It's Okay To Need Help
Mental Health Awareness Week UK (May 11 to May 17)
I grew up in a family where nobody went to a therapist.
If you were struggling, you prayed more. You trusted God more. You leaned on the church and the community around it. If you were in crisis, the quiet understanding was that you were somehow out of alignment with God’s will. Nobody got help. Nobody got medication. Nobody talked about it.
And I just absorbed all of it. The way kids absorb everything, without knowing they’re doing it.
Fast forward to me in my twenties, sitting in my office, when someone came to my door to ask me something. And all I could think was how much I wanted to scream at them for asking me for anything. WHOA!
I had this rage sitting in me and I didn’t know where it had come from or what to do with it.
So off I went secretly to see my first therapist.
His name was Stan. I had a 7:30am appointment every Tuesday morning. He was a Christian counselor, which felt like a step I could take given where I’d come from. And Stan, bless him, was Mr. Rogers in human form. He would come in, change into a sweater, change his shoes, and we would begin.
Stan was the first person, outside of my sisters, that I ever told the full details of my abuse as a child.
He held it. He worked with me using tools that were genuinely life changing. And slowly, over time, I felt a little less lost in myself. A little less like something was wrong with me. My anger started to lift and underneath it were other feelings, ones I hadn’t had language for before.
There there’s Ali.
Ali is a presence. She has been my therapist for 10+ years. She is as steady a person in my life as anyone I know. I see her every week. She has been with me through every move I have made globally, through breakups, through family pain, through close members of my family choosing to walk away, through toxic work environments that left real marks, and through a major depression where I was genuinely teetering on the edge.
She has been the constant.
There have been so many times in my life when I couldn’t identify what I was feeling.
When I had no language for it at all. I have whole chunks of time from childhood that are just gone, likely because surviving them was all my brain could manage. I didn’t learn that from guessing. I learned it from years of therapy, from coaching, from programs I participated in that helped me understand how I had been shaped and why.
I don’t have shame about any of it. About what happened to me. About what I have had to learn and unlearn and grow through. Do I have regrets about how I’ve behaved at certain points in my life? Of course. But most of that behavior was tied to fear, to survival mechanisms I developed long before I had any choice in the matter. I know that now. And knowing it changed everything.
I share this because I think people look at me and see someone who has had a successful career. A leader. Someone who writes and speaks and coaches and teaches and tries to make people laugh. And all of that is true.
And there have been moments of real mental health crisis. Moments where it was genuinely dangerous to be inside my own head. I know what that looks like now. I know what it feels like in my body before it arrives. I know when to ask for help. I know how to tell the people I love that I’m struggling.
I didn’t always know any of that. I had to learn it. With help.
It is Mental Health Awareness Week here in the UK. And what I most want to say is this…
There is no shame in having survived a lot. There is no shame in struggling with that survival. There is no shame in saying, out loud, to another human being: I need some help with myself right now.
If more of us were willing to say that, I think we would see healthier workplaces. Healthier governments. Healthier schools and communities and families. The stigma attached to needing help is one of the most expensive things we carry as a society, and we pay for it in ways we don’t always connect back to the source.
It is not shameful to need help. It is human to need help.