A Mental Health Post for Mental Health Awareness Month

It’s been just over five years since I started seeing a therapist.

I never thought I needed therapy – therapy was for people with real problems. I’ve never had an eating disorder, I’ve never tortured animals, I’ve never had uncontrollable rage issues (outside of driving on the Eisenhower or the Tri-State), I’ve never buried kids in the crawlspace, and I’ve always been fairly high-functioning in social situations.

What was it that finally sent me to therapy? Well, truth be told, I thought I needed fixing because it had been years, many years, since I had been able to look at my then spouse and not feel guilty. Guilty for what, you ask? Guilty because I knew I should have seen her in a certain way but wasn’t able to get myself to see her in that way.

Things finally came to a head, just before the pandemic, when I developed feelings for someone else – the feelings I was beating myself up over for not having towards my spouse.

After a month or so of feeling that way, and after a not-so-gentle prompting from a friend who is no longer a friend (we’ll save that for another post, maybe), I went to see my first therapist. My goal was for them to smack some sense into me and lead me back to the person I had married almost twenty years earlier.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

I saw that therapist maybe three times before the pandemic shut everything down, so I rolled into the social-distancing era with identified but unresolved issues and a hazy view of the future. Instead of smacking sense into me and telling me to suck it up and ignore the feelings I had developed for this other person, she told me that there were reasons I had developed those feelings, and those were what needed to be addressed.

The feelings I had developed for that other person faded quickly, but I still wasn’t able to make myself feel the feelings I thought I should have been feeling towards the person I had lived with for two decades, and who was the mother of my child. Accordingly, I was itching to get back in and continue what I’d started with that first therapist.

Towards the end of the summer of 2020, when people finally started feeling safe (or fed-up) enough to venture beyond their backyard day-drinking spots, I found a therapy practice that was closer to my home in the suburbs than that first practice I found in the city (she never reached out to me after the initial shut-down anyway, so I thought she didn’t want me as a client anymore).

I saw two different therapists at the new place, each for a few months before they, too, inevitably left. Rather than helping my mental health, the fact that I was 0 for 3 with therapists made me feel like I was a horrible person that these people didn’t want anything to do with.

Enter the fourth therapist, sometime around summer of 2021. I’m happy to report that we’re approaching the four-year anniversary of her being my therapist – and she’s definitely seen me through some real shit.

2021 ushered in the beginning of some fairly momentous changes in my life, changes that came from peeling away the layers of the façade I had built up over my life. When you are finally ready to be vulnerable and admit to yourself that you are worthy of help even though you feel others may have it tougher than you, you are finally ready to start making positive changes in your life. Your pain, regardless of how you feel that stacks up against others’, is still valid and shapes who you are.

“Come on, what pain are you talking about, Jason?”

Fine, here’s a little taste. Have you ever been so worried about what other people think about you, that you imagine there is always someone watching your every move? In grade school I used to imagine an invisible camera crew following me around, and I would act accordingly. Even if nobody else was around, I would act “cool” just in case.

My image of “cool” was shaped by the pop culture of the day – namely, the 80s.

One thing that was disturbingly prevalent in the 80s, fueled in part by the AIDS epidemic, was blatant homophobia. If you were gay, you were most decidedly NOT cool. Why? Because “gay” was the opposite of “cool.” If something sucked, it was gay. If something wasn’t super manly, it was gay. The last thing any cool person wanted to be, was gay. It’s no wonder then, when I first realized I wasn’t straight (around sixth or seventh grade), I panicked and did my best to lock those thoughts and feelings down as tight as possible.

Then there was the binge drinking that was so ingrained in my family – even my fifteen-year-old brother got trashed at a family wedding and forgot the words to Gimme Some Lovin’ after he convinced the band to let him sing with them. It was just something that went along with family events – someone was gonna get trashed and there was going to be a fight.

Seeing that lack of self control had a huge impact on me. Being smacked around, by a parent who overindulged, also had a lasting impact on me.

I hated the loss of self control I saw in people who drank. I hated it so much that I never touched alcohol until my 20th birthday (and I was in Italy, so it was legal – I’ve also always been a bit of a rule follower).

“So you’re queer and got smacked around when your parents were toasted, boo hoo.”

Exactly. And that’s how I felt for the longest time. I didn’t need therapy just to throw myself a pity party.

Which leads me back to that façade. There’s no way I would have been saying any of this six years ago. I would have been doing everything I could to convince people that I was awesome – that everything was great. The closest I ever came to admitting I had thoughts and feelings that clashed with my “everything is great!” vibe, was writing an entire damn novel about me dying and everyone else being better off as a result (yes, Renaissance Spook is semi-autobiographical, if you haven’t figured that out by now).

I did my absolute best to hide who I really was from the world. I did my absolute best to be everything everyone wanted me to be. I felt like an absolute failure whenever I couldn’t live up to the standards I had set for myself – or that I believed others had for me. Rather than focusing on myself, I tried to make everyone around me as comfortable as possible. I realize now that I did that to my own detriment.

Every time I thought about doing something for myself, I convinced myself I was a narcissist – who was I to be putting my needs above those of others? It’s a conversation that still sometimes creeps into my therapy sessions – “are you sure I’m not just some masterful narcissist who has just been able to convince you that I’m actually an anxious people pleaser who sometimes feels it would be better to blink out of existence than to disappoint his family or friends?”

I’m not going to rattle off a list of all the traumatic events I’ve experienced. The point is that I experienced them. Chances are, whoever is reading this has experienced their fair share of trauma as well. We don’t do anyone any favors by pretending none of it happened. On the contrary, we are doing a disservice to those around us, by not working on ourselves.

My daughter, Lizzy, didn’t need to see me channel that pent-up anger and frustration at other drivers when we were in the car. She definitely did not need to see me put a hole in a wall in a moment of frustration (combined with cheap drywall – I didn’t punch it, I hit it with the bottom of my fist like I was banging on a table). My ex didn’t need to see any of that either. We may have grown apart after getting married straight out of college, and we may not have been the same people we married, but I should have realized that and left sooner, rather than sticking around because that’s what I thought everyone else wanted.

Halfway through 2022 – two and a half years after starting therapy and being very open about it on social media – I received a message from a friend of mine who was also going through some hard times of her own. She had a question about the type of therapy I was doing, because she too was trying to save her marriage.

I never anticipated anything coming from that simple question, or the conversation that followed – but she and I are getting married in just under three months. Sounds like a fairy tale, but it was hard. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I fantasized about having an aneurysm if I accidentally hit my head on something. I would think “maybe I’ll just unclip my seatbelt and see what happens if I ram this tree.” I’m one of the people who has seen the support messages that a certain search engine displays, in addition to search results, when you search for painless ways to die.

Being loved for me – ALL of me – was life changing. I opened up so much to this person, my now fiancé, that she saw all of me. She saw all of those parts I’d hidden, for whatever reason, from everyone else. She loved me not despite, but because of it all.

I’ll save the details of the divorce – but suffice to say I think everyone is much happier now, almost two years on, than they were in those years leading up to it.

The following is an excerpt from a social media post I made a few months ago. Rather than rewrite it, I figured I’d just edit it slightly and insert it below.

I’ve been really happy lately. I mean, REALLY happy. How do I know? I can usually tell by the fact that I sing along with the radio. Sounds stupid, but it’s something I can’t remember myself doing other than maybe once or twice since, I dunno, grade school? Recently, I’ve been doing it a lot (True Faith and Regret, both by New Order, appear to be my jams).

I was reminded, this morning, that this stands in stark contrast to the vast majority of my life – especially the past six or seven years. I brought some books to the office this morning (Data Analytics For Managers was one – exciting, huh?) to put on my bookshelf. As I was doing so, I noticed the first journal I started keeping in December of 2020, almost a full year after I started seeing a therapist for the first time ever in my life.

Looking through just the first dozen or so entries in this journal made me cry. I was not in a good place. It was painful to read through those entries and remember those feelings. I wish I could go back to that me of four years ago and tell him that things are going to get better. That, yes, you will eventually go on meds for that depression and anxiety but also, yes, you will eventually begin stepping down the dosage because you’ll get to a place where it’s safe for you to not need them anymore.

I get the feeling that most people view therapy and/or therapists as a cure, not as a process. Talking to a therapist is not going to solve your problems if you are not willing to also put in the work that needs to be done on yourself. That work is hard. That work is painful. Sometimes that work will cause pain to others.

Stuffed in the pages of this journal was a “Safety Plan.” What is a safety plan, you ask? A safety plan is a worksheet you fill out, that you review and sign-off on with your therapist/psychiatrist/etc., when you’re in a place where you may feel the world and those you love would be better off without you.

That’s how bad things got. I went from thinking, “eh, I don’t really need to see a therapist, but my friend is telling me I should…” to having a plan of action in the event those dark thoughts started coming too close to fruition. But I HAD to get there. I had to uncover four decades of ignoring feelings, stuffing things down, and never acknowledging that I wasn’t the person I was showing to the world.

I didn’t realize, when I emailed that first therapy practice in January of 2020, how far I would come and how different my life would look. I’m just so thankful I took that first step. Without it, I would have never gotten to the place where I’m finding myself singing along with Bernard Sumner, with the windows down and the top open, making a fool out of myself at the red light.

Without it, I would have never reconnected with, and be on my way to marrying, the woman who has shown me what it means to be truly, deeply loved.

Without putting in all these years of hard, painful work, I might not be here, today, for the most important thing in my life – my reason for living, as memorialized in that safety plan.

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest