she refused to go to therapy. so I went first.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being caught in a loop that has no obvious exit, and I have been in this one long enough to have memorised its shape, which does not make it less exhausting but does mean I can describe it with some precision.

Here is how it goes. Your child stops going to school because the anxiety has become unmanageable, and the school — rightly, in principle — tells you that she needs professional support, that a therapist needs to be involved, that there should be a plan, that the plan should be written down, and that all of this should be coordinated between you and the school and the therapist, who will presumably materialise from somewhere and arrive with the written-down plan already attached. So you find a therapist — and I am going to skip over the part where you find a therapist, because finding a therapist who takes your insurance and has availability and works with teenagers and comes recommended by someone who isn't just a name on a list is its own entire post, possibly its own entire blog, and we do not have time for it here. You make appointments. You sit in waiting rooms that have very calm colour schemes and copies of magazines nobody reads. You fill in forms about your child's wellbeing that ask you to rate things on a scale of one to ten, and you stare at the numbers for longer than you expected before picking something that feels honest without being alarming. And then your child refuses to go, and you sit with that for a while, and then you go back to the waiting room alone.

Not because she doesn't need support — she does, and somewhere underneath the refusal she probably knows that — but because therapy has become, in her mind, another thing that is about school, another room where she has to sit and talk about the thing she is most ashamed of, another adult who is going to ask her to explain something she cannot explain and then nod thoughtfully and write something down. The shame around school avoidance is real and significant and it does not respond well to being the subject of a fifty-minute appointment once a week, at least not in the early stages, when every conversation about it feels like being asked to describe an injury while someone presses on it to check how much it hurts.

I know this because I have sat on the floor outside a locked bathroom door, trying to act as a negotiator between my daughter and her therapist, speaking quietly through the gap at the bottom while being acutely aware that this was not the graduation ceremony I had imagined when she was small. The therapist was very calm about it, which I appreciated, and which also made me feel, in the specific way that other people's calm tends to make you feel when you are not calm, like I was probably doing something wrong.

So she won't go. And I understand why she won't go, and I have read enough to know that forcing her is likely to make things worse, and I am also acutely aware that the school has made it clear — in the careful, non-threatening language that schools use when they are actually being quite threatening — that without a therapist and a plan, their ability to support her is limited. Which translates, in the exhausted parent's internal dictionary, as: this is your fault, and until you fix it, don't expect much from us — and the loop, as I said, has no obvious exit.

What I have noticed, from the inside of this particular catch-22, is that nobody seems to acknowledge how genuinely cruel the logic of it is. The child is avoiding school because her anxiety has made school feel impossible. The anxiety is also making therapy feel impossible, for essentially the same reasons — it is a formal setting, it involves being assessed, it requires talking about the thing she most wants not to talk about, and it has become so thoroughly associated in her mind with the school problem that walking into a therapy room feels, to her nervous system, like a smaller version of walking into school. The school's response to the fact that therapy isn't happening is to add more pressure, which increases the anxiety, which makes both school and therapy feel more impossible, which means less of both is happening, which means more pressure from the school, which — I want to be very clear about this — does not help.

I have explained this loop to several people. Most of them have nodded in a way that suggests they have heard me and in the same moment decided that I am probably not being firm enough.

So I went to therapy instead, which is either the obvious next step or something I should have done considerably earlier, depending on which version of myself I am asking.

Not entirely as a strategy, though I will not pretend the strategy wasn't somewhere in the back of my mind — I also went because I was not okay, and I had been not okay for long enough that it was starting to show in ways I couldn't keep managing with cereal bars in car parks and the occasional cry in a bathroom that I hoped nobody could hear, and someone I trusted told me to go, and I was tired enough at that point to do what I was told without spending three weeks researching whether it was the right decision.

What I found was not someone who would help me figure out how to get my daughter back into school, which is what I expected and what I wanted. What I found was someone who helped me figure out how to be in the situation I was actually in — which is a different thing, and a more useful one than I initially gave it credit for. I found that I had been carrying a version of the same shame my daughter was carrying, that I had been treating my own distress as a problem to be managed rather than a signal worth paying attention to, which — and I say this with the self-awareness of someone who has written a blog post about exactly that mistake — turns out to be a pattern I am capable of recognising in others considerably faster than I recognise it in myself.

I also found that sitting in a room and talking about something difficult, while uncomfortable, does not actually kill you, which is not a piece of information I had fully internalised before going, and which I found myself thinking about in relation to my daughter.

My going to therapy did not immediately fix anything because I am suspicious of narratives where the parent makes one good decision and everything shifts in a meaningful direction, and I would not want to be responsible for adding another one to the internet. She still wasn't going to school. She still wasn't going to therapy. The school was still sending letters that required careful management to avoid reading at times when I needed to be functional.

What changed was smaller and also, I think, more significant. I stopped performing okayness in a way that was costing me more than I realised. I got clearer about what I could and couldn't do, which meant I was less depleted by the things I was actually doing. And at some point — gradually, in the way that things shift rather than change — my daughter started to notice that therapy was not, in our house, something that happened to children who had problems, but something that happened to people who were trying to figure things out, which included me, which included her, and which was a reframing that I could not have engineered deliberately and probably would have managed badly if I had tried.

She is in therapy now. It took longer than I would have liked, and the path there was not the one I would have planned, and the school's written-down plan is still a work in progress in the way that most things involving my daughter and a timeline tend to be. But she is there, and she is talking, and I am there, and I am talking, and we are both, in our separate rooms with our separate thoughtful nodding therapists, trying to figure out something that was always going to require more than one person to figure out.

If you are in the loop — the one where the school needs a therapist and the therapist needs a child who will attend and the child won't attend and the school is waiting — I don't have a clean answer, because I didn't find one and I am suspicious of people who say they did. What I have is this: the pressure to fix your child's engagement with therapy is real, the judgment that comes when you can't is real, and neither of those things is fair, and you are allowed to say that somewhere even if the only place you can say it is here.

And if you are not okay — if you have been managing this for long enough that not okay has started to feel like just how you are now — that is worth paying attention to, separately from whatever is happening with your daughter, separately from the school's plan and the therapist's notes and the letters that need careful management. Not because fixing yourself will fix her, because that is not how it works and the school will not tell you that it is, exactly, but because you are a person in this too, and that person deserves some attention, and the car park cereal bar, while genuinely underrated as a coping mechanism, is probably not going to be enough on its own.