RE: Epilogue

With a chair if it happened to support them.

🤣

Going to do a ☝️ here because I disagree. Therapy DOES work. The therapist has to be a good fit, present, and dedicated to helping the client. What screws people up is trauma and instability, particularly in the years of development. The addiction is an attempt to feel safe. The addict has to want to get better in order for therapy to be successful. And growth and recovery are hard work. Can take years. I believe that even an attempt at therapy and growth, even if the addict finds they aren't ready now or ever, is worth acknowledging. It just might not bring about the results we, personally, want to see.

Everyone has the freedom to stay fucked up in the head and heart even if it's a miserable life. It's really not a freedom we can take away unless we take away the life itself.

Also, not sure how therapists operate where you are, but here, well, I definitely could have benefited from having more people rooting for me when I was a kid. Even just some adult telling me I deserve to feel good and confident and proud of who I am. There was a lot of shit I could never talk about with my parents that I see now needed talking about. Any legs up I did have had a huge impact. Made me believe I was worth all those hours of therapy and work I would put in in the years to come.

My mom used to say to me "therapists just put ideas in your head." I believed it for a long time, until I finally realized she said that because her dad said that to her. Her dad beat and molested all the girls in her family. And her mom did nothing about it. If she'd gone to a therapist, her dad would have gotten what he deserved long before the cancer took him.