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The other day, I got a phone call from a recent acquaintance. She was someone I knew casually and was friendly with, but didn’t know terribly well. She said she had a question for me.
“I was recently diagnosed with depression,” she got right to the topic at hand. “I can count on one hand how many people I’ve told about this. I’m telling you because I believe you struggled with something similar and I just wanted to connect with someone who’s in the same boat and ask some questions.”
I was kinda surprised. I did have two or three minor depressive episodes in my life, both triggered by very real life transitions, but otherwise, I don’t suffer from depression or any other mental illness that I know of.
Since starting therapy, I explained, I haven't had any more minor depressive episodes. That’s a completely different situation from actual Depression, which often requires medication and more intensive treatment.
I told her that, and that of course, I was still happy to help her with whatever I could, and connect her with people who do suffer from depression.
“Oh,” she apologized. “For some reason, from the way you talk about mental health and therapy and are so vocal about it on Instagram and stuff, I had this idea that you had it.”
“No worries,” I reassured her. “I’m happy that you feel that I’m a mental health ally, that you feel safe and comfortable to talk to me. I’m proud that people think that I’m a mental health warrior. Maybe this is a sign that I need to talk about it more.”
And I proceeded to connect her with people who could help.
She was grateful. To be heard, to be seen, to be accepted with zero judgment.
That’s the least I can do, I told her. The stigma around mental illness has got to go, and it starts with us.
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My friend and I were sitting on my bed one Shabbat afternoon, and she was venting to me.
“Every time my parents come over, they take advantage of me. I’m so resentful,” she told me. “This time, when they come to town, I’m not hosting them in my apartment [for perspective, she’s got a small Brooklyn apartment and a handful of kids]. Instead, I’m going to pay for them to stay in a hotel.”
“Why on earth are you paying for them?” I asked, astounded.
Her parents were abusive, manipulative, and caused her a world of problems. Every time they came over, her mental health would go into a tailspin and it would take her weeks to recover. They were demanding, needy, and entitled, going through her kitchen like it was a grocery store, constantly walking all over her, and putting her down every time she attempted to set boundaries.
“I feel like I have to,” she said. She sounded defeated.
I knew this cycle. I knew what having her parents over would do to her, and how she would feel afterward. Weak, victimized, unloved, and helpless.
“I feel so taken advantage of,” she eventually admitted. “She’s my mother. She’s supposed to help me. Instead, I not only take care of all her other kids, but she also expects me to take care of her. It feels so wrong.”
We talked. And talked. And talked. And by the end of it, she said she’d go home and look for her insurance card so she could book a therapy appointment.
Fast forward a half year or so.
“My parents are coming to town for the holidays,” she told me.
“How’s that going?” I asked, with some trepidation.
“Well, actually,” she shared, “I’m not giving them any money, and I’m not hosting them.”
“Wow,” I said. “I never thought I’d congratulate someone on not helping their parents, but good for you for protecting your energy.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Therapy made me realize that my parents are not good people, they can’t give me love, and if I help them or give them things, they’ll just keep taking and taking until I’m totally depleted. I’ll just end up resentful and with nothing more to give. So they’ll come to town, and I’ll see them, but I won't be organizing their food or accommodations or allowing them to help themselves to my things. I’m not giving them a free pass to my home and my energy.”
I looked at her carefully. In the last months, she had stopped putting herself out there so much, stopped overextending and constantly being busy and hosting and organizing events. She had retreated into herself for the first time in years for some much-needed quiet, introspection, and healing. While she was far from “healed,” she had embarked on the beginning of a long process toward it.
I gave her a hug. “I’m proud of you,” I said. “You’re beginning to look within.”
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I met up with a kinda-old friend. She was having man troubles, she told me.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, as we sat at an outdoor cafe sipping our morning coffees.
She went into detail, pouring out all her woes, sharing a saga of epic proportions. Everything was confusing, emotional, intense, dramatic. She was totally adrift, lost to her emotions and unsure of how to proceed.
“Okay,” I pulled out a pen and got comfortable. “Let’s simplify this.”
I tugged the paper placemat toward me and used the back of it to jot down some points as we talked.
“Your main problems with Boyfriend are X,Y, and Z, correct?” I asked her.
She thought about it. “Yeah, I guess that sums it up.’
“How do you feel when he does these things?”
“I feel hurt, and I feel like he doesn’t care about me. I don’t want to have to run after him to care about me. It should come from him.”
“So what do you need from him?” I proposed a few possible solutions that would solve her problems. She chose 2, and added one of her own.
“So to conclude, you feel hurt and unloved when he does X, Y, and Z. You want (fill in the blank) type of relationship. In order for this relationship to work, you need him to do A, B, and C,” I summed it all up factually.
“Yeah.”
“Are you ready to have a hard conversation and share this with him?”
“I guess I have to,” she conceded.
“Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna do. When you call him, explain the following:
‘I felt hurt when you did (the thing he did). It made me feel (sad, hurt, unloved, whatever). I'm willing to commit to a relationship in (fill in the blank) capacity. If that’s what you want, too, in order for this to work, I need (action that shows care and commitment) from you. Are you willing and able to do this?’”
She nodded as she jotted it all down in the notes tab of her phone. She listed her requirements, too, so she wouldn’t forget them in the heat of the conversation.
“The goal is to discover what each of your needs are, and to see if both of you can get your needs met in this relationship. It’s pretty simple, actually. If you don’t want the same things, or aren’t willing to make commitments or sacrifices to make them work, this relationship won’t go anywhere, and there’s your answer.” I leaned back and sipped my coffee.
She looked up gratefully. “Wow. You just made order out of the massive mess in my head. How do you know how to do that?”
I laughed. “It's a pretty new skill, actually, and I’m far from perfect at it,” I admitted.
Over the past two years, I explained, I had begun learning how to use logical reasoning instead of letting my emotions lead me around by the nose. I had begun understanding concepts like needs, boundaries, communication, emotional maturity. I had begun to see things clearer. Thanks to therapy, my life is calmer, simpler, and better.
And, I explained to my friend, she could learn it, too.
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We were sitting around a table at a vegan cafe, sipping matcha smoothies. It was a group of relatively new friends, and the topic at hand was mental health.
One friend, we’ll call her Maya, was talking about her recovery from an eating disorder, suicidal compulsion, and how she manages her mental illness. She spoke with the surety that comes from serious life experience, from delving deep into oneself and emerging whole, albeit with scars.
Maya’s story was eerily familiar to both myself and my friend Sam*, who was having brunch with us that morning. We both had friends who were risks to themselves. The beginning of their stories were quite similar to Maya’s--full of pain, confusion, emotional disconnectedness and overwhelm, unhealthy behaviors and more. Both were engaging in self-destructive patterns and stumbling through life in a haze of determined self-unawareness, floating aimlessly with no direction or clarity and making their emotional messes everyone else’s problem.
The difference, though, was that Maya had sought help. Maybe it was because she was forced to, when she nearly lost her life to suicide, but at the end of the day, she had understood she needed help, and she had gotten it. While she’s far from perfect, she’s grown, learned, and is in a far more stable place in her life. She has the tools and awareness she needs in order to live a healthy life.
“I learned to use logical reasoning instead of emotional reasoning,” she explained to us. “I learned to self-regulate and be aware of my feelings, while making decisions from a healthy place and seeing things clearly. I got help for my mental illness. I live consciously now.”
Our friends, on the other hand, are still stuck in a bad place. For now, neither have gotten help, and both refuse to acknowledge their situations.
Sam and I were quiet. I thought about Maya’s story, and I thought about my friend and Sam’s friend who are still so lost.
“Wow,” I realized, with a sudden, overwhelming sense of gratefulness.”I’m so thankful I got myself to therapy. All the time, money, and energy I spent on therapy these last few years is worth its weight in gold… if I hadn’t gotten help and worked on myself, I would likely be in a similar situation as our other friends,” I thought aloud.
I told Sam and Maya about my passion for therapy, and how I think every person can benefit from it. It’s so important to be open about these things, I explained, because that’s how we remove the stigma and shame associated with something that’s perfectly normal and healthy. It’s how we change the world.
“Actually,” Sam told me, “I don’t think I ever told you this, but I started going to therapy because of you.”
Sam explained that when we had met, I had talked about my experience in therapy so passionately and so confidently that it had convinced him to give it a try. He’s since been in therapy a long while, learning and growing and healing.
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To be honest, I wasn’t so surprised by Sam’s admission. After we spoke, I thought about so many little incidents that I had encountered over the past 3 years, including the ones I shared above. By my calculations, I had influenced dozens of people to start therapy, and those were just the ones I knew about for certain.
I hadn’t done it with the intention of convincing them. I had simply lived my own truth with passion, openness, and confidence, and had been a living example of what I believe in. The people in my life have seen how committed I’ve been to my personal development, how much money, time, and effort I put into my healing, spending tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours, and prioritizing therapy over so many other things.
They’ve also seen how I’ve changed. How I’ve become so much happier, healthier, calmer, and more sure in my life choices. I’ve transformed from the outside in, from fearful to fearless, from chaotic to calm and from confused to confident. I’ve begun to live more consciously, more for myself, and to better understand and protect my needs.
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I recently broke up with my longtime therapist (it sounds funny, I know). It wasn’t because we didn’t work well together–on the contrary. I’m pretty sure I was her favorite client (doesn’t everybody?) and she was definitely my favorite therapist.
It was a problem of logistics: legally, she couldn’t treat me while I was out of the continental USA. And as you probably know, I spend the majority of my life outside of the bounds of the states.
So we said our bittersweet goodbyes. Our closing session was pretty overwhelming for me, so it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I sent her a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ email.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The work I did with you was life changing, and I'm not sure if I would have found my way out of mental fuckery without it. In a way, you saved my life and gave me another chance, a chance to change my mental programming from toxic to healthy(-er) and experience life in a healthier, better way.
I came to you confused, lost, and broken, and you held me through everything with patience, empathy, and care. You helped me understand everything that's happened to me and how it affected me, to understand the way my mind and my emotions work.
You taught me to listen to my intuition and judgment, to demand respect, to protect myself, to trust myself. You showed me a path toward self-esteem, helped me find (build?) my sense of self, gave me tools to work through difficult things, and helped me climb out of dark places. You listened to everything and validated it all with gentleness, care, and absolutely no judgment.
I came to you a complete mess and from the first session you believed in me. And from there, you helped me untangle everything inside my brain. I can finally see things clearly. When I think back to before I started therapy, everything was messy. I was so lost. And even though there's so much more work to do, I feel like I now have a base to stand on while I do it.
Today, I understand myself, I trust myself to make good choices, I believe in myself, I have a sense of self, and I feel safe with myself. I have a deeper understanding of my own emotions and of people around me, and I like to think I share the gift you've given me with others by being open about my own process, helping people get therapy, and just being accepting, loving, empathetic and non-judgmental in my interactions with others who are struggling.
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Therapy hasn’t made me perfect. I’m far, far from it.
What I am, though, is more aware of myself and more equipped to deal with life. This awareness allows me to practice and use my newfound tools and abilities to work on creating the life that I want.
There’s no end point, no point you reach where you’re suddenly perfectly healed. Growth and healing are a practice, and there’s no such thing as a 100% success rate. But you can continuously do better, and that’s what matters most.
I see myself as a lifelong work in progress, and therapy has been the single greatest help in my pursuit of evolution.
In the arena of self-healing, of diving deep into the self, there’s no finish line.
You win just by getting started.
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So what's this article really all about?
I found this mostly finished post in my drafts folder. I remember writing it and feeling like, okay, there’s something meaningful here, but I'm not sure what the through-line is. Like, what’s my point here?
So I shelved it in the drafts folder for another day and put it out of my mind.
Reading it now, almost a year later, it's clear to me what the point is.
I'm harnessing the power that lies in sharing our experiences to hopefully inspire and impact others. Giving a glimpse into the struggles regular people deal with on the daily makes it more real. Makes it normal. Makes it maybe a touch more... acceptable. Less shameful.
Maybe it'll encourage you to have more self-compassion, to give yourself permission to not have it all figured out. Maybe it'll chip away a little bit more at the stigmas surrounding mental health issues. Maybe it'll push you to talk to someone, or to try that therapist whose number's been saved in your phone for the last 6 months.
Maybe it'll go a smidge further in normalizing the messiness of the human experience.
And little by little is how we achieve transformation.
Wishing healing and continuous self-discovery to us all <3
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