had ulterior motives for me as a queer person. She often sited Bible verses. That experience lasted far longer than was good for me.
In 2019, I listened to an interview on The Liturgists Podcast with a woman named Jamie Lee Finch, who talked about her book You Are Your Own. This was the first time I heard the term “religious trauma.” I bought her book, and I remember it wasn’t long into the read that I was sobbing and feeling like I finally realized I’d been holding my breath my whole life. It started to make sense why I had depressive episodes after spending holidays with family. This had nothing to do with my family members as individuals, and everything to do with recognizing the format under which we were raised to behave and exist, dare we acknowledge the blanket of shame that showed up as indiscreet comments from the parents about success, body image, faith, etc. It was like dots connected in my brain as a rush of clarity and I was finally seeing that there is a direct link to why I always had a week of depression after spending 4 days straight drinking and eating and numbing with my siblings.
Come 2020, seemingly the whole world sought therapy. Work came to a halt for me and my ex for months. We had a honeymoon phase of it and then, when work slowly started up again, dread crept in. It was horrible. She had her own experience with past trauma bubbling up and she had an amazing therapist to help her through it. I felt capable for a while to be present and as helpful as I could be, but there was no stopping what I had coming my way. My old suicidality, that old friend, came back hard. Strangely, it started to feel like we separately were battling the most difficult stories in our minds and we could not be the partners we each needed at the time. Her therapist connected us with a couple’s therapist and we met with her over zoom for a handful of months before I was seeing Anna on my own. I remember the first conversation about questioning my gender. I was thinking, “Am I really going to open this box? I secured this a long fucking time ago. What happens when I start talking about it? Will she believe me?” It turns out, this new therapist was a gift to me. I needed the gentle and compassionate conversations, sometimes challenging and always healing. I genuinely believe she helped re-wire my brain in a way that helps me survive in a new way.
Over the last few years, my experience with coming out as gender non-conforming and trans resulted in some of the scary and fucked up responses from people that I’d been afraid of, and it also showed me who believes me and who wants to understand. It showed me that spending time with others who have similar lived experiences are times that I feel most free to let down my mask and be myself (no surprises there). Most importantly, it pointed me to my own transphobia that I had ingrained in me from childhood. I’m learning how I have covered up my pain in the past to make it through moments that I am triggered, saving my reaction for when I am alone. In the moments that I allow my body to relax after a trigger, that’s when suicidality shows up. Anna taught me to treat those moments like a sick day. Thoughts are not facts. Let them pass through me. Sleep, eat when I have the energy to, sleep, cry everything out. I am so grateful for what I learned from her.
I write all of this to share my experience and to insist that it is important to talk about suicidality. It is a common human experience. It’s inevitably passed down from generation to generation. And! Not everyone experiences it! If you experience it, it does not make you “bad.” It does not take away your worthiness of love, shelter, grace, peace. The hardest time to reach out and tell someone you’re struggling is when you’re deep in it. Seeking therapy won’t always connect you with a therapist who knows how to speak compassion into you, but it’s damn worth trying find that person. You’re worth it.
My road keeps going, I’m not a fully healed person. I am excited for the first time to be conscious of what harms me, conscious of my behaviors and how I can move through the world causing as little harm as I possibly can, to myself and to others.
This also gives birth in me a willingness to fight to live. I intend to nurture this new ambition, however it presents itself.
Here’s to living. 🔥
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