Yeah, I'm full of crap. I totally made that definition up. Therapy hangovers are definitely a thing though, and that's how they are for me.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I consider therapy hangover to be one of the primary indicators of therapy progress. Seriously, therapy hangovers are hard, but I'm always a little disappointed when therapy comes to a close for the day and I don't develop a bit of a hangover. It's mostly because I'm weird, I guess.
But it's also because therapy isn't meant to be comfortable. It's not supposed to just be a friendly everyday conversation with the therapist. It's definitely not happy, fun time. It's supposed to challenge you. After all, if not being challenged was going to make things better, I think most of us would have already run with that and fixed things ourselves. I don't think many people really just look forward to the idea of throwing money at someone whose job is, in large part, to make them feel uncomfortable and challenge them and their ways of thinking. But here I am throwing money at someone to do just that.
If therapy doesn't leave you drained and exhausted and pretty emotionally spent, are you even therapy'ing? I mean, for me personally I think the answer is no. Like I said before, I'm always pretty disappointed when I leave therapy feeling pretty much exactly the same way I did when I went in. It feels like a waste of time and effort and money. That doesn't mean it was a waste,
Good therapy has always been hard for me because during a session, my brain is just going non-stop and trying to take in everything from session. Afterwards, though, is a different story. After session, everything kind of starts marinating in my brain. For me, that's when I start to have all of the feelings. ALL the feelings. Every damn one. And that's when all of the processing happens. My brain starts going fifty different directions and it's hard to keep up. I start thinking of all of the things I want to address in my next therapy session, knowing full well that unless my therapist pencils me in for four consecutive sessions, there's no way we could possibly cover everything.
I both dread and look forward to the hangover. I mean, I'm not just a glutton for punishment (I mean, maybe just a little bit, I guess, as you probably know if you've read other posts on this blog, which by the way, makes YOU a bit of a glutton for punishment too), but it means I'm being challenged, which I guess is objectively a good thing.
Stupid therapy hangovers. Stupid, stupid, productive therapy hangovers.
Progress is hard. Lack of progress is harder.
