Nina Jacinto is a writer based out of Long Beach. A South Asian American originating from the Bay Area, Nina’s work focuses on personal essays pertaining to therapy and career development.
She is currently working on her first mystery novel.
Lessons From Therapy
I’ve been in therapy on and off for over ten years. In that time there have been many lessons. Here are three.
Lesson #15: It takes a while to lie down on the couch
It took me just over five years to lie down on the couch. My therapist has had a few physical offices in the time I’ve seen her and each one of them has had a couch. And they are great, comfortable couches – but I’ll be damned if I was ever going to be “that patient” that lie down on the couch, staring into the ceiling, crying about my father. What is this, psychiatry?
It didn’t happen all of a sudden either. I didn’t go from sitting upright on the couch to one day just lying across it. I started to tilt over time. For about six months I went from sitting up straight to leaning back to slowly angling my body, tipping over a bit each time, leaning on cushions that would hold me up at a 45 degree angle.
I wanted to lie down years before I actually did it. My best friend died in 2009. She died in an accidental chemical lab fire. Do you know how much I wanted to lie down? In fact, I was lying down pretty much all the time, except for when I was in therapy. I wouldn’t call the years between 2009 and 2012 living. I’d call them existing. I was existing horizontally. Except in therapy. 45 degree angle sitting for me, thanks very much. My neck? Oh yeah my neck and back are fine, I sit like this all the time. Really, it’s ok. Another cushion? Sure, why not.
Why was it so hard to lie down?
It turns out, a couple of reasons. I had a lot of internalized judgment about what therapy means. The movies and the TV shows about people who can’t get their lives together and just talk and talk while lying on the couch. I didn’t want that to be me! And it WAS me. And it took me time to LOVE that it was me. And all of that somehow got wrapped up in how I was positioned on the couch. Lying down meant defeat. Lying down meant admitting that I needed therapy in my life.
It was also about trust. Baring yourself emotionally to someone is so intimate and so vulnerable. I had enough trouble with that. And then on top of that, to lie down – it was too much! I felt so exposed as it was. I didn’t want to let myself be comfortable. My heart wanted to burrow into the couch and let my tears get absorbed by a set of very lovely red pillows. But my brain and my body refused.
And then one day I said, “I feel like lying down” out loud and my therapist said, “alright” and I did. I didn’t look up at the ceiling. I turned on my side, the way I do when I watch TV, and I looked just above my therapist’s head and I talked and I cried. I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. But I can tell you that I finally admitted that I’d built a strong and powerful relationship with my therapist and I was ready to just….be. Just be in the space – comfortable, vulnerable, sprawling. I was taking up the space I needed to take.
I sprawl and sit and lie down now. Sometimes I slip off my shoes. Whatever feels right. But it took a while to lie down on the couch.
Lesson #26: You can’t love for two.
After a year of back and forth – of sleeping together, of trying to label, of trying not to label, I had decided (for the tenth time) that enough was enough. I knew we couldn’t be friends despite how well we got along. It was too hard on my heart. I told him so. I cried. He remained his stoic self. I agreed to meet him for drinks at a bar. It was this terrible bar close to my apartment – colonial themed which was appropriate.. We drank too much, like we always did. He said – I can’t not be friends with you, it’s too hard. I want more. I’m willing to try the relationship thing with you. I want to try it.
I believed him. I wanted to believe him so much that I just did it, even though every part of my brain thought – this is not how this works. This is not how he works.
He took it back. Not with his words of course. With distance. He pulled away the next day, he pretended like nothing was said. I – humiliated and still hoping that if I cared enough for the both of us it would transfer over to his heart – gently asked about it. You’re taking it back right? Casually, like it was no big deal. Yea, he said. I cared so much, I wanted SO MUCH for something that was obviously impossible and toxic to work out. It didn’t.
I was back at the bar. I picked the same bar again because I somehow knew that this was going to be one of those conversations where you get told that you’re too special and too unique and blah blah blah. I didn’t want to burn another bar. So I picked this one.
We had had a discreet and intense affair – though none of us was cheating, it felt illicit for other reasons. We both knew he was headed across the country for an indeterminate amount of time. He was different though – he was so nice. He was so warm. He made me feel safe. He said things that made me melt into a puddle of vulnerable goo.
We always knew I was leaving, he said. You’re so great, he said. Who knows what can happen down the line, he added.
I latched on to the hypothetical. I played out fantasy after fantasy of falling in love, of moving East – and soon began to believe it had happened. Not for just me, for both of us. We were incompatible and he had baggage that rivaled my own. Loving for the both of us would work out, wouldn’t it? It didn’t.
I was in the car outside my favorite middle eastern grocery store. He turned the car off, and said “I have to tell you something.” I’m anxious, but I don’t know why. “I’m going to take a sabbatical and will be doing some volunteer work for a while in New York.” I looked at my hands. I didn’t feel like grocery shopping. I felt like throwing up. I remember weeks later when it was time for him to go – he sat down on my bed and held my hand and told me he loved me and he cried. I had only see him cry once before. He said he was coming back but I didn’t believe him. He wrote letters sometimes. When he came back, he was a completely different person – physically and emotionally unrecognizable.
I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t understand that he was taking this step for himself – choosing his own journey over mine. I pretended like it didn’t happen. I let my grandparents and my mom fill the space. Once a family friend said I’d grow up to have issues with my father. I did.
You can’t love for two. You can’t do it when you’re a child and it’s your father, and you can’t when you’re an adult and it’s people you love who don’t love you the way you deserve or need. In moments it may feel like they are loving you the way you need, but it’s just you, filling the space with your own love, your own need, your own obsession. Trying to heal old wounds. Hoping that your ability to love harder and stronger, your ability to sacrifice yourself and your own needs, will be contagious.
You can’t love for two. I typed it again because I have to tell myself this nearly every day. You can’t do the work for other people. You just have to be who you are as best as you can, ask for what you need, and hope you’ll find the love you deserve.
Just because they didn’t choose you, doesn’t mean you did something wrong, my therapist says. I cry and cry and cry. You can’t love for two.
Lesson #34: My inner child is real. She needs a hug and a cupcake.
I didn’t like the concept of an inner child. That was some sort of pop-psychology myth, I’d concluded. If not for others, then at least for myself. Even after I had started to delve into early experiences and memories as a child, I was too cool for an inner child.
And then there was a turning point. Over a series of conversations about my own rigidity, self-judgment and criticism, she broaches the subject again. “A part of you is extremely critical and harsh about yourself and where you ‘should be’ in your life. And you describe another part of you, who wants to be more forgiving, more compassionate. Who are those parts protecting?”
“I don’t know….this….vulnerable, squishy part of me. Like a 2 year old Nina. Little Girl Nina.”
“Who is Little Girl Nina?”
“She’s a girl, I don’t know. She’s this younger part of me that needs protection and care and wants to play and be loved and seen and I’m simultaneously protecting her and also ignoring her.”
We sat in silence.
“Fuck.” I say. “She’s my inner child isn’t she.”
My therapist smiles.
Little Girl Nina (LGN) makes her appearances regularly now. One time I tried talking to her in a chair across the couch from me. Add that to the list of therapy-things I thought I’d never do. I cried the whole time. I apologized for stifling her voice and not wanting to listen to her in an attempt to Be An Adult, whatever that means.
But she’s real. My inner child is real. She’s a personified, soft, squishy bunch of memories and vulnerabilities. She squeaks out her feelings and wants to be heard and seen and hugged. She also wants a cupcake. But she doesn’t want to be silenced with 5 cupcakes.
I talk to her. Sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed and on the verge of tears, I ask myself, “What do you need right now Little Girl?” like some distorted fairy tail villain. I try to hear her answer. Healing. Space. Rest.
“We are the parent and we are the child,” my therapist says. The parent cares for the child, keeps her safe, gives her space to play and grow. The child reminds the parent to follow the path of authenticity, to be emotional and raw, to take life less seriously. The child reminds the parents of old wounds that the parent must then process for the both of them.
“We want to end our suffering by sending the child to a deep place inside, and staying as far away as possible. But running away doesn’t end our suffering; it only prolongs it.” Thich Nhat Hanh says. My therapist reads the quote to me. I write it down in my phone to look at over and over again.
Sometimes I have a dream that I’m holding a small girl’s hand on the beach. She pulls away from me and gets close to the water. She gets pulled into the waves and I feel so terrible but I think about waiting, to see if she’ll come back to shore on her own. She doesn’t. And so I dive in. The water isn’t cold – it feels like soft jelly. We grab each other’s hands and we hug each other tightly and the water pushes us onto the sand. I burrow my face into the top of her head and think, “our hair is the same.” And then I wake up. But she’s still with me, burrowing deep in my heart.
