I Thought Therapy Would Heal Me – But Writing Will Tear Me Apart

There have only been a handful of times I’ve sat across the wire-rimmed glasses of a psychology major who knows much more about the atrocities of my life than I. One, when I was 7 or eight, having recently found myself still alive after a near-fatal swimming accident. Two, when I was newly married and fighting back demons I had no idea existed. Three, when I was recently a new mother and worried about my ability to lead a family to different paths than I had been led as a child. And four, when I sat around a table with 5 other women as we in our short twenty-minute allotted time attempted to get all our thoughts out to the light of day and once and for all work through our issues. More on those counts in due time.

Each of those moments, is somewhat futile, either in nature or in duration. Come to think of it, therapy seems a futile mechanism almost in its entirety.  Speaking your emotions into the void. Into what, exactly, remains uncertain.

You offer only what feels safe, what fits within the hour, what aligns with the quiet figure scribbling notes behind wire-framed glasses. You know the questions. You know what they’re looking for. You know how to perform just enough vulnerability. And so, the deeper things—the rancid ones, the demons—stay locked beneath the surface.

Like popcorn these demons— sweltering, putride, kernels simmering in butter, heating up, rattling, begging for release. Sometimes bitter, only deceptively sweet, always hot. But only a few ever pop in therapy. Only the ones you choose. The rest gnaw at you, unpopped, growing hotter, more restless, until you leave, relieved having bought yourself another week.

But writing is different.

Writing is insidious. It does not wait for permission. It spills out—raw, untamed, faster than thought, faster than fear. The words appear before you can temper them before you can wrap them in palatable explanations. The popcorn demons don’t wait in writing. They burst forth, uncontrolled, relentless. They leap from the heat before you can catch them, scattering across the page in untamed chaos. Claws, thick, sharp, unforgiving.

Writing is a betrayal of silence.

It is the boy bursting from the school bus on the last day of summer, having spent nearly his entire year locked in a windowless prison. Finally running wild through the streets. It is the truth leaping from your chest, scattering itself before you can call it back. And once the ink dries, there it is—your mind laid bare. No glasses falling down the bridge of a nose in ceremonious nods, no guiding questions. Just you, the story, and the weight of having confessed.

For the wire glasses, you curate a gallery of acceptable pain, carefully arranged exhibits of your suffering. Reflections of themselves perhaps, only fragments of you. But writing? Writing is your mausoleum. Marbled walls echo the stories and pains of all those buried there. Brick by brick, your confessions take form, a permanent structure in the landscape of your existence. A monument to every secret, every wound, every demon dragged screaming into the light. You cannot hide from them. You cannot excuse them away with polite detachment. They stand, solid and permanent, inscribed for all to see.

Writing is the fall. Writing takes you deeper, past the surface, past the curated recollections, past the safeguards of casual confession. It drags you into the abyss, where truth burns hot and unrelenting. It leads you past the demons rattling against their glass cage, past the whispers of forgotten memories, past the carefully controlled temperature of your grief.

Tread carefully and choose your demise: drown in your therapy where you can remain the architect of your narrative or write yourself into the abyss.

And so, here I stand with ink and mirror. What dark creatures are lying there?