Kimberly Emerson

When I think back on my favorite memories in life, I can get lost in vivid recollection.  The Christmas where my parents gave me a brand-spanking-new ten-speed bike.  The English tea our family had at Epcot Center, where the waitress decided we needed two of everything.  The first time I was in a play and discovered I could make an entire auditorium of people laugh.  The insanely beautiful costumes I got to wear in subsequent shows.  (Suffice to say, if you asked to see a picture of me in a floor-length bronze gown, I’d have to ask you to be more specific.)  Singing at my brother & sister-in-law’s wedding.  A fabulous Italian dinner on a warm clear night with a charming man who said all the right things and made me feel beautiful and mysterious.  (He turned out to be a bit of a mystery himself and later disappeared off the face of the earth, but that first dinner was still lovely.)  Hugs from three women who helped me celebrate my twelfth birthday and still love me thirty years later.

You will notice, the time spent with various counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists is not on the list.  That’s not an oversight.  I think of my hours of therapy the same way I think of the years I had braces on my teeth – I’m glad I did it, and now I’m glad I don’t have to do it anymore.

It has come to my attention, however, how much negative press therapy has gotten.  There seems to be a general consensus that therapists exist to “fix” you, or to tell you what to think, or to spend endless hours mining the detritus of your childhood for no particular purpose.  I won’t say these things are never true.  There are bad therapists out there, and these may be absolutely faithful accounts of other people’s experiences.  In all honesty, my assumptions were probably similar before I went to therapy for the first time at seventeen.  That all changed, however, when I walked into the office of a woman named Gloria, and ended up telling her about all of my crap.  (I’m a writer, so trust me when I say that that is the most fitting word for what was going through my head at the time.)

It may be an exaggeration to say that Gloria saved my life.  But then again, it may not.

When I was in my senior year of high school, I watched the movie Amadeus.  (I’ve seen the live stage version since and I liked it much better than the movie, but the story holds your interest either way.)  The main character, Salieri, works hard to earn musical talent from God.  At some point,  however, he can no longer deny that God has blessed Amadeus, a lecherous drunk, with a greater musical gift than the pious Salieri will ever have.  Waking to this realization, Salieri decides that since God hasn’t honored his part of the bargain, he no longer needs to honor God.

To my teenage self, this hit home in a big way.  I’d tried my best to be the good little girl my whole life, making good grades, going to church, obeying my elders (well, not my older brother, but you get the idea).  In return, my prayer to remain with my friends in Northern California had been answered with a resounding “no.”  I knew other people who defied authority at every turn and got most of what they wanted.  It dawned on me that there was never going to be a great reward for my docile behavior.  Life would just keep running me over like a truck.  Pretty much overnight, my personality changed.  Not in the way you might expect – I didn’t start doing drugs and sleeping around.  I was born “the good kid” and I would die that way.  Instead, I just got majorly depressed.

If you’ve never experienced clinical depression, imagine waking up with fifty-pound weights surgically attached to each ankle.  Just getting out of bed requires concentrated will.  The idea of going about your normal day – getting dressed, brushing your teeth, going to school or to a job – feels as if someone has just asked you to run a marathon.  Loving people will tell you that to get rid of the weight, not understanding that you’d have to cut your foot off in order to do it.

Seeing me go through this dark transformation, my parents wisely took me to a see a counselor.  They had asked around and gotten a recommendation from someone at the school where my mom worked.  I didn’t like the new me anymore than anyone else did, so I went willingly along to the counseling center, where I desperately hoped someone knew what to do with lunatics like myself.

Therapists’ offices come in many different varieties.  This one was located in a large house surrounded by elderly trees and looked like it might double as a bed and breakfast.  I walked inside, expecting a doctor’s office, and instead was greeted by a friendly receptionist who offered me lemonade along with the requisite paperwork.  After a short time, a woman in her sixties who radiated calm appeared in the doorway and introduced herself as Gloria.

We walked upstairs and she opened the door to a room with a couch and a couple of high-backed, well-cushioned chairs.  I settled myself on the couch and wondered what I was supposed to say.  I don’t remember the conversation exactly, but I think she started with some variation of “So, what’s been going on with you lately?”  What I recall with stunning clarity is that after a very short time I started to cry.  This is unusual for me.  I cry plenty easily on my own, but I’m protective of my feelings in front of other people.  Somehow, though, everything about Gloria said “It’s okay, you’re safe here.”  Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t pat my shoulder and say “Oh, poor you.”  On the contrary, she acted as though bursting into tears was not a remarkable experience.  (Fair enough, she was a therapist.  To her, it probably wasn’t.)  In a tone that conveyed no fear or judgment, she asked me if I’d thought about killing myself.  I said yes.  I hadn’t made a plan or anything, but it would have been a complete lie to say the thought never crossed my mind.  She didn’t freak out.  She just calmly said, “If you had a broken leg, would you cut it off?”  I said no, of course not.  “Why not?” she asked.  Because I knew it would get better, I told her.  She nodded toward my tear-stained face.  “And this will, too.”

For reasons I didn’t and still don’t entirely understand, I believed her.

I didn’t see Gloria again for awhile.  I saw another man who worked there.  His name eludes me, and that makes me sad because he was a great help to me at the time.  He had Gloria’s same calming manner.  He asked me questions and I answered, aware that I felt safe in that office.  There were times when knowing that I would return to that upstairs room with the flowered wallpaper for my Saturday appointment was the only thing that got me through the rest of the week. I saw him every week for nine months, by which time I started college, feeling happier and more optimistic than I had all year.

That wasn’t the end of my therapy experiences.  The depression returned a year or so later, and I suffered through it, trying anti-depressants and a couple of therapists who weren’t as good but were covered by insurance.  Depression is funny that way – it comes in waves.  It might last for months or even years, but sometimes it goes on its way as quickly as it came, leaving the person feeling more or less the way he or she did before.  Trouble is, once you know what it’s like to feel that way, it’s easy to find that a small part of your brain is permanently dedicated to fearing that someday you’ll feel it again.

I was on my own, working my first salaried job, when the depression returned in full force.  Going back in search of more therapy, I remembered Gloria.  I liked the man I’d seen, too, but decided that I could be more completely honest and open talking to a woman, so I made an appointment with her.  To my relief, she was just as calm and soothing as she had been before.  We met in a different room, downstairs this time.  I sat on one side of the sofa and talked to her.  I sat in that same spot on the sofa and talked to her once a week (more or less) for the next five years.  This time, I told myself, I was going to conquer the depression, once and for all.

I tried very hard to tell her everything, to keep nothing back.  It was easier than I thought, with such a non-judgmental person to listen to me.  Indeed, I found that I looked forward to my sessions because I could do just that – talk about myself.  The very idea startled me.  I had spent my entire existence, it seemed, being life’s great listener.  I heard about people’s dating woes long before I had my first kiss, much less anything resembling a relationship.  People asked my advice about it, for pity’s sake, like I had (or still have, for that matter) the foggiest idea how to answer.  But this was different.  I was paying her to listen.  I didn’t even have to pretend to be interested in her life.  Not only was she okay with my weekly bout of self-absorption, she encouraged it.  If we got too far off topic, she’d say things like, “But I want to know how that affected you.”

Unlike therapy on TV, I don’t remember a big break-through moment.  I remember lots of little ones, and the funny thing is, they mostly involved things that I heard coming out of my own mouth.  Gloria asked questions – yes, some of them were even about my childhood – but she didn’t make it seem like her questions were important.  What mattered were my answers.  Eventually, I began to notice how I reacted to things, especially the times where my words and my emotions didn’t match.  Those times, I realized, usually brought with them the greatest feelings of anxiety.  Trying to please everyone else, I frequently lost track of how exactly I felt.

At last, because of the baby steps that I took from week to week in that cozy den, I moved on with my life and went back to acting school.  No one was happier for me than Gloria.  (Granted, after all that time, she may just have been tired of listening to me, but I don’t think so.)

One of the things that took me a long time to accept was that depression didn’t necessarily get “conquered.”  It was going to be a process, possibly a life-long one, involving therapy and medication.  There might well be lapses.  But now at least I had tools to deal with them.  I didn’t have to worry anymore whether someone could make me believe I would be okay.  I knew from experience that things got better, I just had to take the steps to get there.  I could take the steps now.  Gloria had helped me to take the fifty-pound weights off my ankles.

Therapy isn’t a wonder-elixir that will cure what ails you with one dose.  It takes time and patience.  But if you or someone you love should have need of it, just know it’s nothing to be afraid of, either.  There are bad counselors out there, no question – I’ve been to see a couple of them, too.  Don’t settle for them.  I can say from experience that there are some wonderful ones, and no one should accept less.  A good therapist won’t give you directions to the intersection of  Fame and Glory, or change you into the person that society thinks you should be.  A good therapist just teaches you how to listen to yourself.

No therapist worth the money will “fix” you, but she might help you realize that you aren’t really as broken as you thought.

Kimberly has invested a lot of time and money on therapy, and she considers it one of her most worthwhile investments.  Not the most worthwhile – that’s Zoe.  Even therapy can’t top that.

Tags: Amadeus, anti-depressants, depression, Epcot Center, Salieri, therapy