How I Knew I Needed Help

Photo by Sean Mungur on Unsplash

You’ve typed it into the search bar at one in the morning and deleted it. Do I need therapy. Nothing’s wrong, exactly. You’re just tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch, snappy with the people you love, and there’s a low hum of dread you’ve stopped mentioning because it sounds ridiculous out loud. Other people have real problems. And underneath it all: is this bad enough to count?

I asked that question for about ten years, with less excuse than most. My mother is a therapist. My father is a therapist. My sister is a therapist. I was the black sheep, off being a stockbroker, making money quickly to outrun a childhood with an alcoholic father and a heartbroken mother. A whole family who could have named my anxiety and my shame, and I didn’t ask. I drank to escape, and told myself I was a catch.

I didn’t go because I hit some dramatic bottom. I went because I got sick and tired of myself. The pain of not changing got bigger than the pain of changing, and that point is different for everybody. I quit financial services for good at thirty-three and went to live at Esalen, on the Big Sur coast. I only knew I needed something honest.

My first week there, the kitchen crew had a group process and it was my turn. I launched into the latest thing I was anxious about. The facilitator stopped me. “Hey Figs. Feelings are sensations in your body. You were asked how you’re feeling, not what you’re thinking.” It was the first time anyone had ever invited me into my body. That’s how I knew I’d needed help. Not from the size of my problems. From how shocking it was to be met.

What’s really going on

That tightening, if you felt one, is the whole answer to “am I overreacting.” Shame convinces you that you’re the only one secretly wondering how everyone else is making adulthood work. Everyone is suffering. I’ve sat with billionaires and with couples who can’t afford childcare. Same pattern. And everyone thinks their suffering is a personal defect.

So when you tell yourself “my problems aren’t bad enough,” that is exactly how shame hides. Compare your life to mine and shame wins either way. The comparison is a protector doing its job, keeping you from the one thing the nervous system treats as more dangerous than the pain itself: being seen in it.

The body is the first ledger. It recorded everything that ever happened to you, and there are two kinds of entries. The ones that got completed, where someone held you, named what happened, and the feeling moved all the way through. And the ones that didn’t. Those stay open and keep broadcasting that something needs to be settled. That hum of dread is an open entry, still trying to complete. Your nervous system is just an honest bookkeeper. You make sense.

And the reason you don’t ask is an entry too. Somewhere you learned that your feelings were inconvenient, so you built a part whose whole job is “I’m fine.” The problem is the maths. A protector is certain that whatever the cost of guarding the vulnerable one, it beats letting them get hurt again. Most of the time it’s wrong. The protection ends up costing more than the hurt it’s guarding against.

The loop, on your situation

I’m not going to answer “do I need therapy” with a quiz. I’m going to hand you the practice I learned from my teacher Aftab Omer, reflexive participation. What am I noticing now, how am I affected, and what creative action is being called for? Run it on the moment that made you type the question.

Get ground in your body first

Feet on the floor. One out-breath longer than the in. You can’t assess your own life from inside a brace, and you’ve probably been braced for months.

What happened

Re-enter the most recent moment in the present tense. “It’s Tuesday night, everyone’s in bed, and I’m sitting in the car in the driveway because I can’t make myself go inside.” Say what happened, not what it means about you.

Where it lands in the body

Where does the hum actually live? The band across the chest. The stomach that won’t settle. Find it. Don’t fix it. That’s the ledger talking, and it’s more honest than the story you tell at work.

Who’s driving

Now listen for the voice. Omer called it the Gatekeeper, the inner critic built in childhood to keep you safe, and I call these protector parts. On this question it has two lines. “You’re being dramatic, people have real problems.” And, “If you go, it means something’s actually wrong with you.” Just notice which part it’s driving: the one that goes quiet, or the one that works harder so the stillness never gets quiet enough for the entry to speak.

Trace it

When is the first time you remember deciding not to ask? Not the first bad month. The first time you were frightened and the adults whispered around you instead of to you, or said “aren’t you grand.” I grew up in an Ireland where the whole country was performing stability and men went to the pub instead of the doctor. A silence you inherited is not a verdict on you.

Feel it and tell someone

This is the step that answers your question. Say the real sentence to one person who won’t try to fix you. “I’m not okay, and I’ve been pretending for a long time.” Then notice what happens in your body as they hear it. If something lets go, even for a second, that’s the missing experience arriving. Shame feeds on aloneness, and the antidote is company.

One creative action

Not a twelve-month plan. One action backed by something real. Book the one conversation. Tell your partner the true sentence instead of the fine one. The one who got hurt first, and had to become a representative of themselves to survive, is still in there. One small reach lets them know you’re coming.

One thing to do tonight

Write down the one thing you’d say if someone searched your eyes the way my grandaunt once searched mine, a tiny old nun who looked past my hair and my charm for the boy underneath, and found him. Then notice whether you’d feel relief or terror if a kind person heard it. Relief means you’ve carried it alone too long. Terror means the same thing.

Would therapy help with this?

Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go. We only address the past when it emerges in the present. In psychotherapy we mine the past far more freely, with another nervous system in the room to lend you its ground. If you’re not sleeping or eating, if the dread has become hopelessness, if the hard thing has a name like trauma or abuse or grief that won’t move, or if some part of you has started not wanting to be here, please talk to a licensed therapist where you live. If you’re thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988.

And if it’s the other thing, the hum, the tiredness, the sense of surviving a life instead of living it, that’s often a ground problem more than a therapy problem. Symptoms, to me, are the soul calling to be heard. The honest answer to “do I need therapy” is usually “you need to stop doing this alone.”

The path

What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself, so the question stops being “is it bad enough” and becomes “what does this part of me need.” Self is the first of the nine Sovereign Grounds.

There are two ways to keep going. You can start Figlet Life Coaching tonight, on the Self ground, and it’ll run this loop with you on your actual week, as often as you need. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together over several weeks.

We don’t have to change the past to heal. We only have to change a present moment. You can’t rewrite the record, but you can complete it now. The past didn’t change. What it means changed.

I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).

Common questions

How do you know if you need therapy?

Your body knows before your mind does. If there’s a sentence you’ve never said out loud, and the thought of saying it to a kind person brings relief or terror, that’s your answer. Not sleeping, not eating, dread that’s become hopelessness, or a wound like trauma or grief that won’t move: those point to a licensed therapist. A low hum of surviving rather than living points to a practice and to company.

Do I need therapy or am I overreacting?

“Am I overreacting” is the Gatekeeper’s favourite question, and it’s rigged. Your nervous system doesn’t react to the size of a problem. It reacts to how much old, unfinished material the problem rhymes with. Two units of pain today, multiplied by two hundred stored from before, feels like four hundred. That isn’t dramatic. It’s remembering.

Can I heal without therapy?

A lot of healing happens outside a therapist’s office, in a marriage, a friendship, a crew. What doesn’t work is healing alone. The thing that was never completed needs another nervous system to complete it. If what you’re carrying is heavy, trauma, abuse, a grief that’s flattened everything, then yes, get a licensed therapist where you live.

Reflexive participation and the Gatekeeper come from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.