WHY IS MID-LIFE THERAPY SUCH A SHAMEFUL SECRET?

... especially when we are going for counselling in our droves. Here four top writers break the taboo with their own searingly honest stories

MID-LIFE women: do we have it all, or are we losing it? Compared with previous generations, we can have better jobs and a hormonehelped sex life, look fantastic for longer and get excited about the riotously fun time that awaits us in future decades.

Or we could find ourselves going into a defeatist hole, where our nests are empty, jobs dissolved, partners departed, and life can look, well, a little less than rosy.

Whatever the reason, more women aged 35 to 54 than ever before are now making ourselves comfortable on the therapist’s couch.

According to the annual St Patrick’s Hospital Dublin mental health survey, 28% of us have been treated for a mental health difficulty and 44% reported having a family member who has undergone treatment for a mental health issue.

My own therapy experience was sparked by losing a high-profile job as an editor in my early 50s, with wobbles reverberating through all elements of my life: marriage, children, self-esteem. I felt shaken to my core and unable to deal with my sense of failure.

Conversations with my therapist built up trust, then looked deeper into my defensive ways and behaviour patterns. In all it cost around €2,200 over a year. It was worth every cent.

But you don’t have to lose a job in order to need a therapist: there are plenty of mundane reasons why these middle years are problematic for women, including hormonal changes.

Parents are also getting old and frail, and we are often more involved in the care of them, which can be exhausting as well as heartrending. And when they die, it can be devastating.

Mothers can be shocked by the feeling of dislocation that comes when their children leave home.

And, at this time, many women look at their partner and find the relationship atrophied. Do we stay together? Is a better phase just around the corner?

As therapist Anna Storey said, ‘Therapy allows time for introspection, to pause and think. So far in life, you might have been fulfilling somebody else’s ambitions (most likely your parents’) and have not stopped to consider your own. Now it’s your time.’

At 61, I’m now in the phase of life that’s often said to be the happiest. And I’m a stronger, more resilient soul for having got through the darker days — with a little help from my therapist. Even better, I now know who to call should the sun start to dip again.

Therapy saved my life when my marriage fell apart By Marion McGilvary

MY MARRIAGE was falling apart and so was I. We’d been married for 25 years and it had indeed been a bed of roses, full of painful thorns which were not easy to untangle and separate from, but nevertheless it was happening. ‘You better talk to someone,’ said my erstwhile husband as I sobbed, ‘because I can’t help you any more’. He was off and I was on my own.

However, he was right. I did desperately need to talk to someone, so a friend recommended a therapist, who agreed to see me on the basis she would farm me out to someone else if she didn’t think she could work with me.

I felt as though I was on sale-or-return and was braced for another rejection as I climbed the many stairs to her consulting room — a crushed, discarded, middleaged woman, full of shame and self-loathing.

I disliked her on sight. She was older than me, calm and posh, and resembled a rather stern headmistress in a 1950s school where they played a lot of hockey. What would sweary working-class me have in common with this woman?

And yet I sat down in the intimidating chair, looking at the couch where other patients chose to lie, and spilled my guts.

By the time the allotted 50 minutes were up I wanted to stay there for ever.

Thankfully, she said she thought we could work well together and we made another appointment.

Despite my initial reluctance I left feeling all the things good therapy is supposed to make you feel — held, contained, safe and, most importantly, heard. She listened to me and didn’t judge.

She helped me arrange my thoughts and tamed them. I walked in hating myself and walked out thinking that maybe I wasn’t quite so bad after all.

I think we all want to be liked. When your partner — your best friend, the person who once upon a time agreed to love you warts and all — decides that actually, on reflection, you might be a bit too warty for him, it destroys your confidence. I felt like a pariah.

But lest you think I had not contributed to the destruction of our marriage, let me disabuse you of that idea. It was an even match. Well, maybe Nadal versus Federer, with me being the Spaniard. So I did not feel likeable at the time.

I found that one of the most lifeaffirming things about therapy was the acceptance. I told this woman the most heinous things I’d done, I scraped my shame up and served it to her on a not-verysavoury plate. And yet, I still felt she liked me.

I liked her back. Sometimes she’d tell me exactly what she thought, not all of it honeytongued, but never judgmental, never critical, never belittling. Just straight.

I have never had unconditional liking, let alone love, in my life, and it was a new thing not to have to earn or cajole, or beg to be liked.

I was myself, stripped back to the bone, and still she made me feel

accepted. So yes, I paid to feel liked once a week. It was worth every cent. Some women have their hair or nails done. I go to therapy. There’s no contest. At least I never have to listen to anyone telling me what they did on their holidays.

Some people talk about therapy as a confessional and, for me, there was a strong element of that at the beginning. To be able to say the unspeakable. But therapy doesn’t offer atonement. You don’t go off and say a few Hail Marys and feel relieved. Therapy offers understanding, from both the therapist and yourself.

Does it change anything? Well, it helps you to forgive yourself and others, and to understand why you have reacted in certain ways to certain circumstances. It saved my life.

I still see her twice a month, and have done, off and on, for the past ten years. Sometimes we just talk about books. We laugh a lot. I still cry. Sometimes I feel myself reaching for the invisible glass of wine as if I’m chatting with a friend. I can honestly say it is the most nurturing relationship I have ever had in my life.

It gives me the confidence to carry on being me By Daisy Goodwin

I ONCE admitted to a very close friend that I was seeing a therapist. She just snorted in disbelief. ‘A therapist? But you have everything going for you.’ If only she knew! I wish I didn’t need a therapist. It’s expensive and time consuming, and quite often painful, but I have come to realise that it is essential to keep my head straight.

The therapist I see doesn’t spend hours talking about my childhood; our work together is much more present tense.

Having been lucky enough to become a full-time writer in my 50s, something I had dreamed of

all my life, I have discovered that writing — unlike my old job of television producing — is not something that can be managed or delegated.

To write well you have to write from the heart and put something of yourself down on the page. The more honest you are, the more vulnerable you become. I have discovered that talking to my therapist is the only way that I can maintain the confidence I need to keep writing.

I would be embarrassed to tell anyone else the fears that swirl around my head at 3am: will I ever have another idea; has all my success to date been a fluke; and will I be found out for being a talentless fraud?

My therapist, who is wise, generous and warm — an ideal mother without all the friction of a real mother-daughter relationship — is endlessly patient with my paranoia and insecurity.

I am reminded that while nothing is certain, my track record suggests I might have another idea and my success is not totally unfounded, and that the world is not full of people wanting me to fail.

It may seem a bit sad that I need to pay someone to tell me something I should be able to figure out for myself, but I have found that using my emotions to write means that I find myself defenceless when I am done.

There are moments when I hear myself echoing the endless insecurity of my teenage daughter. My therapist catches all of that angst and I leave my sessions able to think and function like an adult again.

I suppose I could get the same reassurance from a friend, but I feel that it is unfair to ask anyone to listen to my anxieties, and there is part of me that doesn’t want to expose myself.

And friends, or family members, always want to make you feel better, whereas my therapist is an expert at making me find my own solutions to my problems.

When I was young I used to look forward to the day I would be a grown-up, but now I am middle-aged I realise that adulthood doesn’t magically come with the wrinkles — it has to be worked at.

My therapist is the person who helps me put away my inner child (who is frankly a pain) and learn how to feel like the woman the rest of the world thinks I am — calm, confident and content.

It took a male shrink to fix my fear of men By Christina Patterson

WHEN I was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, I thought I was going to die without ever having found love. I was 46 years old and I had just been dumped by a man who had promised to be my ‘rock’, but then made it clear that he wouldn’t be.

This latest romance, like all my romances, had lasted just a few weeks, so I shouldn’t have been distraught. But when he told me it was over, I thought the pain was going to crush me. I had lived on my own since I was 26 and been single for most of my adult life.

Why was it so impossible for me to find, and keep, a good man? And now, I thought, I might die without ever getting the chance to find out. I felt like a failure as a woman.

It was a friend who suggested I go to see a therapist. Not a bad suggestion on the face of it, except the therapist my friend was suggesting was a man.

And so I found myself knocking on the door of a big Georgian house. When a tall, rather distinguished-looking man in a suit and tie opened the door, I felt like a child who had been misbehaving in class and was sent to see the headmaster.

He ushered me into his consulting room and waited for me to speak. As I told him about the operation I was facing, and the man who had broken my heart, I felt my cheeks burn.

He nodded as I poured out my soul. I couldn’t look at him as I spoke. When I’d finished, he said some things that were so astute, and so surprising, that I knew this was the person I had to see. He told me we would need to meet twice a week, but when he told me his fees, I gasped.

DESPERATE times call for desperate measures. I decided I would find a way, even if it meant getting a loan.

The next time I saw him, I had lost my breast. I had also lost a big chunk of my stomach, which had been moved to fill the space where the breast had been.

At night, I felt as if I was being stretched on a rack. It was hard for me to stand upright and still quite painful to walk. I couldn’t drive, so I had to get two buses each way to see him. I felt like damaged goods. I thought a man would never want to touch me again.

If I hadn’t managed to have a successful relationship when my body was still intact, God only knows how I would manage it now that I was covered in scars. What happened over the next few months and years is very hard to put into words.

At the shrink’s suggestion, I actually lay on a couch. One day, he asked me why I always had my hands over my eyes, and whether I was protecting myself from him. I didn’t know that I did, but then realised I was. I told him I was deeply embarrassed to be talking about such personal things with a man.

I was even more embarrassed to tell him that I appeared to have a ‘stupid little crush’ on the plastic surgeon who had done my reconstruction. I felt like a gawky teenager who had been caught stalking the handsome captain of a rugby team.

The shrink asked me why I called it a ‘stupid crush’. He said he thought it was entirely natural I would have strong feelings for the person who had reshaped my body. When he said that, I recognised I had always thought that owning up to feelings of desire was something that ought to make you feel ashamed.

After that session, I went for a walk in the park. I managed to walk further than I had since the operation. I looked at the crocuses that had just come out. As I gazed at them I felt the tears flow — and those tears felt pure and clean.

I saw him for three years. One time, I went when I’d had a migraine for two weeks. I lay on the couch and cried for most of the session. By the time I got home, the migraine had gone.

I can’t remember exactly when it was that I realised the feeling of embarrassment had gone.

My shrink was incredibly thoughtful, and terrifyingly erudite, but he was also funny. We laughed a lot.

There’s a strange process that’s supposed to happen in therapy called transference, where you’re meant to transfer on to the therapist feelings you have towards other people in your life.

Your therapist becomes a kind of father and a kind of mother and a kind of lover, even though all you’re actually doing is talking and writing cheques.

I don’t know exactly how this works, but I do know that, by the time I said goodbye to my shrink, I felt changed. I believed that I could relate to men in a completely different way.

I had lost my fear of men. I had lost my shame about desire. I had lost the fear of intimacy that meant I would start a relationship and then run away. I am absolutely sure this would not have happened if the therapist I had been seeing was a woman.

Since that therapy finished, I’ve had ups and downs. I lost my job. My mother died. But I feel stronger. I feel different.

I met a lovely man and I think I’m learning how to have a relationship. Yes, the cheques were quite hefty, but I owe so much to my clever, kind and ohso-skilful shrink.

CHRISTINA PATTERSON’S The Art of Not Falling Apart (Atlantic, €21) is out now.