A High Distinction in Therapy

You know you’ve been a high achiever too long when you catch yourself trying to get a High Distinction in therapy. I realised recently that I wasn’t just doing therapy. I was trying to win it. I wanted to be the client with the insights, the one who had already connected all the dots before arriving, the one who could identify her own attachment patterns and explain her nervous system with reference to the literature. I was, essentially, doing the readings before the tutorial. Performing insight looks exactly like having it, which is why it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. From the outside, and even from most of the inside, I appeared to be an exceptionally engaged client. What I was actually doing was managing the session the way you manage any assessment: anticipate the questions, have the answers drafted, control the impression.

Here is what that looked like in practice. I would arrive at her office with nothing to declare. I had it all under control, I thought. I had done the work between sessions, filed the feelings, cross-referenced the patterns. Then she would ask one question, one, and everything would unravel, and I would sit there crying and feel like I had failed. Crying in therapy. Failing. That is the level of rubric I was operating on, in the one activity on earth where crying is arguably the point, or at least the road to the point, the way you have to walk on the stone in your shoe before you finally stop and tip it out. I didn’t stop to listen to what she said next, either. I was too busy working out how to improve on it. How to impress her. I remember one session realising, mid-sentence, that I probably shouldn’t cross my arms because she might read something into it. Think about that for a second. I was monitoring my own body language in front of the one person I was paying to see me at my worst. I told her stories about other people, held them up like exhibits, kept her at arm’s length from the actual thing. We never quite got to the stone.

And once I saw it in therapy, I started seeing it everywhere.

Relationships, where I wanted to be good at intimacy rather than in it.

The gym, where rest days felt vaguely like academic misconduct. Even rest itself, which I somehow converted into a performance category, complete with a quiet internal audit of whether I was resting correctly, efficiently, restoratively enough. There is a question that runs underneath all of it, so constant I stopped hearing it as a question at all: am I doing this right? As if being human came with a marking rubric. As if somewhere a moderator was comparing my grief against the cohort and scaling my joy.

But there is one session I keep coming back to, because it is the whole thing in miniature.

I was talking about a man. Not the one I'm with now. A coward with good manners, the kind who says one thing and does another and lets you carry the confusion as though it were your personality. I sat in her office genuinely bewildered and asked the most reasonable question I had: if you don’t want this, why are you hanging around? If you don’t like me, fuck off. Why are you wasting my time? That was all I was ever asking anyone. Yes or no. Same page or not. I wasn’t proposing marriage. I was saying, I like you. You seem to like me. Let's find out what this is. That’s it. That’s the entire terrifying proposal.

And she said that my openness can create pressure for people.

Something in me flared, instantly and completely. Pressure for who? For people who are on dating apps not looking for anything? For people who answer “I like you” with six weeks of static? That’s their fucking problem. It was, I can see now, one of the most honest reactions I ever had in that room. Unrehearsed. The exact raw material the whole expensive enterprise was for.

What came out of my mouth was: “Oh. That’s fair.”

That’s fair. I got angry at my therapist, a real, live, unperformed feeling, in the one room built contractually for exactly that, and I graded her comment favourably and moved on. Best behaviour. Excellent client. Strong emotional insight. Distinction. In the car afterwards I sat there thinking, why is everything always my fault? Not as an idea. As a feeling, and a much older one than the session deserved. The agreeable client had stayed upstairs in the office saying thank you, and someone considerably younger drove home.

I still don’t know exactly what she meant, because I never asked. I never told her it annoyed me. I thanked her, walked out carrying “maybe I’m too much,” and left the actual problem sitting where we’d found it: with a man wasting my time.

She wasn’t the first, is the thing. Years earlier, a different therapist looked at me across the room and said, “You’re really self-aware. I don’t think you need to be here.” I said, this is why I need to be here. Because I am so self-aware, and I still need help. But I couldn’t get the help. I had performed insight so well that a professional handed me the gold star, and the gold star was the door. That is the High Distinction, right there, awarded in full. Self-awareness makes an excellent tool and a terrible trophy, and mine had been polished to the point where the person trained to see through masks looked straight at mine and marked me Complete.

And then there was the psychologist I saw when my child was transitioning. I went in trying to get support. I was asking for help to be a good mother through something I didn’t yet have a map for, and she told me it was probably just a phase. I looked at her and said, “You think it’s just a phase? Okay. See ya.” And I never went back.

I want you to notice what I only noticed recently, saying all of this out loud. When the harm was aimed at my daughter, there was no “that’s fair.” No best behaviour. No grading anyone’s comment. No wondering on the drive home whether I’d been too much. The mask came off in one motion and I stood up and left. Same woman. Same mouth. It’s only when the harm is aimed at me that the agreeable client shows up, uncrosses her arms so nothing can be read into them, and thanks the examiner for the feedback. Apparently I have always known exactly how to walk out of a room. I just haven’t considered myself a good enough reason.

I stopped going to therapy about six months ago. The official reason is money, and it’s a real reason. I’m a student. I cannot afford three hundred dollars an hour to tell someone well-constructed stories about other people. But underneath the budget was a quieter accounting: I wasn’t getting that much out of it. Which might be true. Or it might be the most expensive “that’s fair” I have produced yet, leaving without ever lodging the complaint, then filing the whole unexamined thing under cost of living. I genuinely cannot tell you which it is. Both, probably. I’m allowed to leave that unresolved. There’s no marker waiting.