I have obsessively watched Grey's anatomy, yes seasons 1 & 2, over the last month. Maybe it is McDreamy, all the sleeping around, or good quality dissociation. I say that to preface my following thoughts...
Counseling, that is being IN counseling, going to therapy, seeing your shrink, whatever phrase you prefer to use is like surgery. Think about it. When you go into surgery a team of tech's, nurses, various doctors, and surgeons each use their specialized skills to cut you open, move things around, perhaps take something out, sew something up, and then put you back together. Depending on the surgery the recovery may be long or short. If you're lucky friends and family stop by your room to talk and bring flowers, nurses check in and take vital signs, doctors do their rounds, and you get drugs to ease the pain. You may go to PT, OT, or some other type of rehab therapy to return to your pre-op condition.
Then there is being in counseling. It is like having surgery on your psyche, your being, but without the morphine drip. All your insides are exposed, you are vulnerable. There is internal patching up, rearranging, and removing. Like recovery from surgery, recovering from the psychological incision takes a lot of time and energy. Often it happens without friends and family bringing flowers when you hurt. In fact, people around you may not even know you have gone under "the knife." But you feel the shift of your insides and the pain of the incision. You monitor your vital signs yourself and hope to God you are reading them right. When the pain gets unbearable you reach for the morphine; sex, drugs, relationship, food, exercise, whatever eases the pain. Except there is no IV and it takes time for the medicine to reach the site. The wound may become infected and need more attention. Or perhaps the first surgery had complications and required a second. Sometimes it may feel as if you are a walking operating room with your insides just dangling here and there. As you walk by your doctor, you ask with discomfort, "ugh, how long is this going to last? I mean, how long can I stay alive like this?"
Then, in time, you take your first steps with your new heart, breath for the first time with your new lungs and there is life. You exist in the world in a new way and still have some scars. Every once in awhile you may have to go back in for minor surgeries, or maybe even major. But when you recover, you recover what it means to truly live as well. And the morphine button doesn't actually look all that appealing anymore.
