Don’t do it alone.

Life is hard. Yes, it’s also good and beautiful and fun and fulfilling, but it can also be hard. And you know what makes it a lot harder? Doing it alone. So many of us try this. We try to face all the things that life throws at us by ourselves. Somehow we think that’s what makes us strong, or at least that somehow the opposite–reaching out for help, leaning on others–is therefore weak and therefore bad. But is it? Honestly, I actually would say yes and no. Yes, it is weak. If “strong” is defined as, “I can do everything all by myself without ever getting any help or support from others”, then yes, it is weak to lean on others. However, I would not say that it is “bad”. In fact, I would actually say that it is not just good, but that it is very good.

For so many of my clients, after they share with me what they’re struggling with, what they’re feeling, and why they decided to come to therapy, I respond with something like, “Wow, that’s a lot. And who else in your life knows about this?” For far too many of them, their response is something along the lines of, “Well, my husband/wife knows some of that, but not all of it, and then my best friend who lives in Idaho who I talk to every couple months, well, he knows some of it too, but again, not all of it, and again, he’s in Idaho and we only talk every couple of months.”

When I hear this, I then internally set as a high priority of mine for them building out their support system. And I don’t just mean people they game with or who are husbands of their wives’ friends so they kind of “have to” be friends and hang out whenever their wives get them all together (though that’s not nothing, and neither are the people they regularly game with), but people who they interact with in person, who they can not only spend “shoulder-to-shoulder” time with, but also “face-to-face” time with.