Restarting therapy, four counselors and seven years later

I felt nervous, standing at the doorsteps of my inner self

“She was such a snob. Very close minded, like she was entitled to everything,” I said, stopping short of saying the b-word in front of my therapist. “I absolutely hated her.”

My therapist sat there silent, which meant she wanted me to go on. 

“I don’t know what else to really say – I hated my younger self.” 

“Do you see, though, how you had to conform to your environment, otherwise you would have… disintegrated?”

Angie shined a spotlight on the Indonesian upbringing at the root of my issues. I’m usually a verbose person. I’m a writer, after all. But I was at a loss for words.

I looked away. I felt nervous, standing at the doorsteps of my inner self. But this was a safe environment, and I’d worked so hard to find myself here. Back at the beginning. 

But getting back there took time. It’d been seven years, in fact, since my first anxiety attack.

*

I woke up to a blanket damp with sweat, eyes shot open staring at the moonlight from outside my university dorm window. 3AM. I felt the blood thump in my ears. I took a deep breath to calm myself down, but my lungs had other plans, immediately exhaling any fresh air that came in. My chest also hurt. Why did my chest hurt?

Ohmygod is this how I die???

My roommate, just two footsteps away from me (that’s Hong Kong dorms for ya), turned over in her sleep, oblivious to my crisis. I googled the symptoms and learned I was having an anxiety or panic attack. Emma Pillsbury in Glee was always having panic attacks and, yep, they looked a lot like this. Problem solved. I rolled over and pressed my body against the wall my bed was shoved against, hoping the plaster’s colder temperature could help moderate mine.

I opened WhatsApp to see if any of my friend’s were online. No luck. I opened 9GAG, hoping some panda videos or funny memes would distract me. The mindless scrolling usually puts me to sleep, but my eyes were latching on the blue screen glow. My thumb kept flicking across my phone in desperation. Two hours later the drowsiness finally set in and I drifted back to sleep.

That’s how the attacks started. First at night, then crawling their way into my mornings, my evenings, and then finally in the middle of classes.

Months of not sleeping or eating well and I felt wrecked.

The cause? The stress of school, tuition, and realizing that I like girls (this last one is prooobably what drove me over the edge).

I wasn’t convinced about therapy. Back in my Indonesian high school, we had an in-school counselor that basically had open office hours. We could come in and talk to her anytime, except nobody did because she had a reputation of being a bit of a blabbermouth. Not a great characteristic for a therapist. If you thought gossip was bad, you should hear how bad Indonesians gossip. Just kidding you’d probably hear of it already because they’re THAT BAD at keeping secrets.

I don’t recall our high school therapist ever helping anyone that actually took the chance to go in, so I learned to keep my problems to myself. Read: I’d just hold it in and cry myself to sleep at night, the three PowerPuff Girls on my pink and lavender walls staring at me in pity.

But my usual coping mechanism – once a month, waiting for my roommate to go out, buying the biggest box of McNuggets, putting on Jane the Virgin until I hit a tear-jerking scene – had stopped working.

I started to enter the desperation zone, so I finally looked up my university’s counseling center. I emailed them when I was having an anxiety attack, my little raccoon thumbs hurriedly typing up a “Hi, can I come to the counseling room right now please It’s a bit of an emergency” in the middle of the school library. They did reply instantly, though with a “no, please make an appointment” so STRIKE ONE this counseling thing is totally not looking out for people’s mental health but whatever I made an appointment and it was in my calendar now so, fine, I’ll go.

I went to their office, poured my life story out to Sunny, a neatly-dressed guy in square-framed glasses, about my family (but not the gay stuff because I was still closeted and let’s get to know each other first, eh Sunny?). But I did get to let some steam out. I felt better afterwards (and dare I say, more sunny?).

We scheduled a follow up appointment two weeks later. But the second time I came back he kinda forgot my life story. Like DUDE, I don’t just tell stuff to strangers!!! (Hello, Substack readers on the internet). Anyway, two strikes you’re out! This ain’t baseball, I can strike you out anytime I want.

For the rest of university, I poured my emotions out in the weights section of the gym instead. Exercising made me hungry, so I was able to eat. It also made me physically tired, so I was sleeping full nights again. Problem solved yet again.

I only told a handful of friends about my sexuality because I was so scared of the gossiping, the judgment from family, and worse, the repercussions it’ll have on my career. I also distanced myself more from my Indonesian and Catholic friends, frightened of what they might think if they found out.

Once I started interning as a reporter, however, I realized that being gay wasn’t that big of a deal after all. The corporate world had largely warmed up to queerness in the workplace ever since the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages in 2015. Every June, I’d see more and more companies colour their logos with rainbow splotches. Turns out I didn’t need to worry about jeapordizing my career for being gay, after all.

So I took a risk. A big swing, if you will. I came out to my parents. It did not go well. It was a big miss.

But like all life problems, I expected this one to go away too (see how I’m avoiding talking about it even now? That’s what I did in life). It didn’t. And therapy profiles and quotes kept flooding my Instagram feed. Why you gotta do me like that, IG? And the host of my favourite podcast, Beautiful/Anonymous, wouldn’t stop yapping about his shrink. The last straw: One of my close friends kept raving about his therapist on his Instagram stories. That’s three strikes at me (I am very good at baseball stuff), so I asked for my friend’s therapist contact.

Ron

Ron charged on a sliding scale, which was generous, since I was an entry-level journalist making not-so-much money in land-of-the-expensive-rent Hong Kong. He also happened to speak English fluently, which was a luxury when finding counselors in Hong Kong. Typically anything English-related came with a price premium in the city because people who look for these services are expats. And pouring my heart out is not something I can do in my potato-level Cantonese (unless all I talked about was ordering egg waffles and bubble tea) so my options were limited to English-speaking counselors.

I started with the simple stuff. I shared about the work pressure to continuously file new stories and chase clicks. Then I shared more, sussing if he was homophobic by floating little hints about me being gay like “I’m having trouble communicating with my partner.” I was drinking a lot too but I never admitted this to Ron (because what would he say, “Stop drinking”?). I saw him for about two months before he said: “I think you’re in a better place and we can stop our sessions here.” I thought that therapy was a long-term thing but I guess the expert deemed otherwise?

But then some issues would pop up, like feeling anxious every time my girlfriend went out drinking till the early hours of the morning. I would text Ron for a session. We’d talk about it, and I’d stop seeing him again. Then another problem would come. And off we’d go again.

Ron was great for what I needed at the time. We never really dove into my childhood or anything. Something about him (Caucasian? Male?) felt like he wasn’t the right person I could open up to. But he was good enough at dealing with in-the-moment crises. I kinda figured that if I was paying at the lowest end of the sliding scale, maybe Ron was just not giving it his best. I wasn’t either. We were both living that scaling slide life and it felt…fine.

He validated my feelings a lot. I wondered if this was just a part of Ron’s American background. (Don’t American families welcome emotions like sadness and frustration? My parents just called being silent during dinner “rude”.) I’d tell him I’m really angry and he’d just say, “Anger is a perfectly normal emotion. It’s not unusual for people to be angry”.

Which was fine, but Ron, I was throwing drunk tantrums at my partner, who is the most emotionally mature person I know. Maybe we talk about that instead of just saying my anger is okay? My girlfriend knew how to argue without lashing out, how to not bring up the past when discussing a present situation, and how to speak her mind without bottling emotions inside. She made me want to be better, so I wanted to figure out how to grow the fuck up instead of fucking up my relationship. Hearing “anger is normal” took me nowhere.

Tracy

If Ron was meh, my next counselor Tracy was… what’s worse than meh? Not very meh-morable? Her office’s air conditioning was off, which maybe was a sign for worse things to come. She seemed to have a really traditional Hong Kong vibe too, which I had a hunch I would not get along with very well because I constantly live in this ether of being not Asian enough for Asia and not Western enough for the west. I usually click most with the in-betweens, and Tracy didn’t seem like one of them.

At this point, I was becoming a lot more comfortable with my queer identity and didn’t hide it from anybody. I just wanted to find a therapist that I can venture on my personal growth journey with. So I said, point blank, that I hadn’t spoken to my relatives for months, that it was really hurting me and I needed to find a way to make peace with it. But then Tracy said, “Conflicts can always be resolved and therefore let’s find a way to reconnect with your parents? You’re related, after all”. Tracy, NO! That is the exact opposite of what I want to do! I want to get past this hurt of cutting them off and NOT make peace! Geez, where were you the whole hour? You get one bold strike and that’s it, I am out!

If my journey with Tracy felt brief… that’s because it was. I ignored her follow-up email about “practicing mindfulness everyday” because d’uh that’s like wellness’s marketing tagline! And I’m trying! With my daily journaling practice and creating “art” and “morning routines” that are supposed to zen me out. And Tracy single-handedly pulled me out of zen-ness.

So… back to square one with therapy. But around this time, I got a new job with a higher salary. If I wanted to, I could shell out some more money to find a new counseling center. It’ll be worth it for my mental health and personal growth in the long run.

That didn’t stop me from putting it off for months, chalking it up to adjusting to the new gig. I was doing better, anyway. In 2023, I kept up with my art practice, monetized my YouTube, and was even travelling outside of Asia to visit friends I haven’t seen since the pandemic.

During my birthday, my best friend Natasha sent me a handwritten letter saying: “It’s impossible to ignore the elephant in the room. It’s your first birthday without your parents. It was the hardest part of this year.”

But though Natasha meant well, she was wrong – it wasn’t the hardest part of the year. I was feeling great, thriving even. I felt like I was finally liberated. I didn’t have to tiptoe around my identity and could speak out on what matters truly to me, such as financial anxiety, queerness, and my mental health. I spoke on various panels during pride month, something I wouldn’t have dared to do had I known that some relatives were still judging me from a corner.

But of course, I wasn’t processing it. I was in denial that I’d cut ties with my literal family. Oh, did I gloss over it in this essay? Yeah, that’s because I still haven’t dealt with it. I was telling myself this narrative that I was thriving (and it felt like I was). I had a swanky new office, I was making new friends who accepted me, and I no longer spent the holiday season being stressed about calling up family members to update them that no, I still did not have a boyfriend.

I needed to properly process what happened. Otherwise, my past was going to keep haunting me, weaving its way into every part of my life without ever revealing itself. Without getting to the root of things, I’d keep lying to myself that everything was okay. Before I got bluffed by my own lies, I had to find the right therapist.

And that’s how I met Angie.

Angie

Angie and I first jumped on a 15-minute consultation call, where she assessed if we would be the right fit or if my case needed to be shifted to a psychiatrist or another counselor. She said some stuff like “inner child” and explained that I fit into her client demographic. Wanting to take this seriously, I flagged immediately that a lot of LGBTQ+ stuff is going to come up because I didn’t want to waste time with homophobic therapists. She was fine with that.

So when I first met Angie in a dim room lit by a book-shaped light that she said is pretty but runs out of battery way too often… I just knew she was the right therapist for me. Her voice was very calming, and she knew how to ask the right questions. She spoke my language (and also English). I’d catch her mirroring my words back to me, making follow-up quips at the right moment and saying “I’m going to take a note on this but we’ll move on for now” at others. She was very thorough, politely interjected my storytelling when she had an insight to share, and explained some concepts as she advised me through them.

“Is this tempo of meeting every two weeks okay?” I asked Angie at the end of our first session.

“Yes I think this is a good… tempo,” she said, adopting my terminology. “I understand therapy takes a lot of resources, so spreading it out might take the pressure off a little bit.”

Angie is pricey. At US$200 an hour, her rate is triple of my previous therapists’. But she’s worth it.

Angie also tempers her reactions a lot, silently shaking her head as she jotted more notes down. I guess being a therapist means that you can’t overly react to something? But to some stories I have, she let out an audible gasp. (We love a dramatic reaction).

“She was such a snob. Very close minded, like she was entitled to everything,” I said in my third session. “I absolutely hated her.” 

“Do you see, though, how you had to conform to your environment, otherwise you would have… disintegrated?”

That sentence, THAT question. That I was not weird, or broken, or fucked up. That I was just a kid who tried to live in an environment that wasn’t going to accept my queer identity. So I had to hide aspects of my identity and adopt qualities that my Catholic and conservative environment required. Even if I ended up hating those qualities. I felt so validated. That level of understanding made me feel that Angie didn’t gloss over my stories the way the other therapists did.

“Love and acceptance as a child is akin to survival,” Angie explained. “You had to remove some parts of your authentic self to fit in. You didn’t have a choice.”

I had never thought of my childhood environment as toxic. I still have trouble thinking so. I just thought I never really fit in. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.

I had read a lot about people having to “put in the work”, but this was when I realized, I have Work work to do.

In the fourth session, Angie presented me with — I kid you not — a literal syllabus of all the things we’d be working on throughout the course of therapy. It had not one, or five, but eight different bullet points ranging from “breathwork” to “window of tolerance”.

It’s month four of therapy now. She has since introduced me to meditation and how to notice feelings instead of judging them.

Some sessions are light. We spent some just talking about my childhood. She’d prod me to reflect and ask, “Could you talk more about that side of you?”.

Other sessions have sucked. Like the time she tried guiding me through a vivid visualization of an abusive ex. It was too much and too strong and gave me an anxiety bout so bad that I lost 2kg in five days.

“Thanks for letting me know that you reacted that way,” she said when I told her the next session. “We don’t have to do this again anytime soon. I’m glad you are still open to coming back to therapy. It really does get worse before it gets better. This is where a lot of clients walk out the door.”

And truthfully, I didn’t even think about quitting. I’ve come too far to stop now. So every other Friday, 5PM at Angie’s office. I sit down on a beige couch and Angie sits across from me, pen and clipboard ready over a cushion she uses to makeshift a tabletop.

“I hope you can trust that whatever we explore will be contained here in this safe space,” she says. And yes, also on Substack for y’all readers. Which is, in truth, a safe space too.

Thank you to

Alex Dobrenko`

, who believed in my writing before I believed in my writing. This essay couldn’t have happened without you. He’s also such a good editor, y’all. I’d highly recommend!

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Update log:

• 📖 Reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (affiliate) by Gabrielle Zevin (page 151/482). The writing is SO GOOD. Open any page and I get immediately immersed in Sam and Sadie’s world. I’ve been reading this during my lunch breaks, by the pier and under the autumn sun.

• 🎢 Went to Disneyland with my childhood bestie who flew in from Melbourne. If you had told us from 20 years ago that we’d be in another city living our childhood dreams (being in an overseas Disney theme park instead of watching Disney Channel from our Jakarta homes), I’d say you’re on some fairy godmother hallucination.

• 🛩️ Hung out a friend who also flew in from Korea (why are all these people flying in, I wonder…) I didn’t realize how much I missed her until we hugged, and I just held on for a while. She was there for so many of my milestone moments in university. Seeing her felt so special.

• 👹 Reading Dante’s Inferno (Cantos 8/34) after it was mentioned in a therapy session. It’s… a lot of imagery and references to process through.

• 💭 Starting to log my dreams after reading

  Chris Cordry, LMFT
  ’s posts about dreamwork. I don’t have enough to go off on just yet but I’m trying to collect a handful logs first.

• 🛏️ Have been occasionally waking up in the middle of the night because of stress. My therapist told me to lean into it instead of fighting it, so I’m giving that a go. This goes hand in hand with logging dreams, so now I just do that when I am jolted awake.