Thoughts on Therapy or Therapeutic Thoughts

I had my first counseling session ever yesterday. It didn't make me feel like as much of a crazy as I thought it might. In fact I came out seeing myself as a much more stable person than I thought I was. As far as the professionals and I know at this point, I'm not clinically depressed, meaning I don't need to be on medication for anything. I sat with Dr. Eva Abel yesterday and told her a lot of the stuff that you can likely find in the deep dark archives of this blog. We didn't get but so far considering these sessions are only an hour long and I'm used to conversations of this nature lasting until 4:00 a.m. with Sadie (because you can do stuff like that when you're in college). The doctor's take on the situation so far is that I am one of her "intelligent" patients, which I think means my depression phases are more a result of my thoughts and less on some sort of traumatic situation or period in the past. This I knew already. So she outlined a potential goal I could have if I continued therapy, which would be to accept that some questions will simply never be answered. I told her that is much easier said than done, and she agreed of course. I guess that's why it's a large, overarching goal. She also suggested I work on separating my deep thoughts from my emotions so that they will have less play on my behavior. Also easier said than done. This must be how therapists make money.

A weird part of everything is that this woman isn't a Christian therapist, so I'm not sure she can fully understand what it is I'm actually striving for intellectually--or rather, how I'm trying to figure out how faith can cooperate with intellect. She seems to think I should find a Christian leader person to talk to about this. That person should probably be my dad. I talk to him about it from time to time, but I may up the frequency. I think we'd both appreciate it.

Once the session was over, we scheduled to meet once more before I go back to school, because I don't think she's a quack and I enjoyed talking to her a lot. She's very expressive, which reminded me of Becca, and she has a certain spunk that reminded me of Noelle. And as silly as psychology seems to me, the truth of the matter is that I want desperately to talk about these things and if I can talk about them to someone who has made it her job to help me through it, well that just seems like a perfect situation.

Mumford & Sons have been playing in my car for over two months now, so as I was cranking up the heat in my freezing cold car and getting ready to back out of the parking space, I listened to what Marcus was singing:

"But you are not alone in this
And you are not alone in this
As brothers we will stand and we'll hold your hand
Hold your hand"

So I thought about how God teaches me things in life--in talking to a psychologist who doesn't even know that God has a plan for me. I thought about finding truth in some of the most unexpected places and how important that has been in helping me understand God and His sufficiency even when I was running away from Him. I started to feel tented by God's sovereignty, and for once I wanted nothing but to curl up and rest within the comfort of His power over my mind, soul, and body.