Cool Girl, Hot Take: An Essay + Q&A from E.M. Ricchini
Is therapy for everyone? Today's guest writer answers, plus some classic BBM interrogation you won't want to miss
Please welcome E.M. Ricchini to your inboxes! E.M. is the multi-hyphenate digital muse behind the blog LARK & LACE and the podcasts Have a nice life. and UNBOYFRIENDABLE. You can follow her on Instagram @emricchini. Today’s newsletter features a Q&A with E.M. that’s sure to enchant and an original piece, “Why I Stopped Going To Therapy” that challenges our “memefied” conventions of mental health in 2021 with her own experience and words from experts. Enjoy, and don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe, share, etc. You know the drill.
Pronouns: She/Her
Age: 29
Location: Splitting my time between unironically beautiful Southern West Virginia and Fishtown at the moment, who knows what the future will hold though
I know you wear a million hats, so asking, “What do you do?” seems a little narrow. Tell us what occupies your time and gives you meaning: For my day job, I'm in partnerships for an eCommerce tech company. It occupies a lot of my time but I still manage to keep a blog (LARK+LACE), host two podcasts (Have a nice life. + UNBOYFRIENDABLE), and I'm working on my first book. It's a lot of content but after spending 2020 consuming, I'm feeling that my raison d'être is to give back to the universe by creating. In my free time, I'm decorating a beautiful 110-year-old Craftsman home that I bought semi-impulsively in a COV*D stupor, cooking, and learning French.
Favorite place you’ve traveled and why: This question gets me because I've been thinking of travel nonstop lately and I used to take it for granted so much! If I had to choose, I'd say Belgium is definitely up there, particularly Ghent. It's easy to feel like a local there. It's a quaint and welcoming place, the food is incredible, and the art and architecture is unlike anything I've seen before. It's sort of like a mix of Amsterdam and Paris; I recommend it to anyone looking to travel not completely off the beaten path but also not completely in more "tourist" destinations.
What’s something people might be surprised to learn about you?: I've learned that people think that I'm intimidating because I have strong eyebrows and almost never smile, but the truth is that I'm more shy than standoffish and I want to make friends with everyone while still being kind of a homebody introvert. (This is why I'm in partnerships.) I think it's because I was homeschooled and raised in what can best be described in a cult-adjacent fundamentalist evangelical milieu.
Let’s talk beverages. How do you take your coffee and what’s your chosen nightcap?: Love this question, and I'll make it easy: black drip coffee, whiskey on the rocks. (With the occasional cappuccino or Hendricks Gimlet.)
Tell us about your new podcast, UNBOYFRIENDABLE: After keeping a blog for nine years, I'd been looking to expand to new media and new channels. I'm too old for TikTok, I chronically undervalue my work and am therefore a bad candidate for the subscription model, and I love blogging but I wanted something extra to compliment it. After doing Have a nice life. for a full year—and seeing how cool it was to have an oral history of my personal history as a part of this insane time for humans globally—I knew that audio would be the medium. I knew the podcast would have to be more "focused" on one topic than my blog. In the midst of this research, Rachel Hollis announced her divorce and I figured that so many people make a grift of podcasting what they claim to be good at—why not be honest about something I'm bad at? Of course "relationships" was the natural perfect fit. I love being able to add friends and other experts into the mix, and waxing eloquently about revelations I've had has been so cathartic. (Especially since I'm not doing the therapy thing.)
Three qualities you seek in a partner: This often gets me into trouble but I love an artistic partner. I've always been with creative types and I just can't let go of my love for being in the "occasional muse" role. Now that I'm older and a more pragmatic in my search for a partner, I hope to find someone who will understand that I take pride in my work, but the reason I work hard is so that I can fund my expensive taste and wanderlust—not as a form of escapism à la 90's workaholic mother trope. I love to talk (two podcasts, duh) and need someone who can be just as fluent in philosophy and other theory as internet culture and 90 Day Fiancé. I also need to know that my partner has never attempted to cancel anybody.
What makes you feel sexy?: Nothing will ever make me feel as sexy as when I get done with a Krav Maga class, come home, and peel my sweaty, sticky workout clothes off. Something about punching things (and people) for an hour really lets my inner freak out. The times when my old partner would be at my apartment when that happened were, let's just say, magical.
What color best represents all that is E.M. Ricchini and why?: A warm, light pink. Almost like a neutral. At first you don't notice it, then it grows on you. (If you have good taste. If you don't, it probably won't—but that doesn't make it any less wonderful.)
What’s the last thing you read that really impacted you? (book, article, poem, quote, lyric, tweet, etc.): I'm deep in content-creation mode so I haven't been filling my mind with the usual philosophy/essays I love. (Lest my work become perhaps too colored by it.) Because of this, I'm actually trying to find a sweet spot of things to read that spark joy without initiating these sorts of ruminations. I really loved an article—interestingly enough one that my ex very sweetly sent me—likening tribalism in Appalachia to the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. A recent transplant to Appalachia who will gladly fight coastal elites who will say mean things about it, I feel like the article really nailed what I love about this region, and affirmed my reason for being here in the first place. It helped me to understand the locals and why they can seem hostile to outsiders, and it made me respect them for it.
What does it feel like to be online right now?: Like there is no cringe left in my body.
Anything else we should know?: I'm recently one-year-clean from pills. Coming off of them was not fun but so, so necessary. If you're trying to get off of benzos, painkillers, Adderall, but don't know where to start, just do the damn thing. Don't let anyone make you feel bad for still partaking in the original cigarette, drinking, or smoking hella weed—do what you have to do and don't look back. I never thought I'd feel so good without my medley of prescriptions but here I am, feeling better than ever.
Why I Stopped Going To Therapy
Ten or so minutes into my early morning doom scroll, I came across the third (unironic) “men will x, y, z instead of going to therapy” meme, causing me to involuntarily let out a sound that can only be described as a cantankerous breath of exhaustion and reflexively close out of my Twitter app.
The memefication of mental health seems innocent enough, particularly when it’s under the guise of ending the stigma of seeking help for psychiatric matters. After all, we have come a long way since the days in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and even early 2000’s when a trip to the “shrink” was seen more as a personal failing than anything else.
However, despite more or less building my personal brand on the premise that we should all get the help we need for our mental wellness, I’ve come to the conclusion that therapy—especially in its current “panacea for everything from childhood trauma to social conditioning” iteration is not for everyone. Let it soak in for a second. If it hasn’t worked for you, that may not be our fault.
The first time I sat in that proverbial dingy chair facing a mental health professional (it’s rarely as dignified as television and movies make it seem) was when I was 23. Before the appointment, I had to fill out a questionnaire that outlined my family history and personal trauma in the most clinical of terms. It was fun to see my defining moments reduced to a check box. In a way, it felt like a casting call for the most insane reality television show. Bullied as a kid? Check. Emotionally abused? Who hasn’t been—check. Sexually assaulted? Check. Dehumanizing as it is, I’ve learned on my mental health journey that this is the norm.
The thing is, casual re-traumatization was just the beginning. In that first session, I was diagnosed with bipolar—a label that plagued me throughout my 20’s and to this day causes those who know me to treat me differently, despite it clearly being an uninformed decision and ultimately a bad misdiagnosis. Even after I ditched that provider, the ones who followed continued to do more harm than good, whether it was making excuses for my substance abuse and infidelity (both of which curiously disappeared when I stopped going to therapy) and making my trauma more precious than it was rather than acknowledging that I could just be existentially anxious for no particular reason at all.
How did we get here? Why would anyone think that recommending this treatment to another human even vaguely resembles an act of empathy? Why do we pay a stranger money to facilitate our own very inward journey to radical self love? (Sidenote: can we acknowledge that therapy is a luxury that many cannot afford.) If you have trauma, the wrong therapist can re-traumatize. If you have no trauma, the wrong therapist can lead you on a wild goose chase to uncover trauma that doesn’t exist. When you have a hammer, every problem is a nail. When you’re trauma hunting, everything is PTSD. If you have a lot of problems, talking about them can make them seem a lot bigger than they are. I personally came to the conclusion that there are unfortunately more bad therapists out there than anyone would like to admit, and that a bad therapist can be worse than not going to therapy at all.
As any reluctant “influencer” would do, I shared these contrarian sentiments on Instagram, feeling somewhat relieved that I could shout into the void that I no longer believe in the transformative power of therapy. As you may know though, the void often shouts back, and I got several messages back telling me that I’m silly and privileged for “disavowing therapy” (I simply said it didn’t work for me). I expected these. What I did not expect, however, was the number of therapists who came out of nowhere to say they agree with what I had to say.
One, who wishes to remain anonymous, said, “therapy is not the only thing that works … Coming and talking for one hour a week isn’t going to solve anyone’s problems. But a lot of people feel like it should be this magical fix.” Another told me that she—as a therapist—recently fired her own therapist because the relationship just wasn’t working. Of course, with so many bad therapists out there, how are you to decide which one is right for you, or if you should stop trying altogether?
The first step is to educate yourself on the different modalities; these are the approaches that can cater to your specific needs. The anonymous therapist said, “at one point in my life, [cognitive behavioral therapy] was what I needed and really helped me. Now, I prefer more psychodynamic practitioners, so I seek them out.” She also recommended doing a consult first over the phone to see if you mesh well—after all, some personalities aren’t harmonious together and that’s perfectly fine. Lastly, check to make sure a practitioner is truly “trauma informed.” What this means is if you are dealing with trauma, your practitioner will defer to you as the expert while creating a welcoming and non-judgmental environment for your self-discovery.
When all else fails, trust your gut. “Doing the work to say, ‘is this uncomfortable because they are not good, or is this uncomfortable because I am uncovering some things about myself that aren’t too pretty?’ … Sometimes the latter will happen, but a good therapist will treat all of those parts with unconditional dignity and respect.”
For me, ignoring my demons caused them to die naturally, whereas giving them too much credence made them larger-than-life. I’m hopeful that someone will be a good match for me and I can continue therapy someday, but for now, I’m content to be un-shrunk while I work on creating boundaries to take to that proverbial dingy chair—inshallah—much later.
Thank you so much for sharing! Though therapy has helped me, having a bad therapist is definitely detrimental to any sort of recovery especially a therapist who isn’t culturally competent. And therapy isn’t the only path! There is so much you can do grow yourself without sitting down weekly with a therapist- and it should be said more often especially with therapy not being accessible to all.