Don’t Look Back In Anger
I’ve been a huge advocate for going to therapy for years. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in some kind of therapy since elementary school. When I was 10, my parents split up and immediately I was placed in counseling at my elementary school with a nice woman named Miss Katie. I remember being pulled out of class to go into her room to talk, and she had this chart that had a scale of 1-10 on how I was feeling that day, 1 being the saddest and 10 being the happiest. At the beginning, I remember feeling in the 1-5 range of the scale, because I felt like my family was being broken up and how I felt didn’t matter. That was what I mostly worked on with Miss Katie. She listened to me and made me feel validated in my feelings and made me feel like they did matter. That first encounter with talk therapy was really instrumental in my upbringing. Because I was able to be validated by a professional adult at a young age, I think it taught me to stand up for myself and my feelings early on.
Later on when my mom married my stepdad and I gained a stepsister, I was not having it. I was also in middle school and got moved away from my elementary school friends that I had known since 1st grade, so there were plenty of new changes being made and again leaving me feeling like how I felt about any of it didn’t matter. My mom then put me in therapy with someone her insurance could cover, and talking to him felt different. It wasn’t comforting or validating, and in fact he mostly talked about his own family and his daughters. I don’t recall him ever asking me my feelings about anything related to what was going on around me at the time. We also tried family sessions, but those seemed to go nowhere. In hindsight it’s obvious that none of us knew how important it was to find a therapist that you really connect with, so that old white man therapist ended being little to no help, to me at least.
When I got to college, I couldn’t afford therapy, so I tried going to a few student counselors who were training to become certified therapists. They were usually few to one off sessions, and it was really hard to find someone consistent. I did end up finding a nice white man therapist in the Castro, but then I soon wasn’t able to afford it anymore and because I didn’t know how to communicate properly, I ended up ghosting him. After that, I was so focused on finishing school and barely surviving on my part-time retail job, I sort of gave up on the idea of keeping up therapy until I could afford it.
In 2016 at the precipice of what would become our most fucked up administration ever, I realized I needed to see someone about all the anxiety I was having. I was having really catastrophic thoughts about ISIS bombings and how horrible the world would be if Tr*mp became president, how many wars would start, how white supremacists would snatch me off the street and do horrible things to me for being a woman and a woman of color. Really horrible shit that literally kept me up at night. A quick Google search of “sliding scale therapist” led me to the Church Street Integral Counseling Center in San Francisco. I knew this time that I needed to be specific about who I opened up my inner most thoughts to, so when I called them I asked for a Latina or woman of color therapist. I ended up getting matched with my current therapist who is a woman of color and also a first generation citizen with immigrant parents. At the time, she was a student completing her MFT hours but I felt like she instantly knew how to help me. She had a way of validating my feelings and thought processes and provided me the space to slow down when my mind goes a million miles a minute. The best thing about her is that she still does.
When my therapist left the Integral Counseling Center, I followed her as her client. And I followed her 2 more times after that. She’s helped me through past childhood traumas and every change in my life since then. Traumas of past relationships, family issues, current relationship issues, how to ask for what I need without feeling guilty, setting boundaries, and everything in between. I’ve been lucky enough to have found a therapist who has been flexible and understanding about all my life situations and making it work around my schedule, whether I had part time, freelance, or full time work. We still meet about every 2-3 weeks via video call, and she has a way of making it feel as if we’re in her office.
I think one of the most important aspects of my relationship with my therapist and finding one was to be specific about my needs. I was very intentional about the type of person I wanted to speak to, and wanted to make sure that they could relate to me on a personal level, and not just therapist/client level. Finding the right therapist is straight up like dating. I’ve heard so many people say that they’ve “tried therapy once” and it didn’t work out so they never tried it again. Personally, I’m like ??? If you go on a bad date, you’re not going to swear off dating, so the same should be applied to therapy. You just have to keep trying and be patient and know what you want and what you don’t want, and then hopefully you’ll meet the right one.
I know that not everybody has the luxury of having a therapist at all, and I am very blessed to have one who is so flexible with me. To reiterate, the way I found her was by simply googling “sliding scale therapist” in my area. With everything going on nowadays, I’ve heard of more and more therapists making themselves available for free or sliding scale therapy, especially for those of us in marginalized communities. In case you were interested, here are some links that I got from @drhanren’s Tik Tok post where you may be able to find your therapy match.
Violet (Queer-Competent Mental Health)
National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network
These are just a few resources for finding the right therapist for you. There’s also online therapy apps like Talkspace and Better Help that have really affordable options. If therapy is something that makes you nervous, I hope reading this has encouraged you to start. It’s also ok if you need more time to think about it. Either way, I hope you continue on your self-care and mental heath journey in whatever way feels right for you.
