In March, I met with my therapist for the last time.
We'd been meeting since 2022. Three and a half years of psychodynamic work, which is a fancy way of saying we sat in a room and she helped me find words for things I had been carrying since I was three years old.
It wasn't my first attempt. There was the woman who, the moment she learned I was a pastor, started speaking entirely in Hallelujahs and Praise Jesuses, like the Holy Spirit had taken over her diagnostic vocabulary. There was the man who seemed bored to be alive, let alone bored to be sitting across from me. There was the counselor I saw in 2018, after my brother died, until our insurance changed when we moved to DC. There was a therapist in second through fourth grade, while I lived with my aunt and uncle, who looked like Jeff Daniels—a fact that delighted him because I was an unusually early Dumb and Dumber fan.
The Parrotts didn't believe in therapy. I had a few sessions through my undergrad counseling center, which Emily made a precondition of us starting to date. Which, fair.
By 2022 I had gotten The Table out of the pandemic, transitioned our governance, started the merger with Resurrection City—and had barely yet grieved my brother. I wanted, needed, something more serious. The Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis referred me to someone who had experience with Christian religion but wasn't, you know, crazy. We didn't end up doing analysis but instead did psychodynamic therapy. A lot of inner work. A lot of memory.
Three and a half years of that, and the takeaways are:
