Good Grief: I Try Out Counseling To Help Get Through A Tough Time In My Life

To me, there are many kinds of therapy: An hour in the hairdresser’s chair, a walk through the park, curling up with a cat, returning stuff to Nordstrom and enjoying the false sense that you have somehow earned money. But I’d never really bought into the idea of going to an actual therapist: My mom was a middle-school counselor, and I can always call her up due to the maternal obligations she implicitly agreed to assume upon giving birth to me. (Plus her advice is already tailored to adolescents, and I often act like one.) And my friends have wine-slash-whine nights regularly, which is like a boozy form of group therapy during which we bitch about work and men and eat cheese.

But this fall I went through some big life changes — including the passing of my 103-year-old grandma, which still makes me tear up as I type this — that created the need for some serious wallowing. And while my friends and family were very supportive, it seemed that I had reached the point at which I needed to enlist the aid of a paid professional with whom to wallow. It’s okay to be Eeyore at a party or two, but at some point you are going to stop getting invitations to attend and will just be a lonely stuffed donkey.

While everyone says you need to shop around for a therapist that fits your needs like you would a compact car, I was willing to sign on with the first one I could find who accepted my law firm’s health insurance. (One can both grieve and take full advantage of one’s medical benefits before the politicians take them away.)

On my first visit, I sat in the waiting room trying to appear emotionally stable. My counselor turned out to be younger than I expected — probably about my age or slightly younger, which made me think of all the potential clients I’ve met with who have wondered whether the blonde child in front of them was even remotely capable of solving their legal problems. Our first hour together was like a disastrous blind date during which one person blubbered into a disintegrating tissue while the other endeavored mightily to avoid looking like a deer in the headlights. But at least in this situation it was already clear who would be picking up the check.

Since then, I’ve met with her several times. But I’ll admit the whole thing is still really confusing for me. As a lawyer and a shareholder in a law firm, I feel like I always need to present my best self when attending appointments. It’s hard to talk to someone about how I feel like I’m falling apart when my job is to have it all together — or at least look like I do. I’ll even make sure I put together a cute outfit whenever we meet so she can be assured that even if I’m in a state of emotional crisis I can still werk it.

It’s also a new experience to be the one receiving the analysis and advice rather than the other way around. (Well, I already have a tax guy and a financial lady, but I have no idea what they are talking about and just pay them to do their thing and leave me alone.) I spend all day at work drawing conclusions based on what people do and say, and now I have this person observing me and trying to do the same thing. Sometimes I just want to crawl inside her head and just get a better understanding of how messed up she believes I am. (“Wipe that non-judgmental look off your face and tell me what you are really thinking!”)

It’s also weird to just sit there talking at someone, in violation of everything I’ve learned about “active listening” and not being a self-involved jerk. It feels very self-indulgent, especially for an attorney whose practice focuses a great deal on gathering information from others and trying to help solve their problems. But at the same time it’s a nice change of pace to have an hour during the work day where I worry about myself rather than all the client emergencies on my to-do list.

I’ve also noted the same sort of trust issues that new clients have with new lawyers. With my counselor, it’s like I’m expected to tell all my fears and secrets to an absolute stranger whose job it is to keep their personal life totally vague and mysterious. I know the focus is supposed to be on me and my baggage, but it goes completely against my lifelong urge to befriend people to not try to know more about this person. At this point I find myself cracking jokes about my ex-boyfriends and making restaurant recommendations during my visits to try to entertain her, and I can’t tell if I’m taking part in a lopsided gossip session or my therapist is silently diagnosing a narcissistic personality disorder. (Another bonus of therapy is that you can talk a lot of crap or sound like a total loser and it goes into the counselor confidentiality vault, which means it’s not going to get spread around your social circle like cream cheese on a bagel.)

But the point is that, while every day isn’t always better than the last, things are on an upward curve overall, which is the way the real-estate and stock markets are also supposed to work. The fact that I’m no longer weeping uncontrollably in front of my new pseudo-friend is certainly a good sign. These days I’ve even been worrying about what we are going to talk about, but it turns out that lawyers like me can always find words to fill empty space.

My relative improvement has had me thinking about what the end game is here. It’s hard for me as a lawyer not to have a specific goal for which to shape my strategy and to justify the lost billable hours. Is there a point at which I will be emotionally “fixed”? Or are we going to reach a point where we can stop talking about the leaking bag of hot garbage that is my present life and start delving into my difficult childhood with divorced parents and no pony? I’m worried at this point that I will just keep visiting my therapist until I die because she laughs at my jokes and the act of ending our relationship seems like it would be awkward. Is there an ethical rule that says we can’t just start being friends? I’m pretty sure that very issue is the plot focus of some Adam Sandler movie.

It was hard for me to admit that I could probably benefit from therapy during this difficult time in my life. In large part since I’m a lawyer, I feel like I need to set aside my personal problems and focus on the needs of my clients and my firm and everyone and everything else. It’s our job to deal with stuff, not wallow in it — like the time my cat, Orca, died, and early the next day I was in court and cheerfully celebrated the win with my client because mourning a deceased feline is not a part of the job description.

The Verdict: I’m not necessarily having some sort of emotional epiphany during my counseling sessions. But just having the routine of dropping everything to chat with someone, and knowing that toward the end of the session she’s going to pull out her notebook to schedule our next appointment, has been comforting — even if I’m left wondering if she is the last professional on earth who doesn’t use some form of electronic calendar. But maybe that notebook is supposed to be symbolic: Perhaps it’s a physical reminder to take it one day at a time. Maybe someday in the distant future, if I’m ever done talking about myself, I’ll ask my therapist about it.

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Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at [email protected].