Unpaid Therapist Quotes

A friend is by definition an unpaid therapist.

for the teens who were the first one that classmate with the wild hair and the dark makeup and the frightened eyes told about the things that were happening at home. the secret keepers, the unpaid crisis responders, the ones who took frantic calls at all hours of the night and went to the high school guidance counselor ostensibly for assessment for therapy, for support for the scars on their arms, but mostly to figure out how to become therapists themselves, because no adult can help a kid the way another kid can. for the ones who grew up to be social workers and nurses and psychologists and any other flavor of professional helper, because they were already doing the helping, so they might as well get paid for it too. because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that’s all we were good for. caregiver, i see you.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psychologists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term “emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Hamlett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculinity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . . While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.

Your smartphone caters to your every whim, which seems great, but then it’s made it so much harder to adjust to the unclickable world. Everything real is also disappointing. No friend is as funny as a video you can pull up on your phone. No girl as hot as the endless catwalk in your pocket. You could meet someone for pizza, but with a swipe it arrives at your door; “contact-free delivery” means you don’t even need to talk to the pizza guy. Sometimes with a classmate you let your guard down and trade messages you shouldn’t. It was only a joke, but it’s never only a joke. Friends preserve everything you say in screenshots. You do the same, so that the deterrence of mutual assured destruction applies, enforced by teachers and administrators and college admissions committees. You’ve rarely spent a whole afternoon with a friend who lent you her full attention. You don’t know most of her secrets, and she doesn’t know yours; she’s already divulged her most intimate worries to a therapist. Rehashing it all again seems so pointless. You don’t really have time for friends, anyway. Your full-time, unpaid internship consumes every extra minute: five, six, eight hours a day—the settings don’t lie—staring at your phone. “My mental health sucks,” you tell the group chat. The others say theirs does, too. You can’t believe your dad had an actual job at your age. You don’t feel ready for anything like that. You’ve only ever known this overmanaged, veal-calf life. Occasionally it occurs to you to wonder: What if taking the risk is the only way to feel ready? What if the solution to adolescent mental health problems is to outgrow adolescence? That may explain why the unending parade of accommodation and intervention, which stretch childhood out like taffy, has only prolonged your torture.