The stigma surrounding psychotherapy has existed since its inception, and for good reason. If you seek mental and emotional help, you’re admitting that you have mental and emotional problems. How humiliating is that? You might as well start walking around town in a straight jacket and howling at the moon.
In a world where people scour the internet looking for sliding scale therapists to kiss away their mind boo-boos and blame mommy and daddy for sudden onset fears of birds, one brave woman has chosen a neural-pathway less traveled. For 34-year-old Jennie Delarosa, there is no problem too daunting that a night out with friends can’t solve.
“I don’t know where I’d be without weekly dinners with my gals,” said Delarosa. “We talk about everything from work crushes, to new recipes, to the recurring dream I have, night after merciless night where a group of men dressed in colonial garb remove my teeth one by one with a pair of my fathers pliers and force me to become the village seamstress, and then later one of us pretends it’s our birthday so we can get free cake. We’re so bad.”
Delarosa actually finds these dinners to be so helpful that she has started asking her friends if they have the availability to meet twice a week.
“Unfortunately, scheduling seems to be a little tight right now,” said Kayla Osborne, Delarosa’s longtime friend. “I’m looking at my calendar and I don’t think there’s time for another session this week, but I’ll contact her if anything opens up. She knows to call 911 if she finds herself in an emergency situaion.”
Not one to be impressed by showy college degrees or psychobabble buzzwords like “self-awareness” and “inner-peace,” Delarosa can’t conceive that anyone in their right mind would spend hundreds of dollars a week talking to a stranger about their most intimate problems.
She’d much rather deal with inner turmoil in a way her father would approve of by spending hundreds of dollars a week drinking screwdrivers at the bar and unloading decades of trauma on a man she just met who, unbeknownst to her, fell asleep an hour ago.