How My New Therapist Has Made Me Look at Myself in a Whole New Way

Unacknowledged sexual assault changed the course of my life in ways I didn’t understand until now

The first time I visited a therapist, I was 16 years old. My parents had insisted on the session because I was having a very difficult time getting out of bed each day. I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to do anything but stay home and write my novels.

“I think you might be depressed,” my mother said. “Or maybe you have anxiety disorder. I don’t know, but something is wrong.”

I didn’t know anything about therapy except what I saw on TV or in the movies — people on sofas talking in serious tones.

That’s pretty much what happened. I took a personality test and then we did a Rorschach Test, and then…we talked.

“So why are you here?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, dispassionately. “I guess I’m depressed. I don’t want to go to school. I feel low all the time. I just don’t want to do anything.”

She asked why I felt this way.

Again, I said I didn’t really know. I told her I missed my cousin, who had stopped writing to me after we moved away from L.A. I told her I was having jealousy issues with my sister, who was so much more perfect and pretty and skinny than I was. I told her I had a hard time feeling close to friends.

I didn’t mention the anxiety. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t just depressed, but terrified to get out of bed each day. Terrified to even think about what the day ahead might hold. Terrified of boarding the school bus. Terrified of walking down the halls at school. Terrified of everything.

I was too embarrassed to tell her that. Normal people didn’t feel that way.

In the end, she diagnosed me with depression and though we continued with a few sessions, she recommended antidepressants as a long-term solution — something I wasn’t ready to try.

So I did my best to pretend that I felt better, in order to prevent my parents from insisting on the medication, and somehow made everyone believe that my smiles were real.

Over the years, I saw about a dozen more therapists. I started each new experience by telling them I had depression, confirmed by my first doctor.

Most of these therapists zeroed in on some information I hadn’t shared — hadn’t thought to share — earlier: that my family was extremely dysfunctional in ways that were harming my mental health.

“No, no,” I’d say with the early counselors. “I’m depressed. My family life is fine. Normal. I need to fix myself.”

After a while, I started realizing that my therapists had been right. My family’s dysfunction was targeting me in ways that were crippling my growth and independence at a time in life when that was most harmful to me — the time in my life in which I was becoming an adult.

Suddenly, therapy sessions weren’t so much about my depression but about my issues with my mother. I knew I needed to talk about it. I knew it was critical to work out those problems. But it also felt impossible.

More importantly, confronting my issues with my mother in therapy was doing nothing to alleviate my depression or the anxiety with which I was eventually diagnosed.

I picked up tricks and tips here and there, but ultimately, it was the depression that I experienced in my thirties that made it clear to me I had to find a way to live with my issues. I had to learn to avoid the behaviors and circumstances that would trigger my depression and anxiety, I had to learn to talk myself out of certain thought patterns when they were happening, and I had to learn to allow myself to have the bad days, to accept that sometimes, my feelings were going to need my full attention and that that was okay.

I have depression and anxiety and I had to teach myself that that’s my normal. That I can manage my life, even with those issues. That I can navigate this tricky territory.

It just took just time and acceptance to finally understand who I am.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in therapy — about ten years now. I attempted to work with a new therapist four years ago, when my dad’s health crisis became more than I could emotionally manage. I didn’t stick around long, however, because despite my insistence that I needed help dealing with my feelings about my dad immediately, she insisted that we have 4–6 sessions in which we discussed only my childhood before we even began tackling my stress around my father.

I “broke up” with her after the third session when I realized she was not going to listen to me when I told her what I needed.

Other than that, I’ve dealt with my emotional issues on my own.

However, at the end of a pandemic in which I’ve felt trapped and terrified and isolated on a regular basis, only to find myself trapped and terrified within my own body thanks to a severe shoulder condition that has caused a lot of pain and immobility in my dominant arm, I knew I needed extra help. I have a lot of good things on my horizon right now and I don’t want to lose any of them because I’m flailing around with the emotional burdens of the past year and the fallout from this injury.

In other words, I need to get my shit together.

I interviewed a few people to try to avoid what had happened with my last therapist and found one I liked. Just before my assessment appointment, I wrote down what I knew she would want to know — significant events of trauma in my history.

There was one thing that overcame the rest — one thing that even overshadowed the emotional abuse that had happened in my family. I circled and starred the middle of the page where I had written down what happened to me at the age of 12 — six months of sexual harassment and assault that authority figures repeatedly told me wasn’t real, was my fault, or that simply demonstrated normal male behavior.

As I circled that, I realized I had never ever talked to a therapist about that. I had never brought it up except to say that I had been “bullied” in middle school.

You see, I never knew what had happened was harassment and assault until the #MeToo movement. I believed what I had been told: that nothing inappropriate had happened and that if it had, it was because I had “asked for it.”

It would never have occurred to me to tell a therapist about that time in my life or the severity of what had happened. Until 2017, there was, I believed, nothing to tell.

“When did your depression first start?” New Therapist asked.

“When I was 12,” I said.

“When did your anxiety first start?”

“When I was 12.”

“When did your eating disorders start?”

“When I was 12.”

She gave me a long look through the screens of our computers. “Do you understand the significance of what we’re talking about here?” she asked. “I’m not convinced you actually have depression or actual anxiety disorder. Maybe you have anxiety issues, but that’s not the same thing. I think you actually have unacknowledged and unresolved trauma that has manifested as depression and anxiety and that you were misdiagnosed because you didn’t tell your previous therapists about that time in your life — because you didn’t understand what had happened to you.”

I confessed that I had thought about that since #MeToo enlightened me to the impact of that time in my life. What I once saw as symptoms that “came out of nowhere” suddenly were very clearly the response that I had to a traumatic situation — it definitely didn’t come out of nowhere.

She asked me another series of questions which included explorations of how I felt in public, my level of awareness of other people, how I behave with a new lover. She noted that my constant vigilance, fear of being attacked, and uncontrollable trembling before having sex with a new partner were very likely stress responses my body had developed after the events I experienced as a pre-teen.

Of course now some of this seems so obvious to me. Surely the average person isn’t constantly gauging how many men are in the vicinity, determining where they are, or what level of threat they might present. Surely the average woman isn’t so terrified to have sex with a new person — one she cares for and trusts — that she can’t stop shaking.

But for most of my life, this has been my norm. This is who I was. The girl who was afraid of everything and everyone. The girl who had a weirdly hard time getting excited about her life — or even getting out of bed. The girl who saw threats everywhere.

The girl with depression and anxiety.

Could it be possible that I was entirely wrong about myself?

It pains me to think of how many women have endured similar — or, god forbid, worse — circumstances and who weren’t allowed to define what had happened to them as wrong. As traumatic. As having a lasting, negative impact on their mental health. As changing the course of their lives.

How many of them have misdiagnosed mental health issues? How many of them have suffered needlessly for years or even decades?

Ever since I have started exploring what happened to Young Yael, I have been heartbroken by what she had to go through. I have often wished I could go back in time and walk beside her, guarding her from what happened, protecting her, somehow.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to protect other versions of Yael, to teach her that there was more to her story than what she believed? That maybe she wasn’t who she thought she was, but that she had bought into the story that she had been told?

I’m still processing all of this. I’m not sure what it all means. And it will be a little while before we are able to determine just what is going on inside my feisty little brain — what demons are hiding there that were never exorcised, what false beliefs have instructed the narrative of my life, what truth actually exists there.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if I was misdiagnosed — because there is nothing wrong with having depression or anxiety.

But what does matter to me is that I find a way to know myself in all my truth. And that, I’m still uncovering.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

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