By: Revanche

Thoughts on the intersection of therapy and Buddhism

August 20, 2025

(this is very superficial, don’t expect any deep thoughts) Buddhism has been on my mind lately, partly because JB asked me to talk to them about it. I struggled to articulate our beliefs system because I grew up steeped in a Buddhist culture but we didn’t talk about the meaning of or how to be Buddhist, we just were. We just practiced the cultural norms without a lot of introspection.

We’re well into my fifth (!?) year of therapy now and I’m seeing concretely where it’s changed my ways of thinking and reacting. It’s helping me see what well meaning family members meant but communicated very badly in the wake of hard times.

When my mom passed, I was gutted. Might as well have hung me up like a dried fish, I was a hollow husk for months. Years, even. The only thing that got a strong emotion out of me was the pablum “don’t grieve, your mom wouldn’t have wanted you to grieve.” That brought out my old friend, rage. Now I can say, No, that’s wrong. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be in pain but my grieving had a place. Where else was my love going to go?

We grew up with a Buddhism that translated as: have no emotions rather than process your emotions and let them pass. During a time of war, and post-war devolution of the society and country that they knew, it makes sense that none of that generation had time to learn or consider healthier ways to process emotions. There was no time or space for that, and so they passed their traumas down in the form of emotion suppression and denial. I grew up an obedient kid with such repressed feelings, aiming to be the perfect robot, that as an adult I thought I was no longer capable of having feelings. My therapist suggested that I was, in fact, feeling so many feelings it was too overwhelming to handle. I didn’t love that but as we worked our way through, I’ve seen that she’s been right about more than one thing, including that one.

There’s a popular translation of “desire is the root of all suffering” from the Four Noble Truths. In a lot of ways, letting go of specific desires has been instrumental for my growth.

I deeply wanted a family of origin that loved and valued me, a family that would make amends to me for their many wrongs (lying to me, stealing from me, wrecking my financial life for even the smallest gains for themselves). It was an indirect route to healing that had to start with realizing how much pain I felt because of their actions. From there, I started to see how much of my overcompensating, trying to save everyone from their mistakes while telling myself protectively that I’ll never be good enough, was a terrible coping mechanism. As I unpicked the habit of hurting myself preemptively, I started to see that they’re not capable of anything I needed. He can’t love me and that I don’t have to accept his pitiful excuse for “love”. I wasn’t obliged to punish myself for “not being good enough”. I could finally stop longing to have a better dad. It’s not happening. I don’t have to forgive and forget, I don’t have to rebuild the bridge, I can just accept that’s the way it is and live my life.

I deeply wanted some other family members to see me as worthy of a genuinely warm relationship. But that’s not possible! They decided years ago that I was not worthy of being part of their family. For years, I tried so hard to prove that I was worthy. Now I understand that it’s about them and their needs / issues, which is not reflective of my value as a person. That has let me take a step back. Instead of yearning for the highly improbable, I now set boundaries that are healthy. I can be the version of me that is best for me around them (mellow grey rock, baby! Go, Captain Awkward, truly LOVE Captain Awkward) and just be. It’s remarkably freeing not to spend energy trying to prove I’m worthy, and instead just protect my peace.

It sounds all very simplistic and obvious, but it took a lot of years for me to slowly disassemble the self-harming coping mechanisms I’d anchored my whole personality onto, and build something better in their place.