Last week I officially had my last session with my personal therapist and the week before that, I concluded my second round of group therapy. This means that I am now done. I am fixed. The finished product.
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Obviously that’s not true. There is still work to be done, but it is a milestone. It signifies that I may not be done growing, but I now have the confidence and the toolset to do it on my own. Let’s dive in.
ACT: Acceptance & Commitment therapy
Earlier this year I started my second round of group therapy. You can read about my first round and its beautiful consequences on my mental wellbeing here.
This round of group therapy would be centered around Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. ACT is a relatively new form of therapy that simplifies the often dry, complicated idea of cognitive behavioral therapy into a more daily usable framework. I’ll go into it deeper over the coming months because it truly changed the way I live. ACT centers around values. You identify these for yourself by simply deciding what you find important in life. My main values are autonomy, connection, growth and joy. Yours may be entirely different.
Align yourself
When you have defined your core values, ACT simplifies most life decisions into a very simple question: do my actions align with my values? Or if the action is yet to be taken: what can I do in this situation to align myself with my values? ACT uses a lot of metaphors and the main one in our group was the lighthouse. The lighthouse is the life you want to live. It is not necessarily something you need to arrive at, it is more an ideal version of you. It shows you where to aim yourself in daily life.
So these days when I wake up and I feel like shit, which happens still, I try to calm my mind and ask myself a simple question: what do I need to do to align myself with my values and take a little step towards my lighthouse? Is it hitting snooze and sleeping in? Or getting out of bed and going for a run? The answer for me is the latter, but if you’re in a differrent life with different values the snooze might very well be yours.
This actually works somehow. For the first time in years, I can get myself out of bed. Simply because I’m not longer forcing myself. I’m doing it because I want to. I can’t explain all of it in a simple blog but it really clicked with me and I still use it every single day. It’s the simplicity of it that works. Just one question can be applied to pretty much every decision, every crossroad in life.
Groups get less scary
This ACT group was my second, after my schema group in 2024. That one was terrifying, but this… This wasn’t so bad. In fact, during the very first session I might have been the most talkative of the 8 people in there. This was a weird realization. Me, the AvPD quiet guy, was talking more than anyone else. In a group. With strangers looking at him. It was fun, actually. Kinda powerful.
Of course this was mostly because I was the only one with group therapy experience. As the rest got more used to it and more confident, the natural balance restored a bit. I had good days where I was social and open, but also bad days where the counselors had to pull the words out of me. That’s just life.
Still it was nice to see the progress between how hard my first group was two years ago and how relatively calm I felt going into this one. It’s just some nice proof of progress.
No more therapy
After finishing my group, I had a session with my personal therapist (also one of the group leaders). We discussed my progress and decided that in all honesty there’s not much to do anymore. It was getting harder and harder to find things to talk about. It’s not like my life had no troubles anymore, but I had the answers now. I kept telling him my issues and then immediately telling him the solution. The only thing left to do was for me to actually act on those solutions, but that’s not something he can help me with. The ball was in my court now.
So we said our goodbyes, almost three years after starting. We had a good last talk where I told him how much I appreciate what he’s done for me. He told me he enjoyed working with me a lot and that whenever he saw me on his schedule he looked forward to our sessions because of how calm and introspective they were.
I am incredibly thankful for meeting this man in particular. He was an open-minded therapist that was willing to try all kinds of things. We did schema, we did EMDR, we did ACT and we just had a good connection. He understood me more than I’ve ever felt before. He didn’t offer much in the way of solutions perhaps, but like I said: I always knew the solutions already. I just needed someone to hear me out and give me the feeling I wasn’t broken beyond repair. To tell me and show me that people don’t hate me. That it’s okay to be myself. He did all that.
Empty
I do feel a sense of pride for being “done”, but it also feels… empty. Like I got rid of something that I genuinely enjoyed. There was always a certain anxiety before (group) sessions, but also a lot of excitement and joy. It was a dedicated moment to work on myself and to focus on growth with others.
Now that is gone and I know I will be okay, but I will miss it. It’s scary being my own support system again, because despite it all I don’t fully trust myself yet. I just try to remind myself that I don’t need to be perfect. I just have to do the best I can. I have the tools and the strength to move through whatever may come. There will be bad days, bad weeks, maybe bad months or even bad years. But that doesn’t mean I will have a bad life.
Guess I'm back
So, I guess I’m back to blogging. I have so much to share but I need to kind of cut it into subjects or it’ll all just be incoherent rambling. I need to go over my ADHD diagnosis and the medication journey, dive deeper into ACT and its lessons and discuss the current state of my marriage and what it taught be about relationships and AvPD. But that’s for another day. Maybe that day will be tomorrow, maybe it’ll be in 9 months. Either way, until then!
