kottke.org posts about therapy
For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive).
I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t totally surprising; by this point, I hadn’t cried for more than three years.
I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.
I started taking an SSRI a few years ago with the goal of giving me enough space to approach life’s challenges without feeling completely overwhelmed (by anxiety, by depression). The medication didn’t “fix” me…it just kept the train from derailing all the time (sometimes over the smallest things) and gave me the freedom to work through things on my own and with my therapist.1
I was lucky to land on a good med/dose combo on my second try — the first pill I tried made me feel jittery and more anxious than I already was. But my current med does come with a couple of side effects. My sex drive is lower than it was (although that could also be age), which is not altogether unpleasant — a quieter mind in charge of things instead of a libido. The other side effect is that I don’t cry anymore, at least not as easily.
Crying is something I took up after my kids were born. Not often, but once every few weeks maybe. I cried when things got hard and for awhile, things were hard a lot of time: pandemic, parenting insecurity, divorce, living somewhere that really didn’t suit me, and always always the website & the discomfort of being an odd sort of “public figure”. Watching any movie with parents and kids (esp. dads and sons) got me — heck, even some Marvel movies got me. In sessions with my therapist, I cried when we’d hit a particularly tender vein of pain. As Gould says, the crying was cathartic and felt necessary — I always felt better and clearer afterwards.
But that’s mostly stopped since I’ve been on my meds. I still get sad, although less so, but I don’t cry. Movies don’t really get me going anymore. When my kids are struggling (in school, with friends), that gets me the closest. I miss that release — I feel a little pent-up sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade crying again for how I felt in the Before Times. I’m ok not having access to crying — at least for now.
Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I’m No Longer Interested in ‘Working on Myself’, aka the exhausting “hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise”.
Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don’t reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.
To be fair, some of this shift was necessary. Therapy helps. Naming patterns helps. Talking about things publicly has helped people survive things they otherwise might not have. Awareness is progress. My awareness, however, has tipped into surveillance.
Being in therapy these last few years has been great, essential even. But I feel what Hussain is talking about here. One of the helpful things I’ve learned is that while you do need to change and grow, you still need to be yourself. I forget who, but someone once said that the job of an editor is to make a writer sound more like themselves. That’s probably true of the therapeutic process as well, including the part we’re responsible for.
I may have shared this before, but here it is again in case it helps someone. A couple of years ago, I was telling my therapist about some crisis I was going through and she told me something that’s had a profound effect on my life ever since: “Jason, what you’re feeling is appropriate for the developmental stage you’re in right now.”
Reader, I was 49 years old. Developmental stages are typically associated with infants, children, and teens — we use them to mark their progress along the path to being adult humans. Adolescent growth is rapid and the transitions are stark; your appearance and capabilities change so much more between ages 3 and 10 than between 30 and 37 that adulthood can feel comparatively static. Even though people keep changing in adulthood, there is some sense in which people are fully baked by the time they reach 18-25 years old.
When my therapist said “what you’re feeling is appropriate for the developmental stage you’re in right now”, it hit me right between the eyes and I knew exactly what she was trying to say. Our growth never ends. We never stop going through developmental stages — we just call them things like “becoming a parent”, “mid-life crisis”, or “perimenopause”. The pain, confusion, and emotional distress we experience is because we’re growing.
Thinking about my life through this lens has flipped a switch for me. Internalizing “this is appropriate” and “I’m leveling up” provided me with a better alternative to “I’m almost 50, I don’t have my life figured out yet, what the hell is wrong with me?” Rewiring my thought process is still a work in progress, but I feel like it’s allowed me to approach challenges more as opportunities than as obstacles, provided me with a map/plan out of dark times, and given me more room to be easier on myself.
(I hope that all makes sense. Personal epiphanies can be difficult to translate for others.)
This piece by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska about how and why psychotherapy works, the effectiveness of the bond between therapists and their patients, and attachment theory is interesting throughout but a bit tough to summarize. Let’s start here, with the idea that therapy provides the opportunity of a do-over in the building your emotional self that mirrors what happens, ideally, in early life between a loving, supportive caregiver and a child.
All of this suggests a tantalising alternative to both the medical professional’s and the layperson’s view of therapy: that what happens between client and therapist goes beyond mere talking, and goes deeper than clinical treatment. The relationship is both greater and more primal, and it compares with the developmental strides that play out between mother and baby, and that help to turn a diapered mess into a normal, healthy person. I am referring to attachment.
To push the analogy further, what if, attachment theory asks, therapy gives you the chance to reach back and repair your earliest emotional bonds, correcting, as you do, the noxious mechanics of your mental afflictions?
As someone who has been in therapy but doesn’t actually know a whole lot about how it works, I found the whole piece fascinating.
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