Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.

I have a habit, a bad one that leads me through the same challenge over and over again. I start having trouble with my mental health – anxiety and depression usually lead to nightmares and insomnia. Nothing horrible at first, but increases in severity over time until I put myself in therapy. I communicate consistently with my therapist, I start taking the steps I need to be mindful of my mental health and how I’m doing and what I need to do to ensure I’m taking care of myself, and I improve.

So what do I do?

After a time, I improve enough that I start to question if paying for therapy is even worth it. (Spoiler alert: IT’S WORTH IT. Every cent of it. Every time.) I start to feel really good. I feel so good, that I think I can handle the rest of mental health healing on my own. Or at least tackle bits and pieces of it while I wait to tackle the really heavy stuff. (It really is just like when people stop taking their antibiotics because they think feeling better means they are better, which is a false equivalency.)

Some things can’t be handled on my own. Some things I need a professional to help with, and some things I might need medication for. I also need to remember that handling my mental health on my own isn’t actually handling my mental health. It’s an act of avoidance, a means of allowing myself to maintain distance between myself and the issues I know I need to work on but don’t want to work on.

I’m fine for a while…each time I quit therapy, the amount of time I can go before getting back into therapy is less and less. The first time, I went years. The second time I went less than one year. Now, it was less than three months.

The interesting bit is that I can tell I’m a lot healthier mentally and emotionally than I was when I first started therapy. I don’t have panic attacks nearly as often anymore. Maybe one every few months or so. The severity of my anxiety and depression are drastically reduced. The nightmares and insomnia don’t last for weeks on end. I don’t constantly feel like I’m approaching a mental break down. So the fact that I can’t go as long between when I’m back in therapy, I think, means that my body is healing, that my mind is healing, and neither will let me keep holding on to the trauma.

I think that’s a good thing. A very good thing. It means I’m learning to identify when things aren’t right, when I need help, when I am (and when I’m not) doing what I need to do to take care of myself. And that is hard to do. Taking those first steps back into therapy is never easy because therapy is hard. But I care too much about the people in my life and about the kind of energy I bring to their lives to be selfish and keep avoiding. Because that’s what avoidance is: a selfish choice. An understandable one because, again, healing from trauma is hard and uncomfortable. I don’t judge anyone who struggles to take those first steps because I’ve been there. But I also believe in calling things what they are. There’s nothing healthy or noble or strong about avoiding therapy. It’s only selfishness. It’s a choice that, whether intentional or not, directly impacts the people we love most. I say this about myself, from my own experience.

Before I ever started therapy, it took the words of a friend for me to realize that what I was going through might not be normal. It was after my first miscarriage. I thought it was normal after a miscarriage to break down in public on a consistent basis, especially when I saw a baby or a pregnant woman. I thought it was normal to not sleep for days at a time because the nightmares were worse than the nightmare I was living. I didn’t even realize I was traumatized until she emailed me one day and said, “Sweetheart, you need to see a therapist because this sounds like textbook PTSD.”

Before I started therapy the second time, the nightmares came back. The insomnia came back. The suicidal ideation came back. I masked it with a lot of weed and a lot of alcohol, but eventually those stopped working, too. My husband noticed the increase in pot and alcohol use and asked me if I had considered going back to therapy, and I had all kinds of excuses for why I wasn’t going. It took the words of someone else, the words of a friend in my class at the university to get me to even think about going back to therapy. She asked me how I was doing and I gave her an honest answer. Her response? “Get your ass back to therapy. Suicidal ideation is nothing to take lightly.”

Sometimes the people around us know what we need better than we do.

If I had gone to therapy earlier in my marriage, I know I wouldn’t have been as badly adjusted. I might not have stayed with him as long as I did. I might have been able to communicate my needs more effectively. I might have been able to identify his abusive tendencies earlier on. And his refusal to seek his own therapy, as well as refusing to go to couples counseling, to this day remains one of the hardest things I have to process and accept. It’s that solitary choice that makes me believe he didn’t really love me. Because if he had, he would have done what he needed to do to show me he was serious about repairing the damage he was causing.

But he didn’t do what he needed to do. At any point. He said he loved me. A lot. Even at the end. He did other things, like took me out on dates and did activities with me. But the emotional aspect of our relationship had completely broken down because he was completely closed off. That’s what happens when we avoid trauma. We get closed off, even from the people we think we love the most. We overcompensate. We say “I love you” over and over, like he did at the end, and we do the things we think the other person wants from us because those things are easy and make us feel good. But we do it all to prove to ourselves that we love them, not to actually communicate our love to them. It’s building a false reality, a reality that allows us to be absolved of our damaging behaviors because accepting that we are severely hurting the ones we care about is too much to take.

But in the end, that’s just another way of choosing ourselves over our partner. When I ignored my ex’s suggestion that I seek therapy, it was a way of choosing what I was most comfortable with over what I knew, deep down, needed to be done. And when he avoided couple’s therapy, that was just him choosing himself over our relationship. It didn’t matter how often I told him what I needed, it didn’t matter how many times I enforced boundaries, they were never respected and things never changed because the reality he’d built for himself was the only one he could see.

The result was more distance. More avoidance. More overcompensation. More passive aggressive behavior. More neglect. Because every time I enforced boundaries, it cracked his reality and made him feel like he was being attacked. Every time he felt attacked, I became the reason for his misery. He wanted to believe he was a good husband, a good man, a good person. He had to believe that. There couldn’t be any other option. He had to be the victim, he couldn’t accept that he might be the perpetrator.

The real tragedy is that accepting he was hurting me would have actually proven he was a good husband. It was the stubbornness, his unwillingness to accept responsibility for how he was hurting me, that made him a bad spouse. But this is what happens when unresolved trauma festers. This is what happens when keeping the false reality matters more than repairing actual reality. The result is always loss and hurting others, and instead of taking that loss and trying to learn from it, he has only used it to further entrench himself in the false reality that he is a victim because that is what abusers do. They do everything they can to avoid accountability because they can’t accept how much they’re actually responsible for, even when the evidence around them is overwhelming.

I go back to therapy now because 1) my mental health matters to me, and 2) the things I do because of my mental health matter to me. I have friends and family and a partner who all mean a hell of a lot to me and the things I choose to do or not do directly impacts the role I play in their lives. I’ve messed up before. I’ll mess up again. All I can do is my best in every given moment to accept responsibility for the things I’ve done, whether right or wrong. and to continue to make the best choices I can. Going back to therapy is the best choice for me right now. I need to keep healing. I need to keep doing the work. Words are easy. Taking action to change and be better is the hardest thing anyone can do. But it’s worth it every time.