I’ve decided to write about therapy today. I was blowing my nose in the bathroom just now and the title popped into my head: ‘Things I’ve Learned In Therapy’. I don’t even know whether I’ve mentioned it on here before, but yes: I have been having regular therapy for around six months now, and taking Citalopram – an antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication – for around four.

I found therapy quite easy to slip into, to be honest. I love – really, deeply love – conversation. It’s not particularly difficult to crack me open. In fact, oftentimes my conversational partners – whether they be friends, flatmates, colleagues, or old ladies at bus stops – get to see the innards of me whether they ask to or not. It’s both a quality and a flaw; I often wish I could hold a little back. Conversely, I often quite like how open I am. The difference between whether I feel proud or ashamed of my candidness depends heavily on who I’m talking to, and their reaction. Sometimes you meet a stranger and you’re open with them and they’re open back, and it gives you this wonderful warm human feeling, a moment of genuine connection – a little blip of pure golden heat. Other times people look at you as though you’ve just drunk expired milk straight from the bottle, then offered them a sip.

My therapist was patient in getting to know me. She realised quite early on that I like to paint a full picture in my storytelling – that I can’t tell a swift anecdote; I have to set the scene, give the characters backstory, align everything perfectly to set up the correct context and tone. It’s a writing thing, I suppose. You spend a lifetime reading storybooks and twelve years writing, and you drift naturally towards the familiar beats of a narrative. Nothing ever simply ‘happens’. There’s always a subtext, and a pretext, and a counter-narrative, and several different interpretations depending on which character’s POV you’re following.

The same subjects keep coming up for me: past relationships, guilt, malaise, frustration, yearning, nostalgia. I rarely – if ever – talk about the future. I talk about family sometimes, but not too much. My family’s not perfect, but they don’t baffle me. Whether we get along or we argue, I always feel I can understand them. We’re all pretty good communicators, and even those of us that aren’t as verbally decorative tend to give it away with their eyebrows.

Some sessions we don’t really get anywhere. That’s fine – I’ve come to understand that you can’t expect what American TV calls ‘breakthroughs’ every time. These are the sessions where I usually just ramble about some unfortunate thing that happened to me during the week. Perhaps I went on a date that made me feel sad, or my writing got bashed at work and I’m cross about it. Those things are okay to talk about in therapy, of course – they feel important at the time – but they’re not what I think of as ‘the big issues’.

Counterintuitively, the big issues tend to come up when everything is fine, when I’m in a reasonably good mood. This is the time to, as my therapist often phrases it ‘drill down’ – when there’s no fliffy-flaffy extraneous stuff clouding my mind.

One of my big issues was this: I have a fear of confrontation. This in itself isn’t what really bothers me, however. What bothers me is that this fear isn’t constant. I am comfortable arguing with my family, with one or two very close friends, and when I’m in a relationship, with girlfriends. This is the part that worried me: why can I only disagree – lose my temper, even – with people I love? Why, with anyone else, do I feel the need to buckle, to compromise on issues when I know I’m right, to avert my eyes and nod in quiet acquiescence? And why after this – after the confrontation has happened and I have failed to stand up for mself – am I quiet for hours, my brain glitching with frustration and redness?

My fear was that this was a sign that I’m a weak man: someone who can only exert force over people when they are assured there’s no physical threat. And I hate those men. They’re loathsome, grotesque; the men who threaten their wives but wither under the gaze of other males. I can’t think of anything worse: this kind of behaviour is indicative of terrible things. The sort of things you can extrapolate to explain why the world is the way it is.

I told my therapist this, and she asked me if there are any times I am comfortable with confrontation. I had a think, briefly, and told her yes – if somebody threatens my family, upsets my mum, insults my brothers or friends, then I have always been more than happy to have an argument. In fact, in those instances, it’s quite instinctual. There’s not really much conscious thought involved.

And so we pivoted: why were those instances okay, and others weren’t? I supposed aloud that it was because I wasn’t the focus; that if arguments involved my point of view and another’s, I was never sure enough that I was right to warrant the necessary aggression to win. There’s more at stake in those instances: whether it’s a colleague, an acquaintance or a stranger, you can never be sure how far butting heads will go. Confrontation, in this way, is like a game of cards: you either bet or fold, and the more you bet – the more you invest yourself in making your point – the less easy it is, on an emotional level, to fold. You lose much more folding after five rounds of betting than you do by folding at the start.

Or – to continue the gambling metaphor – you keep up the bets, and eventually you go all in. All in, for me, means losing my temper. This is when I stop smiling, the adrenaline hits, and I say things far beyond what I meant to say – the superlatives come out, the generalisations. If you’re ever in an argument and find yourself using phrases like ‘you ALWAYS do X’ or ‘you NEVER do Y’, it’s a good indicator that you’ve reached this point. There’s nothing good beyond this line – nuance has been left in the dust.

Confronting loved ones, of course, is safe. They know you. They will not form an opinion of you based on this encounter: they already have a rock solid idea of who you are, bone-deep, and a row won’t change that. With anyone else, however – this lapse in self-control will define you to them; they won’t forget it, and you can’t undo it.

I think your issue, my therapist told me, once I’d finished philosophising, is not that you fear confrontation. It’s that you fear being misunderstood.

This concise sentiment was entirely new to me: I sat quietly for a moment, staring out of the window, thinking about it. I thought about all my upsets over the past few years: the clashes I’d bowed out of, carrying the frustration all day in my chest like a jar of fluttering moths; the moments I’d boiled over and raised my voice, sworn and sulked. I thought back to school, and the detentions I’d gotten, and how hard I’d taken it each time – how personally – while other students simply laughed it off. It all made sense. I don’t fear confrontation itself – I fear it escalating, and losing control of my emotions – and in doing so, being forever tarred as something I am not.

So: the idea that I should be misconstrued makes me deeply upset. As to why? I’m not yet sure – that’s one for further sessions. It seems strange that I should judge others for misunderstanding my intentions – for not knowing the contextual origin of my thoughts – when I barely understand them myself. Perhaps it’s simply an ego thing, that I have too high an opinion of myself – view myself as some immaculately-intentioned, angelic figure against whom meanness is a sin, like punching a golden retriever. But then – look at the way a junkie sits on the pavement, spitting and growling at passersby, complaining that the world is against them. They think they’re misunderstood angels too.

Perhaps I just have an insurmountable urge to be liked and treated respectfully by everyone I meet – and the idea that someone might think I’m an idiot feels so outrageously unfair that it causes me pain. I often call myself an idiot, of course – but I suppose that falls into the same vein of cognitive dissonance wherein I frequently slag off the UK, London, Leeds or wherever, but will become mortally defensive if someone from another country does it.

I hope I’m wrong on all of this – I hope that, when it comes down to it, I’m just an innately good-natured person who hates arguing and wants everybody to get along – but you’ve got to entertain all those unpleasant ideas, just in case. Entertaining the unpleasantness is how you break through.

The good thing about this therapeutic revelation is that I’ve been able to apply it in recent months to instances where I have been upset. Previously, I would have simply berated myself and scorned the other party involved, mystified all the while as to what it was that vexed me so terribly.

Theorising on the origin of this post-confrontation emotion, which I have long thought of as simply ‘redness’ – flushed cheeks, flushed mind – has helped me enormously in dispersing it. I can step back from it now, somewhat stoically (after an admitted prerequisite 15 minutes or so of feeling sorry for myself): I felt misunderstood, which felt unfair to me, which caused me to become upset.

In knowing this, I can work backwards: Did I actually make an effort to be understood?

If no, then it was my own fault and something to work on – gaining the confidence to speak up. And if yes, was their judgement actually unfair? Or was it, from the other person’s perspective, entirely reasonable? Is my indignance justified, or am I being a little bit proud and silly? A lot of the time, the answer is the latter. And one thing I am proud of about myself is that when I reach that conclusion, I’m more than happy to admit it.

Of course, in the instances where my indignation is justified, I can debate, argue, confront comfortably, knowing that the emotions that come through under such circumstances are valid as long as they are true and considered.

It takes a lot of practice, of course. It’s a work in progress.