How I Knew It Was Time To Go To Counseling
One of every six Americans entered counseling for the first time in 2020. We’ve said it before, but 2020 was a doozy of a year. When my family’s routines were disrupted and all we knew was that the future was unknown, I felt untethered. It felt like the ground below me was shifting sand. I didn’t know how to adapt on a moment’s notice to having everything changed for two weeks. Wait, no, two months. Wait... actually, for the foreseeable future.
I saw post after post after post on social media encouraging me to have grace for myself in the unknown. To find ways to cope. And then explicitly saying that it was okay to cope by abandoning my normal boundaries or habits around everything - TV, phone screen time, food, alcohol, showering - even putting on real pants!
As discombobulated as I felt, I didn’t want to send myself into a total spiral by essentially binging on everything. Since I always work from home, nothing changed there. In fact, my workload ramped up a bit, plus now I had to maintain some kind of workflow while my kids were home and we were all trying to navigate their distance learning. We tried to lead our small church through pivoting to online, when that wasn’t something we’d done before. How could we best care for an entire congregation virtually? I’m still not completely sure. I heard people talking about having more free time than usual, but I felt the total opposite. It wasn’t a complete train wreck, but it was close.
Close enough to see that it was time to get help. I love hearing Dr. Kim’s counseling wisdom on each week’s podcast, and sometimes that feels like enough. But eventually, I realized it wasn’t. I found myself frustrated with the same situations over and over again. I wanted a breakthrough to the marriage tension that kept rearing its head as we were together way more than normal and under more stress than normal.
There are lots of reasons people don’t go. Finances, embarrassment, your problems aren’t bad enough, your problems are TOO bad, it’s awkward, don’t know where to start, don’t know who to call, too busy, seems easier to stick it out than “go there,” … But the benefits are far greater. It’s not magic, but the sooner you go, the sooner you start finding relief from things that are causing you more stress and strain than you need to be under. When you need your car repaired, you figure out a way to pay for it. If you can’t, you can carpool, walk or take the bus. But if you don't prioritize your mental and emotional health, what’s the alternative?