Emotional Unintelligence

by Zoe Martin

Image credit: Chirayu Trivedi on Unsplash

A therapist's waiting room is an odd purgatory. Especially when you are not alone. I try to avoid eye contact with the other people the best I can, but sometimes, it just happens. A quick glance where you both acknowledge how you’re both here at the same time. Both there to fix the problems that were probably passed down to you by your parents or because of a horrible trauma you endured. 

Or, sometimes, you’re just broken.

It’s great people-watching, though. When I was younger, I would look at the other people in the waiting room and try and guess their problems. I would create whole stories in my head. Then, a door would open, you would hear a therapist's voice ushering them in, and they were gone. When I was younger, that voice was my mother. She’s been a therapist for as long as I can remember. Specifically, a therapist without childcare, hence my early knowledge of waiting room etiquette. While I wasn't a client of hers, that room was my sanctuary when she would bring me to work with her. 

Therapy has always been present in my life, though I never went myself until I got older. I'm thankful, for the most part. I know there are kids who grew up with parents who wanted them to push everything down, who believe that therapy is only for crazy people. I know I’m lucky. But I am also broken. The ability to talk about my feelings is non-existent. Everything since I could speak has been deep. There is a reason for every emotion. Often, I couldn’t tell whether my mother was trying to talk to me or psychoanalyze me. I think the reason my mental illness went unnoticed for so long was because I couldn’t articulate it. By the time it really mattered, I hated talking about my emotions, especially with my mother. The rest of my family was already in therapy, but they had real problems. My brother has severe ADHD, my father depression, my mother a mix of both. I truly believed I was completely normal, that the illness skipped me. What would I even talk to a therapist about? 

My mother’s waiting room was dark. The only light source came from two lamps, there were no windows. On the coffee table in the middle of the room were some toys, I assume for fidgeting, magazines, and a bowl of lollipops that hated to see me coming. There were also yellow couches pressed up against the wall, just close enough that if I sat on them, I could almost make out what was being said behind the wall. Sometimes, when my mother would come out to greet a client, she would acknowledge their confusion about me being there and say, “Sorry, my daughter is with me today”. 

They would always laugh. I never knew why it was so funny. I do wonder what her clients thought of me. 

As I said, having a therapist for a mother has its perks as well as its downsides. I was never shamed for taking a mental health day and skipping school, though I didn’t take very many. I pushed a lot down. My walls were built very high from years of having no emotional privacy. It’s not like I didn’t have feelings, I did. A lot of them. I just couldn’t talk about them. The words physically hurt me as they were coming out. It’s like when someone forces you to do something which makes you want to do it even less. There was always so much going on in my head that was impossible for me to articulate. Maybe this is why it took my family so long to realize the illness hadn’t skipped me. 

I’ve always been a worrier. My nails are bitten down and bleeding type of worrier. One time, in seventh grade, my best friend invited me to her birthday party. To get inside, I had to pass through a group of boys outside her front door. I made my mother drive around the block three times before I was ready to face people I didn’t know. Even then, she practically dragged me out of the car. I couldn’t swallow pills until I was 18 years old because I was so scared I was going to choke. I failed my driver's test the first time because I was so afraid to merge lanes that

I simply didn’t do it and missed my turn. I have to be physically held down by doctors whenever I get a shot, so I don't run away. All of this is to say I should have started therapy sooner, but I played a waiting game.

Freshman year of college I finally cracked. It started with a school counselor. After weeks of internal suffering, I guess my mother could tell I needed to talk to someone if it wasn’t going to be her. It was like every emotion I pushed down finally emerged from hiding and revealed themselves all at once. It felt as if someone suddenly turned on a blinding light when my eyes were used to the darkness. I finally accepted defeat and made the humbling walk to the counseling center. The lady at the front desk greeted me with pity in her eyes and then pointed me to the waiting room. Room is an overstatement; it was more of a waiting chair. My counselor greeted me, and I took the first steps into his office. He began to make stiff conversation with me as I told him how hopeless I’d been feeling. Halfway into our meeting, he got up to use the bathroom, and I could finally take a glance around the room. Every piece of decor, every poster, every book all had to do with Jesus. I walked out before he came back from the bathroom. 

Image credit: Hans Vivek on Unsplash

I then tried meds. Prescribed ones, don’t worry. My mother, through her therapy network, found me a psychiatrist who could see me. This time, it was a woman, she was younger and didn’t look at me like she felt sorry for me. At my first intake appointment, my mother wanted to be in the room so she could help explain what I was feeling in case I froze, as I often did, and I didn’t object. Maybe she could explain it better than I could. Halfway through our meeting, my psychiatrist asked if my mother could leave so we could speak more privately. It was then she told me that in order to keep seeing her and getting meds, I would need to try therapy. 

My mother once again used her network to find me a therapist—one 45 minutes away. That gave me plenty of time in the car to rehearse exactly how I would describe my traumas, with what cadence, and specific words I could leave out so as not to get too deep. I arrived early, so once again, I sat in a waiting room. This one is much nicer than my mom’s. There were windows and plants and a table with a coffee machine and cups. Despite this, I still felt the same way about the eye contact thing. 

My therapist is young, like my psychiatrist, but she seems to have more depth to her. The first thing she mentions is my mother as she’s the one who reached out. Then she asks why I’m here. I tell her about my spiral. She asks more questions. I am calculated in my responses at first, noting what I choose to tell her and what I don’t. Then I remember she isn’t my mother, though they share the same profession. She doesn’t care what I say really. I sat there and spilled my guts, which is exactly what it felt like. It wasn’t comfortable, my guts were all out for her to see, and most of them were ugly. But then I will leave, and she will leave, and she will go home to her own family like my mother does every day. So, I reached down and desperately tried to pull and grab at any words I could find to describe my feelings, and it eventually came out like word vomit. The session ended. I drove home feeling lighter than I ever had before. I walked in the door and heard my mother's voice. “What did you guys talk about?”  She knows the answer is her.

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Zoe Martin

Zoe Martin is an undergraduate student studying writing at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her work has been featured in The Saintly Review. Zoe hopes to use her writing to advocate for mental health and the queer community.