Is Therapy a 'Spring Clean' for your mind?

Can therapy help us to discover what is underneath all the layers of social conditioning, expectations, insecurities, ego and fear? Would you even recognise the 'real' you that gets unearthed?

Oct 28, 2024

It has been nine months since I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, and it’s been almost two years since I went to my GP complaining of joint pain in my spine and pelvis. In that time I had to quit my job due to the pain and fatigue it created. I stopped driving. My social life took a nose dive. Most of my hobbies took a back seat and napping took a prominent role in my life. My bed was/is where I spend the majority of my time.

Now you may think ‘Wow, what exactly do you do with your life now? You must be so bored…lonely…depressed’. Which yes, I admit, sometimes I am all of those things, but so is everyone else at one time or another, even with a fancy job and an active social life. But I can honestly say that the last couple of years have also been the most rich and enlightening time of my life. I have been given the gift of time to think. Deeply think. The big scary, looking into the unknown ‘why are we all here’ void. Apart from pain and fatigue, I've had very little distractions from that void of questions. Of course I wish that it wasn’t given to me in the way that is has been, with a big dose of chronic illness on the side, but whether I like to admit it or not, it has given me the time to think and sort through a lot of my mental and emotional baggage.

Now again, you may say to yourself, but isn’t too much time to think a bad thing? Couldn’t that drive a person absolutely bonkers? And I would say truthfully, yes, sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be…not if it’s done in a ‘constructive’ way.

My illness has stripped a lot away from me. When I was first diagnosed I thought my life was over. In some ways it was. I had to say goodbye to the old Amanda. I was suddenly faced with a new Amanda, and for a time we awkwardly stared at each other. She stood at one side of the room and I at the other, and we didn’t even dare glance over. Who was this person? What do I say to her? What do we do now? I didn’t know how to act around her; this new version cries and sleeps a lot, she seems lost and confused with no direction. She doesn’t have a job, status, purpose, money, kids…she doesn’t look well anymore. She doesn’t have all the usual labels, so how am I supposed to know what she is about? How can I tell who she is? How do I relate to her? She’s so raw. She can’t hide her pain anymore. She makes me feel uncomfortable.

You see, when I became ill, I literally didn’t have the energy to wear that mask anymore. You know the one we all put on to make everyone around us more comfortable. The people pleaser mask. The one that holds back what they really want to say. The one that does things to make others happy, in spite of your own wellbeing. The one that gets that job, buys those things, carries out those hobbies, to show the world ‘Look at me, I’m happy, I have my life together, I’m worthy of your love and adoration. Please accept me’. But who are you when you strip away all those societal labels? What’s left behind? What is left at your very core?

At first, my knee-jerk reaction was to think, nothing, fucking nothing, that’s what’s left behind. But I couldn’t have been further from the truth! I just needed the time and perspective, to peel away all those layers underneath the mask, and discover who was there waiting for me.

Is therapy the answer?

For years I had been contemplating going to therapy. I knew that I needed to talk to someone about what I was going through. I was ‘pro’ therapy and believed it could help others, but for some reason I never truly believed it would help me. Could talking about my problems to a stranger really help that much? What could they suggest that I hadn’t already thought of myself? Maybe I was beyond help. What if they couldn’t help me and that was my last resort, who or what would I turn to after that? That was a scary thought.

However, I’m so glad that I took that courageous leap of faith (because it is really courageous by the way). Therapy has opened up my eyes to a lot of things in the last few months. It’s given me the space to not only think and talk about the dreaded ‘void’, but to then constructively deconstruct it in a manageable way, problem solve through it and start to come out the other side. My therapist doesn’t tell me what to think, she has guided me to come to those conclusions all by myself. The answers have been there all along, I just needed a gentle nudge to get there. Therapy is great because it doesn’t just give you one nudge and throw you off into the deep end, it nudges you again and again until you can do it by yourself with ease. It gives you accountability to keep doing the hard inner work that is so desperately needed.

A visual representation of what happens if we don’t deal with our emotional clutter!

Therapy is like a deep clean…

I’ve been thinking of it in terms of a weird analogy. Do bear with me…

So you know when you have that sudden urge to spring clean your home, say your kitchen. You feel like you want a fresh start and you want to make things more minimal and manageable. So you pull everything out of the cupboards at once, lay it all over the floor, start sorting things into piles; this pile is to throw away, this one is to keep, this one to donate etc. Deep thinking about life is like that. When you start bringing everything out of the cupboards and look at it all, it looks like a complete crazy mess. It feels overwhelming. You start thinking oh my god, where did all this crap come from. How did I accumulate so much of this stuff. Where do I put it all. What am I going to do with it. Why did I start doing this at 11 o’clock at night on a Wednesday. There is no way I can put it all back neatly. I’m running out of time ahhhhh, and we start to spiral.

Now the sensible thing to do would be to take a deep breath, start with one object and think, where did this come from? Do I need this? You chip away slowly. You take your time and just keep going until it’s done. You would take breaks when you need to. You realise you can ask for help if you need to. You can get equipment or tools to make the job easier, like boxes, a label maker, a skip etc. But the main thing is, and the most important part is, that you keep going no matter what. You push past the uncomfortable mess and come out the other side, even if it takes you years, you keep going. A task done slowly is better than a task unfinished.

Eventually, you get the task done and you feel lighter, happier, the kitchen looks great, you’re proud of yourself, you invite others around to bask in your glory. You have marvellous dinner parties in your new kitchen and your friends get so inspired they go home and do the same thing. People see how happy you are and just want to be around you and spend time in your new kitchen. Before you know it, everyone you know has beautiful kitchens too. You’ve helped your loved ones reach their potential as well. You suddenly have all this free time on your hands because you’re not bogged down with all that clutter and guilt and stress. You have the room to try new things and your life becomes expansive instead of claustrophobic. How healthy and productive does that sound?

But often what we do instead is panic and either just start shoving all the crap back into the cupboards haphazardly, even worse than it was before, and some stuff breaks or gets lost. Sometimes we panic so much, that we leave it there, this giant pile of crap in the middle of the room. We’re paralyzed with fear. So we try to live around the crazy mess. At first we think we’re doing a good job of ignoring it, but it starts to eat away at us. Which of course starts to make us feel guilty and stressed. We start trying to shove the crap onto others. Here you take it! You get jealous of other people’s clean kitchens, even though they secretly have messy cupboards too. Resentment builds. How dare they have what I want. You can’t even use any of the stuff you have anymore because now you can’t find it properly. You stop inviting people over because you’re embarrassed, you don’t even want to talk about it because it stresses you out so much. People around you start feeling uncomfortable and don’t want to talk to you about their kitchens because it just gets weird and awkward. Your messy kitchen reminds them of all the clutter they haven’t dealt with also. So they pull away and avoid you. Eventually you try to avoid that room completely. You are so fearful of going in the kitchen and being reminded of all the crap you haven’t sorted out, so it just sits there. Years pass and nothing gets resolved. All that potential has been wasted. All those dinner parties that haven’t happened. All those friends and family you pushed away. All those years spent worrying about it, and all that energy used ruminating on it, could have been used to face your fears instead.

Bloody hell I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but that's what we do in our own minds with our unresolved problems all the time.

But that’s where therapy comes in. Therapy allows me to empty all my kitchen cupboards i.e mental clutter. It allows me to deeply think about all the crap in my past, my life now, and my future. Lay it all out there.

But then my therapist is like Marie Kondo. She helps me to organise my mental and emotional clutter (instead of my kitchen cupboards). She guides me to look at each memory or thought, one at a time, and work through it at my own pace. Whilst I do this, she offers me gentle reassurance at every step. Instead of asking me ‘Does this item bring you joy?’, she asks me ‘Is this thought helpful?’, ‘Is this pattern of behaviour serving you?’, ‘Is there a different way of thinking about this situation?’.

Then we take a break and come back to decluttering my thoughts the next week, and the week after that. It doesn’t seem so overwhelming anymore. The stuff in the kitchen cupboards wasn’t the issue. We all have stuff. It was the not dealing with it that was the problem. I was putting too much pressure on myself to get it all sorted out in one sitting, so much so that I avoided it altogether and it never got resolved. I didn’t ask for help. I pushed my unresolved stuff onto those around me at times. I would start thinking about stuff at unproductive times, setting myself up to fail. I now know I wasn’t facing my problems. I just left all the baggage there, distracting myself with other things- boyfriends, moving abroad, jobs, chasing unfulfilling careers and buying stuff, blaming others and just hoping the other stuff would magically get resolved. This lead to me pushing away the people closest to me. I didn’t want them to see the real me, I was afraid I would disappoint them, but ironically I was doing that anyway because I wasn’t owning up to my problems.

Hello me…where have you been?

But what’s more sad is that I pushed my authentic self away at the same time. I was wasting my own potential. I was the one getting in the way of myself. Instead of feeling guilty about it, therapy has given me the tools to deal with the problem in a loving, productive, non-judgemental way. I am learning to take reasonability for the role I had in it all. It’s ok that I was stuck in that blame cycle for a while, that’s only human. But I have to acknowledge that by blaming everyone and everything else for my problems, playing the victim, meant that 1) I was taking away my power and control over the situation and 2) I was sitting in my ‘kitchen (emotional) clutter’ and letting it completely take over my life.

Now I’m not saying I was the reason for all the heartbreak in my life. There are some things that were not my fault at all, but I’m learning that it was probably due to other people not owning their own crap that caused those problems. If we all took more responsibility over our own actions and healing, we wouldn’t project onto others and the world would be a much healthier place. We have the power to break the vicious cycle.

I am definitely not saying that I caused my own chronic illness, or other people do, of course not! But becoming ill has certainly been a huge catalyst in making me face my problems. If I didn’t become sick, I think I would have continued to distract myself, spiral and be buried under the weight of it all for many many more years.

My kitchen cupboards i.e my mind, are nowhere near clear and tidy just yet, I don’t think they ever can be 100%, but I can see that I am making huge progress with the help of therapy. I do think people could get to these same conclusions that I have without therapy, but for me, therapy has made it easier to get there. It’s made the journey to ‘enlightenment’ quicker, less scary and tailor-made to me.

This time to really think and being supported to do that in therapy, has been a way of bridging the gap between old Amanda and the new. I can look at the new Amanda now without disgust. We’re edging closer to one another. She doesn’t scare me so much anymore. I actually quite like her a lot of the time now. I can see qualities in her that I missed first time around. I now know, that I judged her way too harshly. Under all those societal labels, fake masks and insecurities, is actually where all the good qualities lay. They were hiding before. Now I can see all those qualities, the ones that really matter. Like empathy, kindness, loyalty, open mindedness, resilience, creativity, curiosity, wanting to be helpful and a deep love of learning. Society at large may not reward these qualities, or at least they rate them below money, status and power in the modern world. But trust me, they are the real gold. The people in your life, the ones that really matter, will see those qualities and love you dearly for them. You should love them dearly about yourself too, because you are amazing 😍

Can love really heal us?

When I asked my husband the other day what he loved about me and why he fell in love with me (I was feeling needy ok!) he said ‘I love you because of your capacity to love and care deeply, your kindness and your empathy. I fell in love with your heart’.

Before, I think I subconsciously saw those characteristics about myself in a negative light. I thought they made me ‘too sensitive’, ‘too emotional’, an overthinker, weaker somehow, that people would use those things against me, take advantage of me, or call me weird for showing that side of myself. So I started to hide them away from most people. The full depth of them anyway.

But when Will told me he loved me for exactly those qualities, I realised in that moment, that those things have always been there within me. I didn't need him to tell me that it was ok to let them out. They were just buried under layers of societal expectations, insecurities, fear of rejection, people pleasing, guilt and ego.

And you want to know the really exciting thing I have discovered since becoming sick?

Those beautiful qualities he saw will always be there. They are free, limitless. They don’t rely on something so fragile as money or status, other people's opinions or even health. They will always be there no matter how sick or poor I get. I will always have the capacity to love and to be loved. Ok I don’t have a job, but I will always be able to contribute to those around me, with love. I am still a valuable part of society. Even when people die, our love for that person continues. That’s the legacy we should be striving towards.

My own mother died over 20 years ago. I don’t remember her because of her job or how much money she brought to the household. I remember her because of her heart and her love for us as a family. I remember her hugs. She was so generous with her time, effort, love and energy. I remember her laugh and the way she told us bedtime stories. I remember her gentle and caring nature. I remember her patience when she taught me how to bake cakes. I remember her silliness and how fun it was to dance with her to Spice Girls. I remember how she made me feel. She wasn’t perfect, no one is, but she always tried her best. There was never a doubt in my mind-she loved us with her whole heart and that love has carried me through the most difficult times of my life. She may not have been here in body for the last 20 years, but her love has always been here and always will be. She is still providing. Love can literally transcend time and space. Isn't that pure magic?

So why are we wasting so much time on trying to cultivate all those superficial labels and some ‘empire’, when instead we should be cultivating what we already have inside of us; love, connection, compassion, empathy, being open minded, patience, understanding, being authentic and human, open communicators, the willingness to grow and learn, self expression, creativity, being generous with our time and attention, listening, showing up and trying to do our best in whatever capacity we can. That’s the beauty of it. Even when you are sick and all you can do is lay in your bed, you still have all those amazing qualities inside of you.

Now you might be thinking this all sounds like toxic positivity. I’m sick Amanda, I don't feel much love for myself or those around me. I don't have the energy to do anything right now. But again, that's why loving yourself is so powerful. You can be the authentic you, the one who gets sad and angry, the one who feels like a failure, or guilty or a burden. The one that makes mistakes and doesn't feel enough. But you still deserve love and can give love even with those feelings, that's the point. All you need to do is to show up with all those messy human feelings and you own them. You do your best to identify them and move on eventually, but some days I just tell myself ‘Ok I happen to feel sad today, but I still love myself. I'll just have to be MORE generous with my love today and be MORE gentle with myself, not less’. I think where we all go wrong is truly believing that we're not worthy of love unless we're happy and successful. What utter bollocks. We're human and that means we're going to have all the range of emotions, again and again throughout our lifetime. Forgive yourself for being human. We still deserve our love and compassion.

We’re told money and power and success are in limited supply, so we all compete and fight one another for it. But you know what is overflowing with abundance and always will be? You guessed it, love! I think we all know this deep down, but it's only been recently, with the help of therapy, where this thought has really stuck with me. It feels radical, but it shouldn't be. I know there will be tough days ahead, especially with a chronic illness, but somehow it feels less daunting knowing I will always have the real Amanda by my side through it all. The one that can always give and receive love.

And finally, the really beautiful thing is, that love is contagious. Once you start loving yourself, others around you start to feel inspired to love themselves better too. Everybody wins. No fighting for ‘success’ scraps anymore.

So let's redefine what success really looks like, together!

Find the beauty in self expression and creativity…

If you are someone who is sick right now and are worried about not being able to contribute, and you think writing on Substack doesn’t mean much, or pursuing your creative passions is not worthy of your time and energy, then I would like to try and convince you that it does matter, more than you may realise. If the soul purpose to be on this planet is actually to love and to be authentic and to express yourself, doesn’t that mean that being creative, in whatever form and capacity that best suits your unique self-expression, is actually one of the best things you can do for yourself and your community? Being creative is a way of letting out those suppressed emotions in a healthy and productive way, that's why it feels so good 😊 Of course we can’t all quit our jobs, we still have bills to pay! But we can carve out some time for ourselves, in whatever capacity we can, and not feel so damn guilty about it.

If you think doing the ‘inner work’ is a waste of time or wouldn’t be right for you, can I convince you to give it a try in a way that suits you? If self-actualisation is the way to reach your full potential in this world, isn’t ‘working on yourself’ one of the best forms of kindness you can show yourself and your loved ones? I know therapy isn't always accessible, but there are plenty of other ways too. For example, therapy books and workbooks written by certified professionals. You can develop more self awareness with practices like YouTube meditations. Can you find someone you trust and speak to them about your feelings? Can you research healthy boundaries and how to out these in place?. These can all be a great starting point. The importing thing though is to keep doing it, it's not a one time thing, it may take years or a lifetime, but it's the most worthwhile thing you could ever do.

Conclusion

Overall, I've realised that to accept my chronic illness and to be able to move on with my life, I need to accept myself as I am first, and that means all of me, including the parts I don't particularly like, including the illness. It doesn't mean I'm excusing bad behaviour, I'm owning that shit and taking responsibility. I'm forgiving others for their part in it too, as they are also only human. I'm moving on, instead of getting stuck. The more I share how I'm feeling with those around me, with honesty and openness, the closer it brings us together. It also signals to them that they can trust me with their big feelings too. A healthy cycle of vulnerability and healing can begin. I know it's scary, but isn't the alternative (being stuck and alone in your troubles) even more terrifying? The trauma that happened to you isn't the only issue, it's the wound that it developed INSIDE of you, the festering wound that's not being healed, which is also part of the problem and continuing the trauma.

So recently when those doubts creep in and I think to myself, what should I do with my life now that I’m too sick to work, or to have kids, or to do all those hobbies I did before.

Firstly, I take a deep breath and let out a deep sigh of relief.

‘Don’t worry ’, I tell myself, ‘the real work is only just beginning ’…

What about you?

Have you ever tried therapy? Has it been beneficial to you? Is it something you would like to try? Has there been any reasons as to why you haven’t tried it- accessibility, money, the wrong type of therapy being offered, waiting lists? I would love to know in the comments.

In my bones...

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