Breathe
By Marilú Acosta
At a dinner party, many years after leaving high school, my friends start talking about "the therapist". What therapist? I ask. The one at school, they answer me strangely, "You didn't know there was a therapist? No way, I never knew. And was it for us? Yes, you would go, ask for an appointment and he would talk to you. And did everyone know he existed? Yes, they answered me like a chorus of crickets. And I kept quiet, thinking about that man I did see walking the halls, crossing the courtyards, who I bumped into at the doors, who was both an everyday person in my school life and a complete stranger.
Ironies of life, my tuition included a psychologist and I never knew it. That's when I realized that in order to receive therapy it's not enough to need it, to want to take it, to be included in the school combo, that the professors know you need it, that you talk to your friends about mental health, your mental health, but if you don't get it, not even if you do. At the university it was a different story, I found out in time that the psychology department offered free sessions to students. I went. The sessions were the practices of those who were finishing their degree. Very nice people, very kind and everything, but I needed something like a Diablo, because the Devil knows more for an old man than for a Devil. There was never a second session. After a few years I found a Freudian-Jungian psychotherapist who came to me like a glove.
In this first season I never got over the feeling of failure for needing to pay someone to listen to me. It pained me to think that I didn't have people within my reach to do so. Although I actually wrote, what I talked about had nothing to do with me and what was mine, mine, I wrote. One day I told her: you have to pause it. She answered me: how curious, I was going to propose you to come twice a week.
The second season began when in the hospital, during my on-call duties, the panic attacks returned. Exhausted, I sank into his gray leather chair, I was post-guard and needed a solution to apply within 36 hours I would be back on call. Her training made me wonder about my childhood. Surely it would fundamentally solve the problem if we analyzed my early years on earth, however we were not going to do it in 45 minutes. I switched therapists, to an "alternative" one. Where do you feel the panic attack? In my neck, I feel like I'm choking. Well, move it to your knee. Just like that? Just like that, if you need to, move it to the ankle or to a finger or to the thigh. We will find the message he wants to convey, while you need to be functional. Then my panic attacks packed up and started to travel all over my body. Against all odds, I finished my internship without panic.
My third season was when, at work, the panic attacks returned. Here, I added different techniques to my mental health: cranial sacral, family constellations, the Freudian-Jungian psychotherapist, and the "alternative" because each one saw a different part of me and all my parts needed to be calibrated. By the fourth season, after seeing the failure of medicine and "medical science" to keep the world's population healthy and to achieve sustained and profound behavioral change in the shortest possible time, I began to look for other methods.
In addition to research in neurology, psychiatry, psychology, physics and quantum mechanics I enrolled in courses, took sessions and read about the Enneagram, Dzogchen meditation, ESP, Heart Basics, CIMA, Interspecies Communication, Thetahealing (basic, advanced, 3 DNA, anatomy (intuitive), Tanatology, A Course in Miracles, Bach Flowers, Homeopathy, IRECA, Reiki, Angelic Reiki, Shamanism, MunayKi Rites of the Q'ero, Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine, Ressonance Repattering, Health Optimizing, Access, Biodecoding, Jin Shin Jyutsu, Hormonal Yoga Therapy, Kundalini Yoga, Numerology, Astrology, and Win Hof Breathing; not to mention coffee readings, Tarot and pendulum readings, sprinkled with different dietary regimens.
All methods have things in common, they also have different approaches and all of them are useful. Other more everyday and colloquial methods are after-dinner conversations, trips, fleeting talks, chats, readings, movies (no, not only the spectacular Hollywood productions, but from other countries, in other languages, from other cultures), moments of reflective insomnia, walks (in nature or in the middle of the chaos of the city), love, pain and sadness. I no longer have the feeling of failure for needing to pay someone to listen to me. I now understand that life itself is occupational therapy and that therapists are professionals who, like chefs, perform an activity that everyone can do, yet not everyone can cook like a professional.
Each situation may require a different method, there are many options; charlatans, everywhere; placebo effect even in breathing you find it. The biggest deception is the one you make to yourself, convincing yourself that it works, that you are fine or that you don't need therapy. Therapy is a path, if you don't move forward, many times the body moves forward for you and not necessarily in the most gentle way.
What is the best therapy? The one you take.
What is the best session? The one from which you come out at peace with yourself.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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