Are you in therapy? Do you know someone who is?

Some days I look around the room and everyone I know is either in therapy, actively avoiding therapy or thinking about therapy. Is it a weird #Firstworldproblem? Is it like people with all manner of apps and paraphernalia for running when walking, plain old walking, in salwars and cheap keds were good enough for their parents? Is therapy quinoa for the mind?

A good friend recently spent several sessions at therapy, frustrated because she wanted to discuss the rage she felt towards her mother-in-law and her fluffy therapist kept asking her pointless questions about her sleep and her baby. At the end of her tether, my friend was determined to dump her shrink before she dumped her mother-in-law.

The first time I went to therapy, I was 22. In those first two months after the man I thought was the love of my life (we were meant to be, we were meant to be, we looked so good together in the mirror) said bye-bye, I alarmed every auto-driver in Bengaluru by crying rivers. Something or someone suggested therapy. Perhaps it was the Donald Barthelme story in which a man writes to his girlfriend’s shrink, arguing that she no longer needed therapy. She was more than fine, he said, she was wonderful. And if she stopped going to the shrink, she could buy the grand piano she wanted. The story argued against therapy but still somehow made it perversely romantic. In any case, something got me to a therapist in NIMHANS, a psychiatric hospital.

My therapist was young, still in training and had no pretensions to intellectualism. So unpretentious he’d marvel at the size of the book I was reading in the waiting room — a Harry Potter or something equally unchallenging. Though he was just a couple years older, he seemed like he was a world far away.

During those months, I began crying within the first five minutes of sitting down and cried all the way till the end. Every week I’d begin bravely, making jokes, being self-deprecating, doing all the things I’d learnt at 22 to deal with being an awkward mess. Then he’d look at me, not unkindly, but plainly waiting for me to be done with the prelude.

Through his seeming simple kindness, it all came out — the longing, the vicious game-playing and fragility of my messed-up young-person world. Most importantly, it gave me a place to go week after week, and cry because my heart was broken and I had thought we were meant to be. The particulars really didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that we were political-minded and complicated everything, that he was bisexual, that I was attracted to bloody-mindedness. I was sad and that was all that mattered. I don’t remember what my therapist said to me but in a few months, the sharpest edge of the pain faded.

I’d have thought I had other people to talk to, that being the precise moment when I was flourishing with old school friends, the still current friendships of college and the hearty (and jittery) friendships with people I shared political beliefs with. But I couldn’t speak any truths to any of them. Imagine telling the truth to the woman who despised me for breaking up with my previous boyfriend to be with this one. Or the college friend who guilelessly said, “Oh well, if you hadn’t decided to be with him, I’d have.” Or the friend whose hair had gone grey from dealing with his own break-up. In front of any of them, the failure part of love failure would have struck me more than the love part of it. Not that I didn’t talk about it. In that particular instance of misery (unlike some others) I couldn’t stop talking. But no variation, no listener ever eased my heart the way the weekly hour in the uncomfortable government-issue chair did.

In the case of my friend with the therapist who refused to discuss the mother-in-law, it all suddenly came together after months. The therapist was trying to get her to a point where she’d feel rested and competent at taking care of her child, this last point being what she was defensive about. A few months later, not only did hostilities simmer down, there was even a spontaneous moment of tearful reconciliation.

For years after my first encounter with a therapist, I didn’t know anyone who believed in therapy, only people who narrated variations of a self-defeating anecdote: I knew in that first session I was so much smarter than my therapist, so what was the whole point?

I wish I had but I never told these sceptics: Does it matter? It doesn’t matter that you are a rocket scientist. All it matters is that your therapist is trained in therapy and you aren’t.

My so-young therapist’s ability to help me focus on what really mattered came from this fact — we all live our lives out of a limited set of scripts. The particulars are just costume. And we are hopelessly distracted by costume.

Nisha Susan is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger; @chasingiamb

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