Avoid Crying in the Grocery Store & Other Lessons I Learned from Therapy
Avoid Crying in the Grocery Store & Other Lessons I learned from Therapy
By Shannon Janico
Yesterday, I cried ordering a salmon patty at the grocery store Publix. With tears blurring my vision, I grabbed the salmon from the Publix fish man, thanked him with a head hung low, and frantically hurried into the bread aisle to avoid any eye contact with strangers that could lead to questions asking me if I was okay. I have never looked harder at a loaf of bread’s nutrition label in my life.
There comes a point when you find yourself crying in public (I find myself doing this a little too often…) or losing sleep that your pain is no longer avoidable. When your emotional or physical pain interrupts your basic daily functioning, it is time to get help.
Maybe you are not a crier, so your breaking point looks more like snapping at your boss in front of a client or draining your savings account at the closest mall after work. However it may manifests itself, there comes a season in all of our lives where we can no longer avoid the fact that we need help. We can no longer run from event to event, attempting to ignore the source of our pain.
Often, our life experiences—whether positive or negative—dictate just how long we are stubborn enough to wait to get the emotional or physical help, this therapy, that we need.
The hardest work is getting yourself there.
For me, it took about nine years to admit that I needed to take physical therapy seriously for my shoulder to fully heal; I dislocated my shoulder playing competitive high school badminton when I went back for a clear and threw it back in myself (wish I was joking…). However, I had more excuses than reasons to go physical therapy.
Excuses included, but were not limited to...
I don’t have time to do this.
It’s too expensive to keep going to every week (my family's insurance covered it—a.k.a. irrational excuse from a 16-year-old).
It won’t really make a difference.
I would rather do an intense workout that keeps my body looking good.
Everyone has a thing they do when they are bored and mine just so happens to be rubbing my shoulder; it’s normal.
The pain will go away without physical therapy.
Fittingly, around the time the pain did not go away, some nine years later, I had developed a passion, some would call obsession with yoga. Yoga made my body toned, skinnier, stronger, and at rest.
It also aggravated my shoulder.
I didn’t mind. The benefits of seeing my arms look thin, yet strong in pictures, outweighed the cost of shoulder pain and getting help. Getting help would mean stopping yoga, and that was out of the question. The thought even angered me.
Maintaining my body image through yoga became an idol. As Tim Keller brilliantly writes, “When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore, if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’”
What I did not realize is that my idolatrous attachment to making my body look “perfect” through yoga made me rationalize hurting my body physically. Thankfully, the Lord led me to a breaking point where I could no longer avoid the pain because I could no longer sleep at night since the pain in my shoulder got increasingly more intense. I needed to get help.
God has an interesting way of helping us break our idols, doesn’t He?
(Side note—at this same time, I got carpal tunnel from editing my students’ papers too much. Idol of control much? Led to what doctors called “double crunch.”)
Ask me to go to emotional therapy, and I will drop anything. Heck, I would even walk there. I love emotional therapy. Granted it took many visits where 6th grade Shannon rolled her eyes at the poor, innocent soul who tried to break down the wall I built to love therapy.
However, once I found the right therapist, I warmed up. My therapist became my ally against the many wars that plagued my teenage world. She became the cool aunt that would shoot it straight and say the things that would have made me blush had they come out of the mouth of a parent. Talking about my parents’ divorce to a trusted adult felt good.
The small things may not seem like big things, but they are.
Her tiny office was (and is—I still see her!) a judgment free zone. She became the friend I never had who not only knew the appropriate text message to send him back but who also had years of PHD research backing it up. Take that!
Someone spent years studying this new problem you are having, so let them help.
Seeing my therapist went from something I had to do as a 6th grader, to something I enjoyed doing as a high schooler, to something that is now a treat as an adult, a gift to have the financial resources for.
Unfortunately, resources are not infinite and often restrict how many times I can go.
You cannot stay in therapy forever.
I know it can be terrifying to let a stranger into your brokenness. As Ann Votskamp observes, “To give someone your broken heart means breaking pride, breaking lies, breaking fear. There’s no communion unless someone breaks their ego…Suffering is a call for presence; it’s a call for us to be present—not only to the brokenness in the world, but to the brokenness in our own soul, and to risk trusting others with our wounds. I think that is what’s terrified me—trusting others with my wounds.”
The hardest work is getting yourself there.
Your fears for going to therapy are valid. It is scary to let your guard down in front of a stranger and uncomfortable, painful to discuss your deepest wounds.
It may hurt before it gets better.
However, when you learn to trust a skilled therapist whom you respect, you will learn a new communion of healing. You will dive into deep wells of pain and press your wounds into the wounds of Christ; you will come up refreshed and capable of going to the grocery store without unexplained tears.
It’s worth the money.
In addition to healing your wounds, you will learn an entire new vocabulary and concepts that when correctly applied with a spouse, family member, friend, or coworker, can 9.5/10 times prevent conflict.
You learn a set of skills and concepts that will help in the future.
Your therapist can provide meaning to why you cry at random things and concrete steps to improve emotional reactions that shockingly often have their roots in childhood events.
You need to identify and target the area of pain, to make it better
To avoid crying in public, snapping at authority figures, drinking your emotions away, or losing hours of sleep, you should go to therapy just as you should get a medical checkup to prevent future problems.
Therapy is preventative medicine.
Now my love for emotional therapy is strong, almost to a fault as seen when a friend comes to me with a problem and my second sentence out is “you should go to therapy.” I mean it with love and back it with years of successful results. Similarly, when I sighed to a coworker/friend that my doctor told me that I had to go to physical therapy at least twice a week for five weeks, she responded with joy and years of successful results backing that I should go.
“You’ll love it! It helps so much and is so nice to have someone attend to your source of pain.”
Hm. Sounds painful and a huge waste of time. While I respected and trusted my coworker/friend, I couldn’t help but feel depressed. Now that my excuses were void with a doctor’s note, fears crept in.
What if I NEVER get better?
What if my shoulder hurts this badly for the REST of my LIFE?
To make matters worse, my very first exercise at P.T. was laying on my back, pushing my head against a pillow, and looking up…
The small things may not seem like big things, but they are.
This is going to be a LONG journey.
I am going to get fat if I keep working out at this rate.
I miss yoga.
I could be doing so many other things with my time instead of this.
This is not fair; everyone else gets to lead a perfectly normal life, and I am doing baby chin exercises.
When the pain did not instantly go away the next day, I had a whole new wave of panicky and sad thoughts.
I am going to have to get surgery.
I will never be able to write again.
I will never recover.
Woe is me.
However, a combination of my Christian memory that the Lord has and will continue to use all things, EVEN pain, for His glory and our good, and an email from P. T. Solutions saying “it is very normal for the pain to get worse before it gets better” encouraged me to breathe deep and hang in there.
It may hurt before it gets better.
As Ann Votskamp beautifully states, “suffering is a gift that He entrusts to us and He can be trusted to make this suffering into a gift.”
“For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Corinthians 1:5).
With each session, I gained hope. Not only did the wonderful physical therapists strengthen my shoulder, but they taught me the importance of strengthening my back, my rotator cup, and my mental attitude. My eyes widened as they hit my forearm with a hammer and knew exactly what exercise I needed. Amazing!
Someone spent years studying this new problem you are having, so let them help.
They watched me walk and taught me that my lower back hurt because I relied on it too much since my hips were weak.
You learn a set of skills and concepts that will help in the future.
They applied pressure to the exact points that needed it, releasing pain kept hostage for years.
You need to identify and target the area of pain, to make it better
It is lonely to suffer an injury alone, whether physical or emotional, for many years. As I told my physical therapists about the pain and instability I had been experiencing for the past nine years, I felt a soothing comfort in their personalized care for me. I started to enjoy sitting on the table with a hot pack on my shoulder, hearing about my therapists’ weekends, learning about what muscles need to be strengthened and why, and gently being personally guided to recovery by doing tailored exercises.
It’s worth the money.
I began to work at home on strengthening my hips and abs, to avoid future lower back pain.
Therapy is preventative medicine.
Physical therapy got so comfortable and enjoyable that by the time of my next doctor’s checkup, I even feared that I would be told that I did not need to go back. God drew me to this verse in Ecclesiastes 3. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.”
I cannot live life forever in therapy as much as I wish I could. I’ll miss my physical therapists and the one-on-one attention given to my specific pains. However, therapy is never meant to be permanent or a replacement for God.
You cannot stay in therapy forever.
Therapy is a temporary gift that shows us a taste of the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God, Christ attends to your wounds. He cares for and heals your wounds, but He also calls you to do “greater works” than he did on earth (John 14: 12).
What are these greater works?
Though it is impossible to specifically say, I trust that it entails sharing our wounds, caring for others’ wounds, and healing the wounds of others in the precious name of Jesus Christ Our Lord for the sake of God’s glory and eternal Kingdom.
Let us do our part in pointing others to the whole restoration when the Lord Jesus Himself comes back. Go to therapy ;)
Recap: The Nine Things I Learned From Therapy
- The hardest work is getting yourself there.
- It’s worth the money.
- Someone spent years studying this new problem you are having, so let them help.
- It may hurt before it gets better.
- The small things may not seem like big things, but they are.
- You need to identify and target the area of pain, to make it better.
- You learn a set of skills and concepts that will help in the future.
- Therapy is preventative medicine.
- You cannot stay in therapy forever.
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