What Therapy Is, and Isn't

What Therapy Is, and Isn't

In the wake of the Oakland Ghostship Warehouse fire, many artists, community members, friends and families are in mourning. Even in my grief, I am inspired by the DIY creativity of the artists of Ghostship and many of the other warehouses across the globe who live under the radar, coming alive in art and community. I think, too, about the subversive and underground nature of therapy, and what a radical act it can be to know yourself on a deep level.

Therapy isn't about making people play by the rules. It’s about helping you learn about yourself, in all your weirdness, your queerness, your creativity, in all that you are just as you are. Your dreams, your shame, your fears, your anxieties, your nightmares, your traps, your stuckness. Therapy is here to help you make sense of past experiences, not to bury them. Therapy is here to help you make sense of confusing and difficult feelings so that you are not at the whim of their chaos and destruction. Therapy is a lot like art in this way.

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Growing Stones and Becoming Courageous Like Georgia O'Keeffe

Growing Stones and Becoming Courageous Like Georgia O'Keeffe

Courage and fear are awkward teenagers at a school dance. When fear steps on courage's toes, courage tends to banish fear to the sidelines with the wallflower, declaring that just messes everything up and should just be ignored and pushed aside.

That might work for a while, until fear takes on a Carrie-type rage, setting fire to prom night.

Fear is a powerful emotion, sometimes more powerful than courage. Embracing your fears can help you step into the most frightening aspects of your life, especially as you get to know yourself on a deeper level. Here's a piece I wrote recently for Psyched in San Francisco, riffing off the Georgia O'Keeffe quotation: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

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