Therapy

     My first experience with therapy was when I was a freshman in high school. After my mother discovered that I was self injuring (I wonder what she would say if she knew I never really got over it) and was quite depressed over losing my best friend. The relationship was really more than that, but it doesn't matter now. Only a few people know about that, none of which really had a say in the events at the time. No one really knows why I went so crazy. It was a really rough couple of months.
      Anyway off the therapy I went. We went once a week. Sometimes my sister and I were together, but most of the time we were separate. I don't think it helped much. In time I think I just got over the situation. Jenny taught me how to cope by snapping myself with a rubber band rather than self injure. I can't decide how I feel about this. I didn't get much accomplished in therapy at 16. I was really uncomfortable being alone and I think really unable to articulate what my feelings on the situation were. Anyway, hindsight is 20/20.
     Flash forward a few years. I've always been a pretty anxious person. Terrified of change or death. Or both. I guess they can go hand in hand. At the end of my freshman year of college my anxiety was starting to get a little worse. Like kind of at actual panic attack status. I had learned to manage the chest pains in high school. But over the summer it was fine. Enter sophomore year. I had a rough time adjusting to living with another roommate other than my sister. We drove each other crazy. First semester was awful. By second semester things had cleared up though and we were good again.
     I wasn't good though. My life had shifted in ways that I couldn't fathom. Now I'm alright with the changes, but at the time I felt like my world was crashing down around me and I couldn't even tell which direction it was coming from. I was just incredibly sad all the time. Nothing made me feel better, not for long anyway. So my roommate and I decided to try out going to the counseling center. I wanted to learn how to cope with change and kind of get my life back together and I think she just wanted to try it out because she was in a counseling class.
     I've always been a person that wanted to try group therapy. Watching movies like Girl Interrupted made it look very interesting. I'm also incredibly nosy. I want to know everyone's life. What better way to get that than to go to group therapy. So while I was doing my intake interview and group gets brought up, I get super excited. I've always wanted to do this, right?! Wrong.
     Group therapy was not really for me. It is an experience that I wouldn't give up, but I am not very good at speaking up and initiating talk about my feelings. I also realized I still had problems articulating when speaking out loud and I started to develop anxiety about having to speak up in front of the whole group. These issues all point to the fact that I should probably stick with group, in order to get over them, and maybe I will.
      My issues - anxiety about death and dying and trying to deal with separating from ones twin - are somewhat unique issues. Especially the twin thing. That is something that I guess is kind of hard to relate to. Or rather, maybe just not group topics. And maybe my feelings went deeper than these two things. Maybe I don't even know what I'm anxious about, because the list is constantly changing.
     I thought that going to group would be different. I had a romanticized version of how it worked. I did not really learn to cope with my anxiety and I only spoke up a handful of times. Hopefully the third times the charm. Maybe I'll do both individual and group therapy in the fall and see what happens. So far my experiences with therapy have been interesting. The second definitely an improvement from the first. So it can only keep getting better, right?