Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

by Christie Tate

“If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.”

“It might be, but keeping secrets for other people is more toxic than other people knowing your business. Holding on to secrets is a way to hold shame that doesn’t belong to you.”

This was my first praise for the parts of me that were ugly, irrational, petty, reckless, spiteful, and spewing. I’d never heard of such a thing. If I were my therapist, I’d tell me to cut that shit out, but Dr. Rosen celebrated like it was Armistice Day with dance-in-the-streets, cancel-work jubilation. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re just getting started.”

I wanted therapy to be linear. I wanted to point to measurable improvements with every year I put in. By this point, after five years and two months, I should be immune from the fury that made me pull hair out of my head with my own fists.

I was okay, or okay enough, for the first time in my entire life. Because I said so.