Just look at me, I think to myself. How far I’ve come. I allow my thoughts to revisit the young woman I was, when I myself first came to therapy. After all these years, the image still packs an emotional punch. I went to therapy against my will at the insistence of my parents. My attitude at the time was that it was a formality before a certain death. A waiting room for the determinedly suicidal. I was skinny and traumatized, my mind and emotions dulled with drugs from my stay at Vinderen psychiatric hospital. I’d spent two months in a residential mental health care program, where the doctors were more interested in medicating away my symptoms than attempting to understand their origins. One day I was unceremoniously released to my bewildered, anxious parents, with the promise that I ‘no longer posed a risk to myself’.

But I did. Of course I did. I didn’t have a single tool to deal with the images in my head, or the terrifying blank patches, and I’ve yet to see the pill that can erase the past.

At their wits’ end, my parents sent me to a psychotherapist, a woman named Ingvild. I still remember the exact moment I opened the door to her office, which was in the basement of a villa in a residential, leafy street in Bekkestua, watching my mother drive off. I was twenty years old and ready to die. Inside stood Ingvild, a small, slim woman with soft blonde curls, whose presence seemed huge and radiant in the little room in spite of her slight stature. I don’t remember what she said, nor what I said in that first session and in the many that followed. But I felt seen, and as though even the very darkest parts of me could be brought out into the light without judgment. Ingvild met me with unwavering empathy and an unconditional presence I had never known before. It was her constancy that became her legacy, and one I always aim to channel into my relationships with my own clients.

Ingvild liked to work with colors in her therapeutic approach and sometimes asked me to describe or draw the colors of my feelings and memories. Back then, when it felt as though I had neither feelings nor memories, only a terrifying void inside, I did manage to ascribe colors to the storms in my mind, and they were invariably the waxy dark greens of forests, and the vivid rich hues of blood, both fresh and dried. I used to pray for a milky white nothingness, the pure, unbroken color of death, silence and release.