Georgette: A Girl & Her Amygdala
Georgette says, “Bonjour.”
Welcome to her world. She’s been running mine since I was in utero. Her ancestry predates the cavemen. Probably.
Do you know what your amygdala is?
It’s the little almond-shaped part of your brain responsible for your fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. Your lizard brain. Your built-in alarm system.
Mine has a name.
Georgette.
Why? Because during my very first Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) session, my therapist tasked me with naming her.
She told me to pick a name that I could use to wrangle her whenever she was putting in overtime—throwing me and my nervous system for a loop at the Walmart checkout line.
To be clear, this wasn’t my very first therapy session.
I’d had plenty of therapists.
But it was my first REBT session.
Why did I choose REBT?
Because I wanted something different.
I’d done talk therapy.
I’d done Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
I’d tried antidepressants.
Mindfulness.
Exercise.
Support groups.
Crying on strangers’ couches.
I wasn’t looking for someone to listen anymore.
I was looking for someone to interrupt me.
Why did I stick with REBT?
Because it didn’t just validate me.
It challenged me.
Dr. M challenged me.
She gave me Georgette.
She made me notice my “shoulds.”
She made me do my homework.
She interrupted decades-old thought patterns.
And I needed it.
Cher had just torn her Achilles tendon, amputation on the horizon.
I was working a soul-sucking job, trying to stay afloat, not making enough money, leaning on self-destructive coping mechanisms, unable to come up for air.
And I felt so isolated and alone in the misery I was choosing for myself.
That’s a sentence I’ll unpack another day.
For now, just know that it took me years to understand the difference between what happened to me and the ways I kept myself trapped afterward.
I’d been living like that for as long as I could remember.
Childhood.
Eleven years old.
Probably earlier.
Why did I even start therapy to begin with?
I was 18 years old, sitting at my university’s counseling center, coping as best I could with existential dread, and accepting that I had no one to talk to about the things I would not and could not say out loud.
A big life transition. Family dynamics. A childhood I didn’t get to experience. A playground where there were no parents and no rules.
I found myself in a self-destructive loop that I didn’t know how to escape.
The patterns of escape. Of disappearing. Of acting out.
Some people would argue it was all for attention.
Maybe it really was a desperate cry to get someone’s attention.
Anyone’s attention.
To save me.
Because I didn’t yet know how to save myself.
I’m still learning.
Still rewiring.
Still reminding Georgette to relax.
I’ve finally found tools that work—and a therapist who won’t let me bullshit my way out of my own healing.
Until next time.
XOXO,
Lucy
