Too Old for Therapy?

I'm seventy-two years old, and lately I've been having guilt feelings for being in therapy at this ripe old age.  After all, I don't have more than a decade left on this earth--that is, if I'm lucky enough to live for ten more years.  Not much time to pay society back for the benefits I'm reaping from therapy.  As I've mentioned, my PTSD symptoms are finally abating.  I'm feeling a lot more "together" than I have ever felt.  Yes, my work in therapy is definitely improving the quality of my life.  But is improving the quality of my life worth my insurance's outlay of money? 

That question has been bothering me.  So I told my therapist about my question and about my guilt regarding the expenditure of insurance funds for my therapy.  What did she say?  She said something beautiful, something I hope everyone who is in therapy and who is struggling to break free from the grip of PTSD takes to heart: 

Each person who heals and grows adds to the healing and growth of the universe.  It doesn't matter how old you are.  Up to the moment of your death, if you are healing and growing, you add positive energy to the universe.  Your healing helps everyone.

Her words helped me understand why I am doing this.  Of course, my primary goal is to alleviate my PTSD symptoms.  In doing that, I improve the quality of my own life.  But don't I at the same time improve the quality of lives around me?  For example, if I am mentally present in the moment, am I not better equipped in a crisis to think clearly and, thus, to possibly help somebody than if I were in a PTSD fog?  Am I not more responsive to other people and their emotions than if I were caught up in the numbing that comes as a PTSD response? 

Looking back on my life, I can see that if I had not been shackled and blinded by PTSD responses, I might well have made major life changes as a wife that would have been beneficial to my son and daughter--and to myself.  And to our abuser.  I might, for example, have left my husband before his behavior had done so much damage.  In fact, if I had gotten help for abuses I'd suffered in my childhood, I might not have married an abuser in the first place!  What a thought!

Regretting past inaction is not usually productive, but in this case it serves to remind me that in healing and growing at age seventy-two, I am doing what I need to do and what I ought to do.  And I am contributing to the healing of the universe!  My hope is that my thoughts, as I publish them on this blog, will contribute to YOUR healing! 

May we all contribute to the healing of the universe!  Namaste. 

www.jfairgrieve.com