Why all my books have a therapist in them
It all started with a conversation I had with my dad’s doctor.
It’s one I will never forget.
To give you some context, this was more than 10 years ago. The conversation around mental health was very different to what it is now. And, truthfully, until my dad was diagnosed with a treatment-resistant depression I was very much in the camp that mental health was something that affected ‘other people.’
In the 12 years my dad was ill, I met a lot of different doctors and professionals, who were tasked with helping him. In total, I suspect more than one hundred. But there were only 2 I ever trusted, liked and believed could make my dad better.
Dr A was one of them.
I would meet him on a Saturday morning at the hospital where my dad had been for a really long time. I came to almost enjoy these meetings, a little bit of clarity in a tiny room surrounded by confusion and chaos. As a journalist, I’d always had a fascination with other people’s behaviour. But it had been so hard to make sense of what was happening to my dad and I felt lost.
When I met with Dr A, my confusion felt seen.
“This isn’t just here, is it?” I nodded to where we were. “This is everywhere. This affects all of us.”
He sat back, rubbed his hair and sighed, a deep look of sadness in his eyes.
He nodded.
Then he said, “This is just the peak of the problem. But really, it’s the people out there (he nodded to the window) who think it doesn’t affect them at all. They’re the ones who worry me the most.”
“What can we do?” I asked him.
He shook his head, with a look of despair. “So much of it is about prevention, but if we’re not prepared to look at ourselves, there isn’t much anyone can do.”
I went over and over this conversation in my mind for years, alongside reading everything I could about mental health and depression. I could never understand how someone as kind, loving and content as my dad could become as poorly as he did. I also knew it ran in generations of families and given I have two sons I had to learn as much as I could, so I didn’t pass it on to them.
For a long time, I felt like I was silently going a little insane myself. The outside world didn’t really reflect what Dr A had said. I’d hear about doctors prescribing anti-depressant after anti-depressant, and that the problem was escalating to a mental health crisis we’d never seen before.
It all felt hopeless, helpless and harder to understand.
But then, thanks to the world of long-form interviews and podcasts I began to discover the work of incredible people whose findings supported my earlier conversations with Dr A.
One is renowned psychiatrist and world-leading expert on trauma, Bessel Van der Kolk. He has spent decades looking at families where the same mental health illness affects every generation. But in all the years they’ve researched, tested and used our very best science, they’ve never found a single gene responsible.
He says:
“Psychiatrists in the 1970s believed that the answer to mental health problems was simply a pill – a quick and easy solution to the complex emotional issues that underlie trauma and other mental health struggles.”
But he goes on to say, here we are the wealthiest, most educated we’ve ever been, yet with the biggest mental health crisis the world has ever seen.
Another is Dr Gabor Maté, a physician and expert on addiction, stress and trauma who, like Bessel Van der Kolk, has spent decades researching mental health.
He believes the problems all begin with us suppressing our emotions.
“The repression of emotions doesn’t eliminate the emotions. It only stores them in the body. And over time this emotional baggage can manifest as illness, depression, or chronic stress.”
He says so many of us live in other people’s minds, rather than our ourselves. This creates disconnection and disconnection, he says is the essence of trauma.
“The emotional pain, the way we cope with stress, the ways in which we disconnect from ourselves, these patterns can be handed down unconsciously from parents to children.”
Which takes me back to that little room with Dr A.
“If we’re not prepared to look at ourselves, there isn’t much anyone can do.”
So, I took my fascination with other people and turned it on to myself. It still feels self-indulgent at times. But I think of the words of the great writer Elizabeth Gilbert:
“The greatest harm I’ve ever done to other people was through me not knowing how to take care of myself. Because if I don’t take care of myself, a few things are going to happen. I’m going to lose my mind. I’m going to become super needy, super clingy– because I’m going to try to get my needs met through you.”
I’ve learned about my patterns, the good ones and not-so good. The self-sabotage, the people-pleasing, the self-destruct. I’m learning that there’s no such thing as a negative emotion, but we do have to feel our emotions (in healthy ways) so we don’t pass them on to others.
And believe me this is very much a work in progress.
I listen or read something about mental health every day and have done pretty much for the last eighteen years since my dad became unwell. The more I learn, the more I realise I don’t understand. It can be daunting, painful and frightening. But it’s also liberating, life-changing and fascinating. And I know I feel better for at least trying.
What this isn’t, and I learned this from Dr A, is a deep-dive about what’s wrong with us. Mental/emotional health he explained is just the same as physical health. Who doesn’t need an odd tweak here and there? And in the words of the brilliant spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle, our power lies not in our thoughts, but in our awareness of them.
One of the biggest worries about someone I love is when they say or someone near them says, ‘Oh they’re fine. They never get upset about anything. They’re always the same.”
I want to shout and tell them this makes me really worried.
I thought about becoming a therapist so I would be qualified to do just this. But then I thought back to Dr A, and remembered until anyone is prepared to look at themselves, there isn’t much anyone can do. Besides, people like Dr A have a patience I’m not sure I’ll ever have.
So instead, I made the decision to put a therapist in all my books. I also understand, while I still find it comforting to sit in a little room talking to an expert making sense of the chaos that is life, this isn’t for everyone. It’s daunting, expensive and as I very much learned through my dad’s experience, and my own there are good mental health professionals but there are also terrible ones too (sorry to the good ones). But I have come across those who are truly shocking who can break your trust in the most terrible of ways.
I’m not a therapist.
But I am a journalist.
I have been for nearly 30 years and at the core of journalism (good journalism) is trust. All of my therapists are based on my research, on all the science, advice, and my own therapy I’ve learnt along the way.
My books (I hope) are also filled with the love, warmth and loving communities we all also need. Because the truth is life, while magical, is also really, really tough and confusing to us all.
Those emotions, even the ones you don’t like - are never telling you there’s something wrong with you.
They’re just telling you, you need to be seen.
